I have a personal Facebook account, which I use to keep up with friends and family. Like many of you, I've also discovered that this gives me a peek inside the psyche of those friends and family — and one of the things that I saw was an interest (and sometimes belief in) conspiracy theories. It wasn't limited to the Right or the Left. And it definitely wasn't limited to people I love but consider a little "off", if you know what I'm saying.* Over and over, I saw perfectly rational, sane people, supporting and spreading ideas that, to me, seemed a little nuts.

And that made me curious: Where do conspiracy theories come from? The answer, according to psychologists and sociologists, is not "Glenn Beck's fevered imagination." In fact, the category "people who believe in conspiracy theories" can't even really be separated into The Other in a nice, neat way. If you look at the data, the people who believe in conspiracy theories are us. And those theories grow out of both historical context, our feelings about ourselves and the wider world, and the way that our brains respond to feelings of powerlessness and uncertainty. Here's a short excerpt from my most recent column for The New York Times Magazine:

While psychologists can’t know exactly what goes on inside our heads, they have, through surveys and laboratory studies, come up with a set of traits that correlate well with conspiracy belief. In 2010, Swami and a co-author summarized this research in The Psychologist, a scientific journal. They found, perhaps surprisingly, that believers are more likely to be cynical about the world in general and politics in particular. Conspiracy theories also seem to be more compelling to those with low self-worth, especially with regard to their sense of agency in the world at large. Conspiracy theories appear to be a way of reacting to uncertainty and powerlessness.

Economic recessions, terrorist attacks and natural disasters are massive, looming threats, but we have little power over when they occur or how or what happens afterward. In these moments of powerlessness and uncertainty, a part of the brain called the amygdala kicks into action. Paul Whalen, a scientist at Dartmouth College who studies the amygdala, says it doesn’t exactly do anything on its own. Instead, the amygdala jump-starts the rest of the brain into analytical overdrive — prompting repeated reassessments of information in an attempt to create a coherent and understandable narrative, to understand what just happened, what threats still exist and what should be done now. This may be a useful way to understand how, writ large, the brain’s capacity for generating new narratives after shocking events can contribute to so much paranoia in this country.

Read the rest

Image: December 21st...., a Creative Commons Attribution No-Derivative-Works (2.0) image from clawzctr's photostream

I've written before about Moran Cerf -- celebrated neuroscientist, former military hacker, and good-guy bank robber -- who also happens to be a great storyteller. Here's a video in which Cerf recounts some clever and fascinating neuroscience experiments that use neurofeedback to help people resolve competition between different thoughts and wills in their minds. The applications are even more interesting -- mentally controlling a robotic arm, for example.

Moran Cerf: Hacking the brain (Thanks, Moran!) ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/05/17/brain-hacking-using-neurofeed.html/feed 8 http://boingboing.net/2013/05/13/a-93-year-old-neuroscientist-e.html http://boingboing.net/2013/05/13/a-93-year-old-neuroscientist-e.html#comments Mon, 13 May 2013 21:54:42 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=230081

At an age when some people are struggling with their own memories (and many others are just plain dead) neuroscientist Brenda Milner does an amazing job of explaining her contributions to our understanding of how memory works. Milner is one of the researchers who worked with H.M., the famous patient who lost his ability to form new memories after undergoing brain surgery.

This is a long talk — almost an hour — but it's a fascinating look at the career of a scientist who changed the way we think about the mind, told in her own words.

You can watch the full video at Vimeo

This review also appears on Download the Universe, a group blog reviewing the best (and worst, and just "meh") in science-related ebooks and apps.

When I go to science museums, I like to press the buttons. I'm convinced this is a special joy that you just do not grow out of. Hit the button. See something cool happen. Feel the little reward centers of your brain dance the watusi.

But, as a curmudgeonly grown-up, I also often feel like there is something missing from this experience. There have definitely been times when I've had my button-pushing fun and gotten a few yards away from the exhibit before I've had to stop and think, "Wait, did I just learn anything?"

Science museums are chaotic. They're loud. They're usually full of small children. Your brain is pulled in multiple directions by sights, sounds, and the knowledge that there are about 15 people behind you, all waiting for their turn to press the button, too. In fact, research has shown that adults often avoid science museums (and assume those places aren't "for them") precisely because of those factors. Sound Uncovered is an interactive ebook published by The Exploratorium, the granddaddy of modern science museums. Really more of an app, it's a series of 12 modules that allow you to play with auditory illusions and unfamiliar sounds as you learn about how the human brain interprets what it hears, and how those ear-brain interactions are used for everything from selling cars to making music.

It's part of a series that also includes Color Uncovered. The app is basically a portable Exploratorium. It would be very simple to convert everything in here (from games to text) into a meatspace exhibit. And that's a good thing. There are some big benefits to having access to your own, private museum.
A) You get to press the buttons as many times as you want.
B) You actually have the time and the headspace necessary to explore the text and learn the things the button-pressing is supposed to teach you.

For instance, one module features a psuedo vintage tape deck that allows you to record yourself speaking, and then play the recording both normally, and in reverse. You're particularly encouraged to try recording palindromes—words and phrases that are spelled the same backwards and forwards. You might think that palindromes would also sound the same backwards and forwards, but you'd be wrong. The phrase "too bad I hid a boot", for instance, sounds more like garbled Japanese when it's played backwards.

Having this all to yourself on an iPad means that you can spend a lot of time being silly (examples of recordings made by this reviewer include palindromes in different accents, "Hail Satan", and multiple swear words) while easily jumping back and forth between the interactive diversion and the explanations of how it works and how it fits into modern society. I can even imagine kids playing with the toy part of this for a while before finally stumbling upon the embedded text and having their games suddenly illuminated with meaning. That's pretty cool. In a museum setting, I've watched plenty of kids muck around with the button pressing and then run off before they ever have a chance to learn that phonemes are distinct units of sound or that backward speech doesn't just reverse the order of the phonemes, but reverses the phonemes themselves. Sound doesn't have palindromes.

The other benefit here is that Sound Uncovered eliminates the need for the role of Boring Adult — the person charged with the futile task of reading the explanatory text out loud to a gaggle of button-pressing children who really do not care about that right now. In doing so, it frees adults to actually have fun and learn something, too. If you don't have to be the education enforcer, and can trust that your kids will discover the explanations as they play with the app over time, then you're able to actually engage in play yourself —both with your kids and without them. The portable museum is a place for kids, and it's a place for adults, too.

That said, I think an adult on their own would probably burn through this pretty quickly. I got most of what I'm going to get out of it on a three-hour plane flight. But it's also free, so it's not like you're out a lot of money for a small amount of information. In general, I'd say Sound Uncovered is a good example of how the digital format can be used to improve science communication in ways that aren't easily possible in the real world.

Sound Uncovered and Color Uncovered

Neuroscientist David Eagleman has a similar argument about the human brain. Our conscious brain (our "I") is the tiny chrome bulldog, while our non-conscious brain is doing the driving. His highly-readable pop science book, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, offers dozens of persuasive examples to support the idea that our conscious brain is at the tip of our behavioral iceberg.

Here's a few questions Eagleman asks in Incognito:

Why can your foot jump halfway to the brake pedal before you become consciously aware of danger ahead? Why do strippers make more money at certain times of month, even while no one is consciously aware of their fertility level? Is there a true Mel Gibson? What do Odysseus and the subprime mortgage meltdown have in common? How is your brain like a conflicted democracy engaged in civil war? Why are people whose name begins with J more likely to marry other people whose name begins with J? Why is it so difficult to keep a secret? Why did Supreme Court Justice William Douglas deny that he was paralyzed?

Eagleman's answer to all of these questions is that the non-conscious brain is made up of many signal processors, honed by eons of evolution, that compete and cooperate with each other to make decisions that eventually make their way to the tip of the cognitive iceberg, where the "I" takes credit.

I think Eagleman is probably right, but I'm also the kind of person who is easily persuaded by attractively presented arguments and Eagleman, who is an accomplished fiction writer (see Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives) is a good story teller, so that has to be figured into my feeling that he's onto something. In any case, this was one of the most entertaining books about the brain that I've read.

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

Previously:

An interview with David Eagleman, neuroscientist

David Eagleman: We live in the past…literally

Comic adaptation of David Eagleman story about the afterlife

The profile mentioned that Robbins had consulted on a book called Sleights of Mind, written by a pair of neuroscientists named Stephen L Macknick and Susana Martinez-Conde (a husband and wife team, who also hired science writer Sandra Blakeslee to help with the prose, to very good effect). Macknick and Martinez-Conde are working scientists who had a key insight: the way that magicians manipulate our blind spots, our attention, our awareness, our intuitions and our assumptions reveal an awful lot about our neurological functions. Indeed, conjurers, pickpockets, ventriloquists and other performers are essentially practicing applied neuroscience, working out ways to systematically fool our perceptions and make seemingly impossible things happen before our eyes.

The book is a marvellous read, a very well-balanced mix of summaries of published scientific insights into visual and attention systems; accounts of the meetings between illusionists and scientists that the authors organized; histories of magic tricks; exposure of psychic frauds and fakes; and a tale about the couple's quest to craft a neuroscience-based magic act that would gain them full membership to the exclusive Magic Castle in Los Angeles.

I really can't overstate the charm and delight of Sleights of Mind -- from the introduction to the extensive footnotes, it is a truly great popular science text on one of my favorite subjects. The accompanying website is full of supplemental videos, showing how illusions work as mechanical effects, scientific principles and bravura performances. The performers who assisted the authors -- James Randi, Penn and Teller, Derren Brown, and, of course, Apollo Robbins -- are all justly famed for their skill, and the book is worth a read just for the insight it provides into their work. But it goes so much farther, providing both a theoretical underpinning in the neuroscience of perception and consciousness, and practical advice on how to apply this to your everyday life.

One interesting note: the authors mention a book called The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception, which reprints the secret (and long-lost) training documents that magician John Mulholland created for the Agency in 1952, which were used at the height of the Cold War by US spies to deceive their Soviet counterparts -- for example, details of how to use the "big move" of lighting a cigarette to disguise the "small move" of slipping drugs into a rival's drink. I haven't read this yet, but I've just ordered it.

Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/02/11/sleights-of-mind-the-secrets.html/feed 7 http://boingboing.net/2013/02/08/the-history-and-future-of-ps.html http://boingboing.net/2013/02/08/the-history-and-future-of-ps.html#comments Fri, 08 Feb 2013 15:25:17 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=211757 Nature Reviews Neuroscience published an article looking at the neurobiology of psychedelic drugs and why researchers were returning to this field after 40 years of stagnation. As part of that, they commissioned four of the best neuroscience bloggers on the Internet to write posts about the history of psychedelic psychiatry and the possible ways we could use these drugs to help people. I stumbled across this collection recently, and thought you all might enjoy it. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/02/08/the-history-and-future-of-ps.html/feed 5 http://boingboing.net/2013/02/07/apollo-robbins-pickpocket.html http://boingboing.net/2013/02/07/apollo-robbins-pickpocket.html#comments Thu, 07 Feb 2013 23:03:04 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=211531 a great Atlantic profile of Apollo Robbins, a stage pickpocket who pulls off the most audacious fingersmithing you've ever see.]]>

Last month, I linked to a great Atlantic New Yorker profile of Apollo Robbins, a stage pickpocket who pulls off the most audacious fingersmithing you've ever seen, manipulating attention with such a fine touch that he leaves even jaded magicians slack-jawed.

Here's a great example of Robbins's schtick, from an NBC news show. I've been reading Sleights of Mind, a book on the neuroscience of vision, attention, optical illusion and magic, for which Robbins was extensively interviewed, and this video really helped me understand what the writers are talking about.

Supernatural pickpocketing skills!! Awesome to watch! - by Apollo Robbins (via Kottke) ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/02/07/apollo-robbins-pickpocket.html/feed 52 http://boingboing.net/2013/01/22/what-its-like-to-have-a-gran.html http://boingboing.net/2013/01/22/what-its-like-to-have-a-gran.html#comments Tue, 22 Jan 2013 22:35:41 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=207649 Radio producer Jess Hill, who has been working in the Middle East, wrote an account of what the experience of having a grand mal seizure was like.

She wrote the post a week after the episode, and two weeks before having brain surgery to remove the tumor that caused it.

"At the time I was still having seizures every few days, and just the act of writing about the first seizure in such detail almost brought on another one," Jess explains. "I initially planned to keep this account private, but after two months, I’ve decided to share it, if only for the fact that it might be useful to others who have had or will have a similar experience."

It happened when she was in transit via plane from Yemen to Beirut.

My head resting against the window, I was swimming around somewhere between awake and asleep when I felt my mind fall through a trapdoor and into a vacuum. Suddenly, there was no ground for my mind to land on. No language. No concepts. Anxiously I grasped through the smothering black for an idea, a word, something I could articulate. Nothing. Just black.

Then I felt my eyes roll up in my head. On a slow, steady rhythm, they started jerking forcefully to the right. Language flooded back i’ve lost control! and jerk, jerk, jerk, further and faster my eyes pushed to the right. Breath quick and shallow now, eyes so far up and to the right they pushed painfully against their sockets. My head jerked too now, like it was being dragged by my eyes jerk, jerk, jerk, I tried to push out a sound, a grunt. Nothing but spittle.

In full seizure now, shaking uncontrollably, I could still see out of the very corners of my eyes. There was no-one sitting next to me, and the man two seats down was staring into his iPad.

Read more. Follow Jess on Twitter: @jessradio.]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/01/22/what-its-like-to-have-a-gran.html/feed 62 http://boingboing.net/2013/01/15/a-more-resilient-species.html http://boingboing.net/2013/01/15/a-more-resilient-species.html#comments Tue, 15 Jan 2013 16:07:17 +0000 Linda Stone http://boingboing.net/?p=205497

“A playful brain is a more adaptive brain,” writes ethologist Sergio Pellis in The Playful Brain: Venturing to the Limits of Neuroscience. In his studies, he found that play-deprived rats fared worse in stressful situations.

In our own world filled with challenges ranging from cyber-warfare to infrastructure failure, could self-directed play be the best way to prepare ourselves to face them?

In self-directed play, one structures and drives one’s own play. Self-directed play is experiential, voluntary, and guided by one’s curiosity. This is different from play that is guided by an adult or otherwise externally directed.

A MacArthur Fellow told me that, when he was a teenager, his single mother would drop him off at an industrial supply store on Saturdays while she ran errands. Using library books as his primary resource, he built a linear accelerator in the garage. It wasn’t until neighbors complained about scrambled television and radio signals in the hours just after school and after dinner that his “playful” invention was discovered.

Photo: Linda Stone. "This is the "office" of a 14 year old I know."

Play researchers’ findings indicate that self-directed play, for both children and adults, nourishes the human spirit and helps develop resilience, independence, and resourcefulness. Yet, our desire to be efficient and productive, and our tendency to over-schedule and over-program, has crowded out opportunities for self-directed play in our education system and in our lives at home.

According to Pellis, self-directed play supports us in better handling the complex and the unpredictable, both in social and in non-social situations.

Play scholar, Brian Sutton-Smith, wrote “The opposite of play is not work. The opposite of play is depression.” NIMH reports that one in ten adults are depressed, up over 400% in the last two decades, with far more suffering from anxiety and other mood-related disorders. When psychiatrist Stuart Brown conducted play histories of over 6,000 people from a variety of backgrounds, he noticed that childhood play histories often have a strong relationship to what people do in their adult lives.

A technology consultant I interviewed told me about his passion for stamp and coin collecting. When I probed about his interest in stamps and coins, he said he was fascinated that countries that spoke different languages and had different currencies had found ways to cooperate on services like mail delivery, and had figured out currency exchanges. As an adult, one of his areas of expertise is global internet policy.

One of Brown’s studies covered the life and death of Charles Whitmore, a college campus mass murderer, who, in 1966, on the University of Texas campus, killed 15 people and wounded another 31, after killing his wife and mother the previous evening.

Extensive interviews with those who knew Whitmore, revealed that a “lifelong lack of play” had been an important factor in his psychopathology. Whitmore was always pressured by his parents to “do something useful” -- the antithesis of self-directed play.

In the course of his research and through extensive interviewing, Brown found that many violent criminals shared this same lack of childhood play.

Play can be risky. During self-directed play, our imagination and curiosity guides us as we venture into the areas where we can fail and iterate. Consequently, we play when we feel safe and secure, and self-directed play tends to reinforce a feeling of safety and security.

Researcher Jaak Panksepp, suggests that depriving young animals of play can delay and disrupt brain maturation. Panksepp’s research found evidence that play increased gene expression of BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), a protein involved with brain maturation.

On the flip side, a life rich with self-directed play can nourish genius. I had an opportunity to interview a handful of Nobel Laureates on their childhood play patterns, every one of them reported many memorable hours of self-directed play. Many of these Nobel Laureates went on to say, “This is actually what I do in my lab today.”

I worry that our education system focuses on measures related to rote learning versus the type of student engagement enabled by self-directed play. I worry that in our desire to develop our potential through densely packed schedules and programmed activities, we are actually stifling our potential and suffocating imagination and curiosity.

Stuart Brown, author of The Neuroscience of Play, advocates, “Play is…more than just fun. Plenty of play in childhood makes for happy, smart adults – and keeping it up can make us smarter at any age.” It is through self-directed play that we discover who we are. Coaches and experts often admonish us,  "Find your passion!" Then they offer questionnaires and processes.  The truth is, the very best way to find our passions is to give ourselves the gift of time for self-directed play.

[Brain maze illustration: Shutterstock.com]]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/01/15/a-more-resilient-species.html/feed 10 http://boingboing.net/2013/01/10/junior-seau-had-brain-disease.html http://boingboing.net/2013/01/10/junior-seau-had-brain-disease.html#comments Thu, 10 Jan 2013 19:43:50 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=205097 ABC News reports that a team of scientists who analyzed the brain tissue of the late NFL star Junior Seau after his 2012 suicide "have concluded the football player suffered a debilitating brain disease likely caused by two decades worth of hits to the head." ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/01/10/junior-seau-had-brain-disease.html/feed 13 http://boingboing.net/2013/01/03/where-characters-come-from-an.html http://boingboing.net/2013/01/03/where-characters-come-from-an.html#comments Thu, 03 Jan 2013 22:36:10 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=203959 My latest Locus column is "Where Characters Come From," and it advances a neurological theory for why fiction works, and where writers find their characters.

As a writer, I know that there’s a point in the writing when the engine of the story really seems to roar to life, and at that moment, the characters start feeling like real people. When you start working on a story, the characters are like finger-puppets, and putting words into their mouths is a bit embarrassing, like you’re sitting at your desk waggling your hands at one another and making them speak in funny, squeaky voices. But once those characters ‘‘catch,’’ they become people, and writing them feels more like you’re recounting something that happened than something you’re making up. This reality also extends to your autonomic nervous system, which will set your heart racing when your characters face danger, make you weepy at their tragedies, has you grinning foolishly at their victories.

In some ways, this is even weirder. For a writer to trick himself into feeling emotional rapport for the imaginary people he himself invented seems dangerous, akin to a dealer who starts dipping into the product. Where does this sense of reality – this physical, limbic reaction to inconsequential non-events – spring from?

Where Characters Come From ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/01/03/where-characters-come-from-an.html/feed 9 http://boingboing.net/2013/01/01/apollo-robbins-profile-of-a-p.html http://boingboing.net/2013/01/01/apollo-robbins-profile-of-a-p.html#comments Tue, 01 Jan 2013 23:49:07 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=203425

The New Yorker's profile of Apollo Robbins is one of the most interesting things I've read all year (ha). Robbins is a self-trained virtuoso pickpocket who once managed to lift a pen out of Penn Jillette's pocket, steal the ink cartridge, and return the pen, all while he was demurely insisting to Jillette that he wasn't really comfortable performing in front of magicians.

Josh grew increasingly befuddled, as Robbins continued to make the coin vanish and reappear—on his shoulder, in his pocket, under his watchband. In the middle of this, Robbins started stealing Josh’s stuff. Josh’s watch seemed to melt off his wrist, and Robbins held it up behind his back for everyone to see. Then he took Josh’s wallet, his sunglasses, and his phone. Robbins dances around his victims, gently guiding them into place, floating in and out of their personal space. By the time they comprehend what has happened, Robbins is waiting with a look that says, “I understand what you must be feeling.” Robbins’s simplest improvisations have the dreamlike quality of a casual encounter gone subtly awry. He struck up a conversation with a young man, who told him, “We’re going to Penn and Teller after this.”

“Oh, then you’ll probably want these,” Robbins said, handing over a pair of tickets that had recently been in the young man’s wallet.

When Robbins hits his stride, it starts to seem as if the only possible explanation is an ability to start and stop time. At the Rio, a man’s cell phone disappeared from his jacket and was replaced by a piece of fried chicken; the cigarettes from a pack in one man’s breast pocket materialized loose in the side pocket of another; a woman’s engagement ring vanished and reappeared attached to a key ring in her husband’s pants; a man’s driver’s license disappeared from his wallet and turned up inside a sealed bag of M&M’s in his wife’s purse.

After the performance, Robbins and I had dinner at the bar. “A lot of magic is designed to appeal to people visually, but what I’m trying to affect is their minds, their moods, their perceptions,” he told me. “My goal isn’t to hurt them or to bewilder them with a puzzle but to challenge their maps of reality.”

My fascination with the profile doesn't just come from the recounting of Robbins's many impressive deeds (though they are impressive, and if I ever had cause to book a magician for a gig, he'd be it), but also the struggle that Robbins has had in coming up with ways to maximize his prodigious talent.

Reading further down, I noticed that Apollo Robbins collaborated with neuroscientists on a book called Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions, which I've ordered. I was also unsurprised to learn that Robbins had consulted on the late, lamented caper-show Leverage, which explains quite a lot about why that show was so good.

A Pickpocket’s Tale [Adam Green/The New Yorker] (via Making Light) ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/01/01/apollo-robbins-profile-of-a-p.html/feed 20 http://boingboing.net/2012/12/14/physical-sexual-abuse-documen.html http://boingboing.net/2012/12/14/physical-sexual-abuse-documen.html#comments Fri, 14 Dec 2012 15:18:01 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=200443 reports released under a court order to Bloomberg News show that caregivers at a Florida center for brain-injured and "non-neurotypical" adults physically and sexually abused patients, in a systematic and brutal manner. Caregivers "goaded them to fight each other and fondle female employees and in one instance laughed at complaints of mistreatment." At least five patients have died at the center in question, the Florida Institute for Neurologic Rehabilitation, from alleged abuse or neglect there since 1998. Two patients died in just the last two years. (Bloomberg)]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/12/14/physical-sexual-abuse-documen.html/feed 0 http://boingboing.net/2012/11/26/do-these-conjoined-twins-share.html http://boingboing.net/2012/11/26/do-these-conjoined-twins-share.html#comments Mon, 26 Nov 2012 17:17:15 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=196189 In the New York Times, a piece by Susan Dominus on two twins joined at the head ("craniopagus") who are "beyond rare" because of the way their brains fused inside their skulls. "Their neural anatomy is unique, at least in the annals of recorded scientific literature," she writes. "Their brain images reveal what looks like an attenuated line stretching between the two organs, a piece of anatomy their neurosurgeon, Douglas Cochrane of British Columbia Children’s Hospital, has called a thalamic bridge, because he believes it links the thalamus of one girl to the thalamus of her sister."]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/11/26/do-these-conjoined-twins-share.html/feed 3 http://boingboing.net/2012/11/16/the-neuroscience-of-the-human.html http://boingboing.net/2012/11/16/the-neuroscience-of-the-human.html#comments Fri, 16 Nov 2012 16:10:39 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=194653

Using brain scans, scientists are trying to find how great freestyle rappers drop dope lines. Discovery News reports on a study conducted by researchers the voice, speech and language branch of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Here's the paper: "Neural Correlates of Lyrical Improvisation: An fMRI Study of Freestyle Rap." (via Clive Thompson; image photoshop mine from original study)]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/11/16/the-neuroscience-of-the-human.html/feed 7 http://boingboing.net/2012/11/16/the-power-of-sleep-pbs-newsho.html http://boingboing.net/2012/11/16/the-power-of-sleep-pbs-newsho.html#comments Fri, 16 Nov 2012 15:38:07 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=194620

Miles O'Brien has a wonderful piece on NewsHour about the neuroscience of sleep and other forms of brain-rest, including meditation. I was present for some of the taping and research, and I love how the story turned out.

Sleep deprivation can cause serious health and cognitive problems in humans. In short, it can make us fat, sick and stupid. But why do humans need so much sleep? Science correspondent Miles O'Brien talks to scientists on the cutting edge of sleep research and asks if there's any way humans might evolve into getting by with less.

And below, some out-takes from Miles' time swimming with dolphins at SeaWorld. Dolphins sleep in a very interesting way, and you'll want to watch the piece to learn more. PBS Link, and YouTube Link.

]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/11/16/the-power-of-sleep-pbs-newsho.html/feed 3 http://boingboing.net/2012/10/22/brain-on-a-chip-for-drug-testi.html http://boingboing.net/2012/10/22/brain-on-a-chip-for-drug-testi.html#comments Mon, 22 Oct 2012 17:30:08 +0000 David Pescovitz http://boingboing.net/?p=189006 Draper Laboratory and University of South Florida researchers are developing a prototype "brain-on-a-chip." No, it's not an AI but rather a combination of living cells and microfluidics in a bio-artificial model of the brain's nerovascular unit, the system of neurons, capillaries, and other cells that control the supply of nutrients to the brain. Eventually, such a device could be used to test medications and vaccines. And that's just the beginning.

“In addition to screening drugs, we could potentially block vascular channels and mimic stroke or atherosclerotic plaque," says lead researcher Anil Achyuta. "Furthermore, this platform could eventually be used for neurotoxicology, to study the effects of brain injury like concussions, blast injuries, and implantable medical devices such as in neuroprosthetics.”

"Draper Laboratory Developing “Brain-on-a-Chip”"]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/10/22/brain-on-a-chip-for-drug-testi.html/feed 0 http://boingboing.net/2012/10/18/why-casual-sexism-in-science-m.html http://boingboing.net/2012/10/18/why-casual-sexism-in-science-m.html#comments Thu, 18 Oct 2012 16:15:16 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=188230
Psychobiologist Dario Maestripieri returned from a neuroscience meeting in New Orleans and posted to Facebook that he was disappointed with the "unusually high concentrations of unattractive women. The super model types are completely absent. What is going on? Are unattractive women particularly attracted to neuroscience? Are beautiful women particularly uninterested in the brain?"

He added, "No offense to anyone."

Many people took offense, starting with the Drugmonkey blog, which reposted the remarks.

Janet Stemwedel on Adventures in Ethics and Science has a good post explaining why she is offended by this:

The thing is, that denial is also the denial of the actual lived experience of a hell of a lot of women in science (and in other fields -- I've been sexually harassed in both of the disciplines to which I've belonged).

I can't pretend to speak for everyone who calls out sexism like Maestripieri's, so I'll speak for myself. Here's what I want:

1. I want to shine a bright light on all the sexist behaviors, big or small, so the folks who have managed not to notice them so far start noticing them, and so that they stop assuming their colleagues who point them out and complain about them are making a big deal out of nothing.

2. I want the exposure of the sexist behaviors to push others in the community to take a stand on whether they're cool with these behaviors or would rather these behaviors stop. If you know about it and you don't think it's worth talking about, I want to know that about you -- it tells me something about you that might be useful for me to know as I choose my interactions.

3. I want the people whose sexist behaviors are being called out to feel deeply uncomfortable -- at least as uncomfortable as their colleagues (and students) who are women have felt in the presence of these behaviors.

4. I want people who voice their objections to sexist behaviors to have their exercise of free speech (in calling out the behaviors) be just as vigorously defended as the free speech rights of the people spouting sexist nonsense.

5. I want the sexist behavior to stop so scientists who happen to be women can concentrate on the business of doing science (rather than responding to sexist behavior, swallowing their rage, etc.)

I've got a daughter who, at four and a half, wants to be a scientist. Every time she says this, it makes me swell up with so much pride, I almost bust. If she grows up to be a scientist, I want her to be judged on the reproducibility of her results, the elegance of her experimental design, and the insight in her hypotheses, not on her ability to live up to someone's douchey standard of "super model" looks. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/10/18/why-casual-sexism-in-science-m.html/feed 277 http://boingboing.net/2012/10/02/what-a-dead-fish-can-teach-you.html http://boingboing.net/2012/10/02/what-a-dead-fish-can-teach-you.html#comments Tue, 02 Oct 2012 19:51:57 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=184176

The methodology is straightforward. You take your subject and slide them into an fMRI machine, a humongous sleek, white ring, like a donut designed by Apple. Then you show the subject images of people engaging in social activities — shopping, talking, eating dinner. You flash 48 different photos in front of your subject's eyes, and ask them to figure out what emotions the people in the photos were probably feeling. All in all, it's a pretty basic neuroscience/psychology experiment. With one catch. The "subject" is a mature Atlantic salmon.

And it is dead.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a powerful tool that allows us to capture incredible amounts of information about what happens in our brains. It's relatively new — neuroscientists began using fMRI in the early 1990s — and it produces colorful images that help bring numbers to life for the general public.

All of those things are strengths for fMRI. Unfortunately, they're also all weaknesses. New tools vastly expand our understanding of the human body ... but they also mean that we have to develop new standards so that different studies using the same tool can actually be compared to one another. Images of the human brain help make science more understandable ... but they can also be incredibly misleading when the public doesn't have a good idea of what the pictures show. Amassing vast quantities of information is great ... but it also makes it easy to end up with false positives — coincidences of chance that look like something a lot more important.

Enter the dead salmon.

In 2009, a team led by neuroscientist Craig Bennett and psychologist Abigail Baird ran an fMRI experiment using the salmon as their subject. Not only did they really put a dead (and frozen) fish into an fMRI machine, later analysis of their data actually produced evidence of brain activity — as if the dead fish were thinking. It wasn't, of course. But Bennett's and Baird's research — which recently won a 2012 IgNobel Award — was meant to show how easily scientists can mislead themselves and why well-done statistics are vital.

I got to speak with Bennett and Baird last week. In the interview, they talked about the study, how fMRI really works, and what scientists have to do to make sure they can trust their own results.

Craig Bennett: We're not directly measuring activity in the brain. You'd need electrodes implanted in the brain itself for that. We're actually measuring the amount of magnetic disruption in the brain. We use a trick of how brain and body work. Oxygenated and deoxygenated blood have different magnetic properties.

Abigail Baird: If a brain region is doing a lot of work it's probobably going to be bringing in a lot of oxygen through increased blood flow. The premise is that if an area is working harder it will need more nutrients and oxygen and that will be delivered through the blood.

Using blood flow as measure of brain activity is reliable, but it's a very slow response. True brain activity happens when cells are communicating using neurotransmitters and electricity. Real, actual brain activity is measured with electrodes in the brain or someting like EEG that records electrical activity. The problem with doing that is that when you use EEG, you don't know exactly where the signal is coming from or what the signal means. fMRI presupposes that brain activity relies on oxygen but there's a 4-6 second delay because that's how long it takes for the call for more blood to go out. It's a slow response and in a way it's a sloppy response. We're assuming that there are more leftovers here in spot A then spot B, so there must be brain activity here and not there.

CB: The best description I've heard is that it's like coming up on thhe scene of a car accident and being able to tell what happened based on the skid marks. We have to try to interpret by the changes what was going on when the activity happened. It's a proxy.

AB: I'm so tired about hearing about "the brain lighting up". It makes it sound like you see lights in the head or something. That's not how the brain works. It suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of what fMRI results mean. Those beautiful colorful maps ... they're probability maps. They show the likelihood of activity happening in a given area, not proof of activity. According to our analysis, there's a higher likelihood of this region using more blood because we found more deoxygenated blood in this area. It's also correlational. Here's a time frame and the changes we'd expect, so we see which bits of brain correlate with that.

CB: We've had methods to look inside the brain of a living human for decades, and we've gotten quality science out of that method. What does fMRI add? The big thing is spatial location, you can say where in the brain activity is happening to a much greater degree. It's really mostly about that. But what that buys you is the ability to produce really pretty maps of the brain. You get a greyscale image with the colored spots that indicate what's significant. But that's not showing brain activity, it's showing a statistic. I drew a line in the sand and said these dots are the ones that crossed the line. It makes for drammatic and pretty presentation of data. If you have a page of jargon people will believe it at a certain level. But if you put a picture of the brain with active voxels [a three-dimensional pixel] people will believe it even more because a picture of the brain is next to it. We have a powerful tool and ability to create dramatic persuasive figures. And we can use it in improper ways.

CB: This is why we have to do tightly controlled experiments. To do it right, you'll take two conditions, almost exactly matched except for one critical thing. Some of the studies I really like are visual studies. I could show you the same stimulus, say a flashing circle of light, but I'd change the position of it. Whether it's inn the top third or the bottom third of your field of vision. Just by changing the position and comparing each position to each other you can see which parts of the brain are sensitive to each spot. That's a narrow study and a really good control.

AB: More than a couple papers have been sesationalistic. There have been comparisons of Republican and Democratic brains. That's ridiculous and it's a misuse of fMRI. It's not a specific enough question.

AB: In an fMRI study you have to stimulate the brain in some way. So what are you showing the brain in order to make distinction between Republicans and Democrats? Say it's pictures of people on welfare, and Democrats showed more activation in one area and Republicans in another. It doesn't actually tell you anything about Democrats and Republicans. Those results might tell you something about compassion. Or how we process compassion. But to say there are fundamental differences as a whole group between two groups of people, when there's so much variation within the group, it's just silly. I could get the same result ... find big differences ... with two groups of Democrats.

Remember, the brain doesn't just light up and those images are showing statistics, not all activity. If you see the same thing in several different studies, you can trust it more. But you should be suspect of one study of a handful of people, especially if the question wasn't specific enough and the researchers just went fishing to see what would happen. Also, what you're seeing is an average of the group, not each individual. You could have a group of 40 people and 39 out of the 40 show activity in one area, but that area might still get dropped from the final images because everybody didn't have it. So you need to consider the individuals, not just the group.

CB: In almost any experiment, but especially with MRI and fMRI, it's a noisy measure. There's all kinds of noise that gets entered into the signal. It'll pick up your own heart beating. We once had a lightbulb going bad in the scanner suite and it was introducing specific singal in our data set. You have to get enough data ... run the experiment enough times ... to separate signal from noise.

We're looking for variation in the magnetic field. With the salmon, fat will do that. Fatty tissue has a magnetic signal, but some areas of fatty tissue are more dense, and some less, so you'll see a differential. The salmon's brain was more fatty and that created more inherent variability. But it was just noise. It wasn't due to any actual activity but just happened to match our study design. Now, that's unlikely. But it just happened to happen. It's possible to find a false positive like that.

AB: We also saw activity outside the body of the salmon. The magnet itself has noise. It will always have noise. And if the threshold is low enough you're going to get that noise pattern matching up with your hypothesis.

AB: In most behavioral sciences and natural science, there's a certain cutoff level where we consider the things we've found significant or not. The gold standard is .01, less than a 1% chance that you're seeing something just by accident. Or a 99% chance that it's an actual difference. But, still, 1 out of 100 times you'd get that exact same result just by chance. We're also interested in data at the .5 level. Anything up to 10% we tend to call that a trend — something might be happening. That has held throughout history of psychology and neuroscience and it's pretty good. But we'd never had any tools that produced the magnitude of data that fMRI has. Instead of making comparisons between two groups of 40 people, you're making comparisons between 100,000 points in the brain and that .01 no longer says as much because you have so much more information to work with.

CB: Here's my analogy, if I give you a dart and say, "Try to hit the bullseye", you have some chance of hitting it. Your chance is not 0. But, depending on skill, you might hit more or less often. So you try the throw with one dart and hit on first throw, that's impressive. That's like finding a result. But if you only hit it once out of 100 tries, it's less impressive. In fMRI it's like having 60,000 darts you can throw. Some will hit the bullseye by chance and we need to try to correct for that. We tend to set a threshold and say anything over is legitimate and anything under is not. But what our team found is that in a surey of literature, between 25-40% of published papers were using an improper correction. You have a lot more chances of finding significance so you need to be more conservative of saying what is a legit result.

AB: So if you have a really specific hypothesis you can stick to the traditional numbers. But if you don't know what you're looking for and you just want to see "what lights up", then you're getting lots more chances to see things that could be just random. That's when you need to be more strict about what you consider real. And people aren't always as careful about that as they could be.

CB: Up to 40% of papers published in 2008 didn't do proper correction, so are there incorrect results in literature? Absolutely. Even if we correct perfectly you'll probably have 5% incorrect. There will always be false positives. But as a field we need to do as good a job as possible to release the best results we can. What we're saying is that it's not good for you, your study, or the field as a whole to not correct hard enough.

• You can read Craig Bennett and Abigail Baird's full paper online at the Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results

• Read a story Alexis Madrigal wrote for Wired about this study in 2009

• Read blogger and neuroscientist Scicurious' article on the dead salmon study, published after the IgNobel announcement.

Between the downfall of Jonah Lehrer, and Naomi Wolfe's new book that claims chemicals in women's brains force us to demand our lovers shower us with roses and candy and refer to us as "goddess"*, there's been some growing backlash against the long-popular idea of better living through neuroscience. You know what I'm talking about here: You (yes, you!) can succeed at work, be more creative, improve your relationships, and have a better sex life — all you have to do is read this one interpretation of the latest in neuroscience research!

Perhaps unsurprisingly, that pitch oversells the reality. What we know about how the brain works isn't really that clear cut. But more than that, the idea of scientific self-help quite often has to severely distort science in order to make any sense. The public comes away with a massive misunderstanding of what MRI does and doesn't tell us, what hormones like dopamine actually do, and what the lab tells us about real life.

There are two big essays that you need to read before you pick up another story or book that tries to make connections between cutting-edge brain science and real life. The first, in New Statesman, is by Steven Poole and the broad overview of why it's such a problem when neuroscience becomes neuro-speculation. The second, by Maia Szalavitz at Time Magazine's Healthland blog, focuses on Naomi Wolfe's new book and uses that as a springboard to talk about the bigger issue of brain chemicals, what they are, and what they aren't.

From Steven Poole's piece:

The human brain, it is said, is the most complex object in the known universe. That a part of it “lights up” on an fMRI scan does not mean the rest is inactive; nor is it obvious what any such lighting-up indicates; nor is it straightforward to infer general lessons about life from experiments conducted under highly artificial conditions. Nor do we have the faintest clue about the biggest mystery of all – how does a lump of wet grey matter produce the conscious experience you are having right now, reading this paragraph? How come the brain gives rise to the mind? No one knows.

... Distortion of what and how much we know is bound to occur, Paul Fletcher points out, if the literature is cherry-picked.

“Having outlined your theory,” he says, “you can then cite a finding from a neuroimaging study identifying, for example, activity in a brain region such as the insula . . . You then select from among the many theories of insula function, choosing the one that best fits with your overall hypothesis, but neglecting to mention that nobody really knows what the insula does or that there are many ideas about its possible function.”

From Maia Szalavitz:

Correctly understood, neuroscience offers important insight into how our minds function and how our brains shape our lives; many of my articles on Healthland attempt to explore these questions. But the kind of oversimplification seen in Wolf’s book and, sadly, in many other popular accounts of neuroscience, threatens to perpetuate a psychological myth. Rather than illuminating the complex interplay between mind and body, it portrays human beings — especially women — as automatons, enslaved by brain chemicals we cannot control.

That’s not what the science shows. The mind-body connection is far more complicated and wonderful, as a quick tour through some of Wolf’s errors will illustrate. There is a new science of female sexual behavior, but it is far more liberating than the book suggests.

... That’s because the brain circuitry that drives us to love and parent — the same region that can be derailed during addiction — isn’t the only part of our brain. Even in the throes of addiction, romantic obsession or the early chaotic days of parenting, we’re still capable of choice, and none of the neuroscience data proves otherwise. “Just because genes or a molecule modulate a behavior, it doesn’t mean that genes or molecules determine that behavior,” says Young. “People who are in love will generally engage in behavior that they wouldn’t normally do, but I don’t think that means they’re less responsible.”

Moran Cerf is a neuroscientist. In the video above, which Cory posted on Friday, he tells the story of how a paper he published in the journal Nature ended up getting him phone calls from Apple and invitations to appear with Christopher Nolan on the publicity tour for Inception. The problem: Nolan, Apple, and a lot of other people thought Cerf had figured out a way to record dreams. He hadn't. Not even close.

Cory's piece, and a link that Xeni sent me to the video, got me reading up on this case and I wanted to provide more of the scientific background—so you can see clearly what Cerf's research was really about and how the media got wrong. Back in 2010, Cerf and his colleagues were trying to figure out how humans look at a world cluttered with different faces, objects, smells, and sounds and manage to filter out the specific things we're interested in. What happens when I look at a messy desk and immediately focus in on one piece of paper? If there are two objects on the desk that are familiar to me, but only one of them really matters, how does my brain resolve the conflict and direct my attention in a single direction?

Turns out, at least under laboratory conditions, humans can filter out the important stuff by consciously controlling the firing of neurons in their own brains. Here's how Alison Abbott at Nature News described the research at the time:

In the last six years or so they have shown that single neurons can fire when subjects recognise — or even imagine — just one particular person or object. They propose that activity in these neurons reflect the choices the brain is making about what sensory information it will consider further and what information it will neglect.

In this experiment, the scientists flashed a series of 110 familiar images — such as pictures of Marilyn Monroe or Michael Jackson — on a screen in front of each of the 12 patients and identified individual neurons which uniquely and reliably responded to one of the images. They selected four images for which they had found responsive neurons in different parts of a subject's MTL. Then they showed the subject two images superimposed on each other. Each was 50% faded out.

The subjects were told to think about one of the images and enhance it.

They were given ten seconds, during which time the scientists ran the firing of the relevant neurons through a decoder. They fed the decoded information back into the superimposed images, fading the image whose neuron was firing more slowly and enhancing the image whose neuron was firing more quickly.

Watching this on-line feedback, the subjects were able to make their targeted image completely visible, and entirely eliminate the distracting image, in more than two thirds of trials, and they learnt to do so very quickly.

That's pretty cool, in and of itself. But the headlines associated with this story ended up focusing on a nonexistent VHS system for your dreams.

In the video clip, Cerf explains that the mix-up seemed to stem from a botched early-morning interview with the BBC. He gave hesitant, uncomfortable consent to the idea that maybe, possibly, his research could mean that there might someday be such a thing as a dream recorder. From there, it became a Telephonic game of errors, with other publications writing up stories that quoted the BBC article. Before long, Cerf was the inventor of a dream recorder and fielding calls from hungry investors.

Plenty of publications wrote well-reported stories about Cerf. In fact, Time magazine online managed to put out a responsibly written article and a sensationalistic one (based on the BBC piece) on two different blogs, on the very same day.

But what Cerf remembers (and, likely, what many other people remember about his work) are the stories that got it wrong.

READ MORE:
• You can read the full paper "On-line, voluntary control of human temporal lobe neurons" at Cerf's website
• Read the Nature News article describing the study
• Time.com put out two stories on Cerf's work on the same day. One of them accurately describes what the research is about. The other one heavily plays up the dream recorder idea that has nothing to do with Cerf's work.
• Watch a couple videos Cerf made about the research, including one where you can hear neurons activating at the sight of a Marylin Monroe picture.

If you watch or read much science fiction, you know that all it takes to suspend disbelief about fictional science is an explanation that sounds good on the surface and makes use of terms and ideas that your audience doesn't fully understand but does find emotionally compelling. It's why "radioactive spider" made sense in 1960s.

Apparently (and unfortunately) this effect is true for actual science as well.

This slide comes from a lecture given by Oxford University neuroscientist Dorothy Bishop. Basically, it's showing that an explanation of a psychological phenomenon became more believable if you added in some hand-wavey neuroscience and pictures of brain scans. Suddenly, an explanation of human behavior that's based on circular reasoning and poor logic changes from something lay people won't accept to something we're happy to buy into.

Bishop's entire, hour-long presentation on the science of bad neuroscience is available to watch online for free. If you don't have time, check out this summary of the key points at the Neurobonkers blog.