So there’s going to be a seminar series on religion and neuroscience at McGill. Given that it’s being hosted by the religious studies group, I don’t have high hopes. I’m kind of wiped now, but please anticipate some ranting on the misuse of neuroscience, neurorealism and neurofetishism, and just generally why I get annoyed with this kind of thing.
via Skepchick Elyse:
My friend Jamie Bernstein (Skeptical Ninja and VP of the Women Thinking Free Foundation) recently admitted that she has never read the New Testament. Not once. Not a little bit.
I mean, I guess it makes sense, she was raised as a secular Jew… so she didn’t really have a whole lot of use for Jesus things in her life. But after learning this fact, I took it upon myself to shame her into making a humiliating video for my amusement… with the promise of posting it here on Skepchick for your amusement. When I told her that Jesus would have wanted her to do it, she didn’t really have an out. So she agreed.
Yeah, it’s about as funny as it sounds.
So I just finished re-reading Robert F. Sawyer’s book Hybrids. It’s not without its issues, definitely. But it also had a comment on atheism and religion (specifically, Christianity, though the argument applies to a number of other faiths as well), and their relationships to war and executions. I’ve been thinking about it with all the death penalty news lately. Essentially it goes like this:
“Christians (and others) have an underlying belief that the dead are not really dead. They say, pray, and write of their dead loved ones ‘God is taking care of you’, ‘We will be together again’, ‘I know you’re watching over me’, etc. But you can’t speak with the dead. They are, after all, dead. You can’t ask them for forgiveness. You can’t be touched by them. All you have is your memories and whatever they themselves have left behind. But many faiths treat life as a sort of prologue, and that those who are wronged or who wrong others will be judged in ‘the next life’, rather than in the here and now. So long as humans continue to believe that those who have died are alive somewhere else, maybe living a better life, we will have another means to justify wars, executions, and murderous revenge. And we’ll be able to stomach injustices easier, both as oppressors and the oppressed, because there’ll be pie in the sky, by and by.”
Now, obviously this isn’t the only way humans can justify these things to themselves. As much as it’s an annoying trope, Stalin and communism managed to kill huge numbers of people without the balm of an afterlife (though I rather doubt they all lacked any belief in continued existence after death). Ideology can stand in place of a faith in an afterlife, particularly when you convince yourself that some other group doesn’t count as human, or that your continued existence is dependent on theirs ending.
The only tricky thing I find with an absolutist stance against killing, as informed by the understanding that people who die are dead, is that at times it can be necessary in order to protect oneself or others. It is this sort of thing which is invoked by atheists like Christopher Hitchins or Sam Harris; the former is the only person I’ve heard who’s formed an even half-wise convincing argument supporting the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But even if you think it’s necessary, acknowledging that someone who dies is gone forever ought at least to forestall hasty and violent actions. But people rush to wars, rush to call for the execution of convicts, and cheer when a criminal is shot instead of captured and tried. Atheists are by no mean immune to these things, but at the very least we have a good reason to be wary of falling into those habits.
I’ll end with a quote from the Seventh Doctor, speaking of his companion Ace and why he chose to rescue her rather than preserve the sword Excalibur. “Exotic alien swords are easy to come by, Aces are rare.”
As much as I like science philosophy, I do get a bit twitchy sometimes when people describe themselves as “neurophilosophers”, given the current buzzword status of neuroscience and the fact that most social neuroscience makes me extremely wary in the same way evo-psych does. Sam Harris, for example, makes me scrunch my eyes so hard I see spots.
My program recently had a retreat (like a mini-conference). I’ll confess I didn’t attend a lot of it, especially today, given I was feeling a bit ill, and kept falling asleep during the molecular/cellular neuroscience talks. But the opening talks were by Dr. Ian Gold and two students regarding the intersection of neuroscience and philosophy.
Dr. Gold introduced the topic by giving a quick history of neurophilosophy, citing Patricia Smith Churchland’s 1986 book “Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind Brain” as really kicking off the field. Assuming (correctly, I’m willing to bet) that most people in the audience weren’t too acquainted with philosophy, he gave some examples of just what the field covers.
Firstly, neurophilosophy asks question about neuroscience itself. One of the big ones is ‘can psychology be reduced to neurobiology?’ For those of you following at home, by the way, my answer is “Yes in principle, but neurobiology is probably not the appropriate level at which to describe most psychological phenomena. Other questions deal with core principles like “How should we understand functional localization?”, core methods like brain imaging and cognitive functions, and core concepts like “What exactly are visual receptive fields, and are they a useful concept?”
Secondly, neurophilosophy directs neuroscience at traditional philosophical questions and concepts. These include
Mind: What is the relation between perception and action? How do different sensory and motor pathways interact?
Social theory: How do people “mind-read”, ie. create an idea of what others are thinking or feeling? Do certain types of neurons play a role?
Epistemology: What are beliefs? What can we learn from delusions caused by temporal lobe lesions.
Metaphysics: What are the limits of free will? Libet’s experiments, for example, suggest our brains begin actions before we’re consciously aware of them.
Ethics: How do people make moral decisions? There seem to be different brain networks involved in different kinds of ethical decision-making, and certain regions seem to play a role in our assignment of moral blameworthiness.
Aesthetics: Why is a painting beautiful? For example, the ambiguity of the Mona Lisa seems to result from the fact that at different resolutions, her expression is different (mocking when high, sad when medium, happy when low), and so as our eyes move and we focus more or less on her face, we see different emotions.
Dr. Gold ended with an excellent quote from Hippocrates: “One ought to know that on the one hand pleasure, joy, laughter, and games, and on the other, grief, sorrow, discontent, and dissatisfaction arise only from the brain.”
I might go through the student talks later, but for now, I like the idea that neuroscience and philosophy can interact, however cautiously.
So I’ve been having trouble with my science.
I know! I’m shocked as well. But as I might have mentioned previously, the current study I’m running is actually the first time I’ve run participants through an experiment. My undergrad research was conducted using patient charts. The first part of my master’s involved a lot of study planning and design, and some analysis and write-up, but I never actually ran people through anything or even really observed our experiments. In my second, current lab, I’ve only re-purposed previously collected data.
I’m running a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) study right now. TMS uses a powerful electromagnet to induce changes in current in the outer layers of the cerebral cortex (ie. the top layer of your brain). You can use it to selectively enhance or inhibit activity in fairly specific parts of the brain. Repetitive TMS, the kind I’m using, inhibits activity, and is often thought of as creating a “virtual lesion”. It wears off in about 10 minutes or so, so it has some limits, but it’s a pretty cool tool.
I’ve mentioned this before. In normal brain imaging, all you can do is say which brain regions are active during a task, sometimes as compared to another task. You can do a lot more, really, but for the moment we’ll go with this. What TMS can do is tell you if a region is essential to a task, or if it’s involved in some peripheral process, or if it just tends to be active at the same time, or if the activity is just a false positive.
Now, the way we do TMS is fairly straightforward. We sit someone down, and load up an MRI scan of their brain on our computer. They wear a pair of glasses with three tracking beads on them, and sit in front of an optical sensor. We then touch a pointer, which also has tracking beads, to various parts of their face. In this way, the sensor can link the shape and movement of their head with the head and brain images in the computer. We can then use that and our coil (which again has three beads on it) to target a precise spot on the surface of the brain.
The only question now is, how strong should the stimulation be? There’s no set, absolute scale. And everyone seems to have brains which take different levels of stimulation to be affected. Even on the surface, since the current going through the scalp, people feel different things. I felt like someone was flicking the inside of my temple; a lab-mate couldn’t even feel it during their turn, and we were both using the same stimulation level.
So what we do is establish peoples’ resting motor threshold (RMT). This is the minimum strength required to cause a small muscle twitch, called a “motor-evoked potential” (MEP), because it’s measured using electrodes over the muscle. We simply send a single quick pulse from the coil into the hand area of the motor cortex, and cause a muscle in the hand to become excited. This is pretty cool.
But we can’t evoke the bloody MEP. My professor tried on three of us with no luck. I managed to get them consistently from him and a lab-mate (just by approximating over the scalp, without an image of their brain). And today I couldn’t get anything from my pilot participant or my handsome, bow-tie-wearing pilot/actual participant. And for them, I had an image of their brains, registered to their heads, with the “hand knob” region marked out.
And we can’t really run people if we don’t know the stimulation strength to use. If we can’t evoke MEPs, we can’t know the stimulation stength. I’ve booked a bunch of people for next week, so here’s hoping we figure something out.
So we had our first official Freethought Association (McGill) meeting (EDIT: of the year) tonight. I think it went pretty well, my usual tendency to talk a lot aside. We got some new people, who spoke up and made suggestions, and even some critiques. Given that we’ve spent a while being just the same people, it was nice getting some fresh insight stirred into the mix. We also have someone who was running a similar group out at Simon Fraser, and it’s nice having someone with that kind of experience as well, given that we’ve mostly been a small social club. New event ideas from a bunch of people, too. We should have a more exciting, if busier, year.
A friend and I have been having a discussion about literature. Not the classy kind, but scientific literature. See, we need to keep hundreds of journal articles around to refer to all the time. What do you do with those papers?
You could sort them by year, but there’s a lot of papers per year. You could sort them by journal, but these days papers tend to be known by their topic and authors and year, with the journal coming after. And was it published in Journal of Neurophysiology, Neuron, etc, etc. The problem with alphabetizing them is that only gives the first author, and often (but not always), the lab the paper came out of is run by the last author listed.
What a lot of people I know do, including myself, is create rough subject categories and put .pdf copies of articles in those. The problem there is many if not most papers can fit into several categories to varying degrees.
This is why we have library/information sciences. One of my friends has come up with an interesting idea.
“1. Papers are named [Year]. [Author] [(Corresponding author)] – [Journal] – [Title] e.g. 2011. Martinez-Garcia et al. (Romo) – PNAS – Neural mechanisms of postponed decisions.pdf)” This is nice. Year, author, journal, and title. I might abbreviate the title with just the key words, but it gives you all the info you really want in one go, while organizing sequentially.
“2. All papers go under “documents/literature/All Papers” This seems like it might be a bit annoying to find something, but keep reading.
“3. Sub-folders based on labs are created (e.g. “documents/literature/Romo – University of Mexico”) with shortcuts to the articles in the subfolders – each collaborator has a shortcut to the paper in the “All Papers” folder.” This lets you follow papers by which group produced them, which can be especially useful if you know each lab’s interests and biases.
The only issue I can see here is whether you identify a lab by the PI (primary investigator) or name-location, since PIs do move to new places and found new labs, though it’s fairly rare. I also miss, say, knowing I’m looking for prosody papers and being able to see all the ones I have on the subject, but eventually you’ll know the various labs well enough that you’ll only rarely have to search for phrases in the titles.
Thoughts?
I wish we still had ads like this. It’s maybe a bit paternalistic, but it’s accurate. I suppose the quacks could still purchase their own ads, but they have those now anyways. At least this way there’d be some push-back.
