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.
Well, I’ve been focused more on political things and my thesis than science lately, as shown by the month gap between this post and my last. Hopefully I’ll be getting back up to speed soon.
In the meantime, here’s a clip of Joseph Bronowski, talking about science, dogma, and human fallibility.
So I’ve soured a bit on SVAR. I corrected my input and now my model doesn’t work, which is frustrating, and I don’t quite understand the math well enough to fix things without a good deal of trial and error. Still, were it not for the awesome folks at AFNI, I’d be further behind.
I was listening to a conversation in our lab, between one of my profs and a former student of his. They were talking about how a lot of speech or language theories rely on certain theoretical brain networks, and were grousing a bit about how few of these models reflected actual anatomy. In particular, certain regions which are thought to be connected in a network don’t actually have direct connections via white matter fibre tracts.
As you might recall, white matter in the brain, which generally forms the pith-looking part of the brain when you look at slices, is mostly made up of axons, the long wire-type bits of neurons which connect one neuron to other neurons. Thus, you have layers of grey matter, or neurons themselves, on the surface of the brain and axons under the surface, connecting neurons both between and within regions, as well as to other neurons deeper in the brain.
I was thinking about how you might find accurate fibre tracts, so you could know which regions are directly connected to others. One way is to insert tracers into cell bodies, wait until normal brain function has caused the tracer to be transported along those neurons’ axons, and then kill the subject and cut open the brain to see where the pathway leads. When doing research intended to apply to humans, this is often done in monkeys. Obviously, this is controversial enough in monkeys, and can’t be done in humans.
But monkey brains are not entirely like human brains. Sure, we’re both primates, but a lot of the functional difference between us and monkeys comes from our brain differences. There’s a lot of debate over which parts of the monkey brain are equivalent or “homologous” to which parts of the human brain. And that doesn’t even take into account that monkeys use different parts of their brains for some things than we do. So in humans, you can try various techniques and tricks.
A popular one is called “diffusion tensor imaging”, or DTI. This is a type of magnetic resonance imaging, which uses properties of water diffusion along axons to create images of fibre tracts. Don’t ask me the details – I’m still learning how to describe simple volumetric MRI. But part of the issue is it’s a difficult, representative reconstruction of actual fibres, and has certain limitations in how specifically it can describe the tracts.
So wouldn’t it be nice to trace them directly? I was thinking about this on the way home tonight. I mean, we do have extracted brains from corpses. You could stain a region and follow – but not really, because a brain needs to be fixed (hardened) in formaldehyde in order to retain any real structure after death. Okay, but presumably you could construct some artificial support, and maybe keep it in liquid. That’s just an engineering problem. That’s not a knock against engineers, by the way, but just a way of saying it’s possible barring the actual design and construction.
But the tracing methods I recall from undergrad need an active brain, which is transporting nutrients and the tracer down along axons. But… well, we could devote some research to temporarily sustaining a brain in some kind of pseudo-skull, in an oxygen-rich nutrient bath. No reason why it’s not doable, if complicated.
And that’s when it hit me.
I’d come from a fairly simple, abstract research question to putting living brains from corpses in jars.
And I believe, very much, that we are our brains, embodied in our flesh. A disembodied human brain would not be like a person – a body is a requisite part of that, to my mind – but it would have been a person. Imagine total sensory deprivation. Not just the mild sort done in experiments, but the sort where you literally cannot see, hear, smell, taste, or feel anything. At. All.
This never happens unless you are unconscious. There is always sensory feedback when we are the slightest bit awake and aware.
But I still think if you kept a brain alive, it would be alive. Conscious, in a way.
It really is a short step from scientist to mad scientist.
(Which is sort of cool in a way. Also – imagine the applications of living brains in jars! The possibilities are endless!)
Ahem. Right.
So I had something I’d wanted to post on, and now (frustratingly) cannot remember what it was.
Instead, I’ll link to these posts on a recent study purporting to study neural differences in women with and without low sex drives. The whole issue really strikes at a few major issues in neuroscience. And, unfortunately, it’s been widely covered in the Telegraph as Women with low libidos ‘have different brains’ and the BBC as Libido problems ‘brain not mind’.
1. Any study needs to have a good idea of what exactly it’s studying. There’s some sketchy history over hypoactive sexual desire disorder. It’s not disputed that people might have low libidos and be frustrated over this, but as Dr. Petra Boynton points out, many of the screening tools are too vague to be reliable indicators of what’s being supposedly measured ie, bothersomely low libido. So even the diagnosis is pretty vague.
2. The groups were 19 women ‘with’ HSDD and 7 without. Now, having twice as many people in your clinical group as your control group is pretty sketchy, and you wouldn’t think it’d be hard to get more controls – hell, most of the time the problem is too many people in your control group and too few in the clinical. And in another study done by the authors of this study, looking at themes to include in research-purposed erotic clips, they do not even take into account the sexuality of their participants.
3. This isn’t really peer reviewed. I think there are lots of problems before this even gets to peer review, but it when it was put about in the media it hadn’t even been published, only presented at a conference. Such findings usually reflect ongoing research which has not been finalized or thoroughly reviewed, and as such shouldn’t be considered authoritative.
4. Not that you’d know that by the researchers themselves. Here’s Dr. Diamond, the lead researcher: “Us being able to identify physiological changes, to me provides significant evidence that it is a true disorder as opposed as opposed to a societal construct.”
Now, at pointed out here by Julian Savulescu, a neuroethicist, this is bullshit. The study found different patterns of brain activation. Well bully for them. Say some women complain of low libido, and others don’t. Put them in an MRI, and they will have different patterns of brain activation. Say some women complain of chronic boredom, and others don’t. Put them in an MRI, and they will have different patterns of activation.
Why? Because mental states are the same bloody thing as physical states, and I strongly question the capability of any neuroscientist unable to grasp this. Social constructs create different mental states -> mental states = brain states -> brain states are physical. Bam, there you go.
All this report shows is that there is a difference in mental processing between people in one construct and people in another – or as has been pointed out, people who might be tired, sick, feeling incompatible with their partner, or any other number of things. Perhaps what they found was simply that sexually satisfied people process erotic images differently than people who aren’t.
So big deal. What do the findings -mean-? From the excellent deconstruction by the Neurocritic, quoting the report:
“…women with normal sexual function had greater activation in superior frontal and supramarginal gyri. Women with HSDD exhibited greater activation in the inferior frontal, primary motor, and insular cortices. Additionally, normal women had greater activation in the posterior cingulate cortex while women with HSDD appeared to recruit the midcingulate region.”
And yet there seems to be no discussion about just why those regions have differential activation. Different brain regions have broadly different functions, and any study looking at something like this ought to at least try to explain their findings in some coherent way. Simply saying ‘different patterns of activation between groups X and Y’ is a cop-out.
There’s two final points I’d like to make.
One, go read Ben Goldacre’s take on the issue of ‘neuro-realism’, whereby people feel subjective mental states, like fear or pain, need to be validated as ‘real’ through brain imaging. Of course they’re real – if they weren’t people wouldn’t feel them. There’s no such thing as something that’s ‘just in your head’. If you feel it, it’s real. This isn’t talking about facts – if you ‘feel’ Atlantis was real you’re wrong – but internal states of being. And all neuroimaging can do is localize regions involved in these states, not somehow validate their existence.
Secondly, and I can’t emphasize this enough, is that scientists in general and social scientists in particular need to take responsibility for their research. Anything involving humans needs to be approached carefully. Science rightly has a good deal of authority, and things which are glossed with science (much in the same way as pseudoscience) are often accepted uncritically, particularly when they confirm existing attitudes. I would suggest, given how counter-intuitive scientific findings can be, that any findings which seem to confirm existing social rules or attitudes should be strongly scrutinized. Even if your research isn’t pseudoscience, and is conducted with the best of intentions, you need to look very hard at how you’re asking your question, why you’re asking it, how you will interpret your findings; and in this day and age, how the media will interpret your findings.
After all that, as this nonsense shows us, your findings can still be reported as confirming social attitudes even if they don’t.
T. L. Woodard, N. T. Nowak, S. D. Moffat, M. P. Diamond, M. E. Tancer, R. Balon. Wayne State University School of Medicine, Detroit, MI. CEREBRAL ACTIVATION PATTERNS IN WOMEN WITH HYPOACTIVE SEXUAL DESIRE DISORDER (HSDD) VERSUS WOMEN WITH NORMAL SEXUAL FUNCTION. American Society for Reproductive Medicine’s 66th Annual Meeting.
So, Monday and Tuesday were the Lorne Trottier Public Science Symposium, a yearly event at McGill which provides a free public forum for people to watch scientists talk about science. Basically.
I’ve not gone before, but this year it was on pseudoscience, so how could I resist? The Friday event I mentioned last post kicked it off.
Monday afternoon there was a ‘press conference’ at the McGill Faculty club (which is posh as hell), which was really more of a student Q&A with the speakers: Michael Shermer, David Gorski (of Science-based medicine and the blog of a friend of his), and Ben Goldacre of Bad Science.
It was pretty good. There were questions about what ought to be covered by health insurance, the placebo effect, the infiltration of quackery into academics, how to engage with people, and so forth. It was a nicely intimate setting.
After that myself and a friend met up with some folks from the CFI to talk about events before heading into the Monday night talk.
The event was opened by the Dean of Science at McGill and the Provost, with the introduction by Joe Schwarcz of the OSS.
Shermer was up first. I don’t know him as well as the others, and I’ve never read any of his writing besides a blog post or two. He was very brash and pugnacious, and did a good talk on how cognitive issues in humans make it difficult for us to think and act skeptically. Useful talk, though up here he comes across as very American.
Gorski was after him, and he gave a talk focused on breast cancer quackery, and gave some good advice on how to deconstruct cancer testimonials. He’s definitely as big a nerd as the internet indicates – while I enjoyed his talk, I think he’s still getting used to addressing large public audiences instead of medical-scientific groups or individual patients.
Goldacre was probably the best speaker that night, though since I have the usual Canadian love for an English accent I might be biased. He did a brisk talk on supplements and quacks, and some of the legal trouble he’s had.
Shermer was the only one who managed to keep it pretty light. People dying of cancer is rarely funny, so Gorski’s speech ended up being a bit of a downer, and Goldacre ended up talking about Matthias Rath, who’s basically one of the more evil people walking the earth today. And the only reason I can write that is because I’m in Canada and not the UK.
There was a question period too! Sadly, the only questions I remember were from nuts. The first was a self-proclaimed lawyer who said that he’d examined each and every alternative and mainstream medical treatment, and knew that all alt-med was bunk. Except, of course, for Rrrroyal Rrraymond Rrrrife, whose experiments in the 1930s were never replicated! The frequencies were lost sirs, and why has the scientific community never embraced this great man’s work I ask you yes you sir what are you afraid of, that you will not reconstruct the great work of Rrrroyal Rrrraymond Rrrrife? Even Gorski ended up butting in to ask if he was going to ask an actual question, which he spent 10 minutes doing. Given Gorski’s a cancer surgeon/researcher and had spoken on the topic I was impressed by his restraint.
The other one was told he could ask a one-sentence question, and bargained for 30 seconds. He then proceeded to ask Shermer at great length about the Kennedy assassination (!), for 39 seconds. I was impressed, both because he’s clearly been on about this for 40-some odd years at least, and that he managed to pack a question into 39 seconds. If only the first nut had been so brief…
I hung around after and got to meet Ben Goldacre, who’s a great bloke. Very friendly, easy-going, and pleased to sign something for me. And I got to meet David Gorski! You’ll have to forgive the fannish-ness, but given the huge influence his writing has had on me in the past few years I was pretty excited.
A bunch of us CFI and Freethought types went out after for a few drinks after, and had some good conversation.
Tuesday James Randi gave a presentation at McGill. Though I’ve not read any of his books, I knew who James Randi is, and he’s a living legend. Much like Harry Houdini, he started out as a stage magician and ended up as a skeptic and investigator, even working with scientific committees to critically examine claims which scientists are not always equipped to investigate.
The talk was excellent. Randi is tiny, but he has an amazing stage presence. Lots of old-but-good jokes, some conjuring tricks, and an explanation of why he’s so devoted to skepticism. Long story short – charlatans and frauds hurt people by preying on their belief. He showed how he exposed Peter Popoff, how he demonstrated psychic surgery, mentalism, etc. I was impressed. Magic fascinates me, though I’ve never really been tempted to take it up, and I always love to find out how the trick was done.
I’d talk more about Randi, but as I don’t know him as well as the Monday speakers, I don’t have as much to say.
If you’d like to see or listen to the talks, you can go to the following link:
http://bcooltv.mcgill.ca/ListRecordings.aspx?CourseID=3113
So McGill hosts these “Freaky Friday” events, in which McGill scientists are supposed to explain some of the actual science behind films and pop culture. Ostensibly, anyways. Mostly it seems to be a science lecture followed by a movie. You can find details on them here.
I was put off of them last year by the UFO ones, in which a professor abused the philosophy of science to tell us that we’ve totally been visited by UFOs and there’s a massive global cover-up. That wasn’t so cool, especially since there’s enough disinformation out there already. We don’t need people muddying the waters even more.
But I’ve gone to two this year, and they’ve both been pretty cool. The last one was by a biogeologist talking about the work being done looking at indirect evidence of life earlier than was previously thought, using Carbon-12/13 ratios and the atmospheric ratios of different Sulpher isotopes. It was neat. I never thought finding old rocks, grinding them up, and then analyzing them would be so cool, but it was. The movie for that was Night of the Triffids, which was an awesomely bad old sci-fi flick.
Tonight was a lot closer to my heard. Joseph Schwarcz was the presenter, which was cool. The talk was on the growth of quackery, and as he made clear it really hasn’t changed much – more sophisticated maybe, but the claims and the content are pretty similar.
He brought us through snake oil salesmen and patent medicine, talked about Houdini’s skepticism, and showed some more modern quackery like Asea http://www.teamasea.com/, which is a 5% salt water solution. And really, it doesn’t even scratch the surface. I’m not going to go into the history of quackery, or all the various forms and authors, but suffice to say it was interesting. Check out Dudley J. Leblanc and Hadacol for an example from the 50s.
I’ll just mention one other, since it’s so overblown. Bill Nelson (you have to read his ‘bio’) invented the EPFX-SCIO, which claims the following:
The EPFX-SCIO scans the body for 9000 frequencies, each associated with a different compound, much as anti-virus software would do for a computer. The EPFX-SCIO operates at biological speeds (up to 1/1000 of a second) charting the resonance or responsse of the body to these frequencies, comparing them to a norm and ranking them in degree of reactivity, identifying both acute and chronic imbalances. Clients can then be provided information about the results and energetic therapy can be given to attempt a balancing or harmonizing of any aberrant frequencies. Offering over 200 biofeedback therapies in 72 modalities, it is the largest healthcare software package in the world, combining both eastern and western philosophies and techniques.
I don’t even know where to start…
After that we watched a film called “The Living Matrix”.
Let’s play a game. Watch the movie, and take a drink every time someone makes a claim that runs counter to basic science, or makes a factual scientific error.
Now that you’re out of the hospital, I’ll remind you that you can’t sue me for your alcohol poisoning.
The film is a painful mishmash of healing touch, energy medicine, ‘The Secret’-esque intentionality stuff, and a hefty dose of what I’ve started thinking of as “Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work” syndrome. I can’t even address their claims, since they often conflict. Near the beginning they claim that consciousness is not in the brain, and that the body does not need some sort of central organizer. But then in the second half, they spend a bunch of time wondering how the body can function without a central organizer.
They even wonder how cells can communicate with each other, and I foolishly thought they would start speaking about inter-cellular communication. Hah! No, they claim that some central organizer needs to send out simultaneous signals to all the cells at once (since they claim the different speeds of nerve transmission make complex behaviour impossible). They claim that the actual central organizer is the heart!
That’s right, we’re right back to fucking Aristotle. They say it can “imprint information” on the body using “sound waves, electricity, magnetism, and electromagnetism” and that the nerve tissue on the heart (which, you know, the brain uses to maintain a heartbeat) is actually to tell the brain what to do. Seriously – some of the same arguments as 2300 years ago when Aristotle argued the heart was the centre of consciousness. And how does it talk to cells? Well, they’ve got these receptors embedded in the cell membrane…
*facepalm* Which are used for chemical signalling between cells. Apparently they missed that bit in high school or first year bio. And none of this is about the more egregious nonsense about “fields” which is addressed a bit here.
Anyways. Suffice to say that me, the developmental biology student next to me, the one across the room, and the engineer sitting below me were all choking back astonishment and outrage for most of the film. The phrase “not even wrong” comes to mind.
The after talk was… interesting. There were a couple people who were really into it, and they talked about how they believed in intuition, or telepathy because they would think of someone and then that person would call them. This old nonsense always ignores the huge numbers of times when you’re thinking of someone and they don’t call.
So, it was fairly fun even if the film was frustrating as hell. Anyone care to explain how Rupert Sheldrake has a position at Cambridge? Oh, the they mentioned Adam Dreamhealer. Oh yeah.
You can see more thorough review of the film here.
I wonder sometimes if I’m even speaking the same language as these people.
So, what responsibilities do scientists have?
I’ve been thinking about this, since we’re right between the anniversaries of the bombings of Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945).
First, I strong suggest reading the general Wiki page on the bombings.
Second, take a look at this film footage.
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That’s the underwater detonation of either Able or Baker, 23 kiloton nuclear fission bombs.
The creation and implementation of the nuclear weapons used in WWII, and those after, would not have been possible without the collusion (I use the term intentionally) of civilian scientists with the military. People like Oppenheimer or Luis Alvarez, while being patriotic Americans, partly viewed the creation of the bombs as an intellectual challenge. Others, such as Edward Teller, were more enthusiastic.
And of course, the same was true on all sides of the wars, from the atrocities of the German scientists to the Soviets. Even Canada, whom we Canadians like to think of as generally well-intentioned, contributed substantially via the Chalk River laboratories.
Today, too, military conventional and WMD research and production would not be possible without the active contribution of scientists.
Now, science is an entirely neutral tool. It is a means of knowing – nothing more or less. As with other neutral tools, though, the uses to which it is put are rarely neutral. I like to think they are frequently positive – vaccination, for example, or space exploration. The further enlightenment as to how our minds and brains function.
But much of what scientific discovery has produced is problematic at best. Nuclear weapons are a clear and obvious example. But what about fossil fuel engines and the technology required for their fuel’s extraction? The use of psychology in developing harsh interrogation and torture techniques? Bioweapons liked weaponized anthrax or sarin nerve gas?
I like to think science will be used to solve many of these problems. By this, I reject the primitivist solution, especially to environmental problems, which would ask us to dismantle everything and return to the lifestyles of our early ancestors. There is nothing to be gained by that, to my mind. I think the benefits of the modern world outweigh any sort of vague ‘harmony with nature’ that lifestyle would bring us.
Instead, I think genetic engineering, the development of alternative forms of energy, and green technologies will solve many of the problems which science has also been used to bring about.
But this leaves one big problem left – scientific participation in military technologies. Such technologies, unlike nuclear or coal power, are not two-edged swords. They are intended for a single purpose which ought to be anathema to a civilized society.
Doctors and lawyers and other professions have formal codes of ethics. These are fairly lax – doctors and psychologists have assisted in torture in American prison facilities, for example. These codes also hold no bounds over military doctors or psychologists – they only have effect if such people wish to work in a civilian setting.
True, enforced ethics codes are a fairly recent invention. Nothing formal guiding research ethics existed prior to the Nuremberg Code or the Declaration of Geneva. The Declaration of Helsinki, which codified the proper ethics involved in conducting research with human subjects, was originally drafted in 1964 and not really implemented until the revision in 1975.
Think about that. Given the length of time it takes for policy changes, especially things like a code of conduct, to become a part of the culture they’re concerned with, one could reasonably say there was no strong base for ethics in human research until the late 1970s. Problems still occur today – imagine what it was like then, when there was no formal concern for individual self-determination, when there was no concern for informed consent.
But other scientists still have no formal code of ethics dealing with the outcomes of their research, unless they deal with human or animal experimentation. True, there are codes of conduct dealing with plagiarism and misconduct, but none dealing with questions like ‘will this be used to kill people?’ or ‘will this poison this ocean?’
I’m not trying to lay a lot of blame at the feet of scientists. Much of the time the products of research have multiple applications, some of which may not be intended by their discoverers. Scientific findings are frequently misused, misunderstood, misstated, or made up to support particular political, social, or ideological positions (See Bad Science for some good examples).
My point is that scientists have a great deal of power through their findings. Anyone holding power needs to be careful how they wield it. Should Oppenheimer and his colleagues have refused to develop nuclear weapons?
It’s not an easy answer. They felt they were in a race with the Soviets and the Nazis, with the fate of the free world at stake. They lived in an age where the claims of nationalism and racism were not questioned in the way they are today. But I think they should have questioned themselves more than they did – the decision to drop the second bomb on Nagasaki was partly theirs.
Science can be, I believe, one of the greatest tools for good that humans possess. It can grant us independence from the vagaries and vicissitudes nature, from disease, from decrepitude. I think the scale of its view can help deliver us from petty intraplanatary regionalism. That the international communication and collaboration which facilitates it can be used to break down political barriers.
But scientists need to think about it. We do not have the luxury, any more than do soldiers or doctors, of simply going along with things. We must think about the uses to which our discoveries will be put, and work to make sure they are not misused.
So I’m reading “The Brain That Changes Itself” by Norman Doige. I’m liking it more now I’m getting into it, but there’s a few things bothering me about it and I thought I’d share, since at least some of them are things that bother me about popular science in general.
In the interest of fairness I’ll admit to being biased against the author from the start. He’s got a degree in psychoanalysis and apparently has a practice in it too. I didn’t even know you could get degrees in that anymore, but he seems to be on the older side. Psychoanalysis is a good part of the reason scientists often don’t take psychology seriously – even psychologists, while acknowledging how it really got their discipline going, hate the fact that it colours their entire field.
There are lots of concepts from psychoanalysis that have been very hard to discard over the years, since they’ve been around enough to become ‘common sense’. Repressed memories, for example. There’s really little evidence for their existence. If anything, people with traumatic experiences tend to relive them through flashbacks and the like. The idea of repressed memories, and psychoanalytic techniques like guided recall under hypnosis, led to the whole Satanic ritual abuse phenomenon in the 80s. We know that those conditions are perfect for creating or changing existing memories. Some very simple studies have shown this, whereby people are asked leading questions about their memories.
“Do you remember hugging Bugs Bunny at Disneyland?”
Plenty of people will answer yes to this, despite it not being possible. It gets much worse when the question is being asked during moments of emotional stress, hypnosis, or other moments when we’re open to suggestion.
But because Freud went on about repressed memories it’s common wisdom that they exist. And that’s not even getting into his sexual stuff.
So I don’t like the way Doige constantly attributes ideas as original to Freud, like a Marxist would to Marx. But that’s not my primary complaint.
It’s that he wants a Narrative. And it’s that most annoying of popsci Narratives, the ‘plucky revolutionary scientist is belittled for his ideas but bravely makes life better for a few daring clients.’
Personally, I think Kuhn needs to take a share of the blame for this. His idea of the structure of scientific revolutions, that all advances are made by the existing paradigm being broken by a new paradigm promoted by a tiny minority of visionaries, has been the bane of every skeptical scientist’s existence. Every homeopath, every UFOer, every basement crank now thinks the only reason their brilliance isn’t being recognized is because the dominant paradigm resists change.
Science does have a certain amount of inertia. Any idea which challenges established ideas does have a bit of an uphill battle. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Many, if not most, ideas turn out to be wrong. The established ones have resisted change not solely due to hidebound scientists but because they’re fairly well-supported and the evidence against them is not sufficiently compelling to force a change.
I’ll give two examples that get bandied about a fair bit.
In 1982 Drs. Barry Marshall and Robin Warren of Perth discovered that H. pylori was the cause of peptic ulcers, not stress. There’s a famous story (true) about Dr. Marshall drinking a beaker of the cultured bacterium to prove it was the cause. So – plucky duo prove cause of illness in face of doubting Thomas scientific community.
Except that the groundwork was already there. Though a study in 1954 failed to find stomach bacteria, studies through the 1970s found evidence for pathenogenic stomach bacteria. While there was opposition to Marshall and Warren’s claims, after several other groups were able to replicate their findings independently (one of science’s major modern protections against cranks) they became generally accepted. Except among much of the public, of course, where the idea that ulcers are caused by stress is still pretty common.
A second example concerns continental drift. Even until the 1960s there was no real acceptance of the theory of continental drift or plate tectonics. As soon as fairly accurate coastal maps of the continents became available, various people noted how they looked as though they ought to fit together. Plants and animals on each continent, a number of which are closely related, supported the idea. Some people suggested the Earth was expanding, but this was not hugely difficult to falsify. Others stated that the continents had been pulled apart by gravity, or the force of the Earth’s rotation, or other forces.
Alfred Wegener came up with the idea of ‘continental drift’, and provided some evidence that it had occurred. But because he couldn’t explain how it had occurred, it remained a hypothesis not widely accepted. But people kept at it, evidence accumulated, and eventually there was enough physical knowledge of the continents and the discovery of oceanic crust and the churning of the mantle gave a workable explanation.
So it’s not as though lone geniuses came up with any of this. They worked hard, came up with evidence that meshed with other independent findings, and eventually their findings were accepted. But if they hadn’t had enough high quality evidence – if their findings had never agreed with the findings of others – then they wouldn’t have been accepted.
The book also takes some potshots at horrible localizationalists and their insistence that specific regions of the brain perform particular functions and goes on about how contrary to their dogmatic beliefs, the brain isn’t a machine or a computer. It’s something of a strawman. While there have certainly been a large number of people who have rejected brain plasticity up until recently, as Doige goes through the book he keeps providing accounts of a lot of scientists, including some of the giants of neuroscience like Wilder Penfield and Donald Hebb, who didn’t take that view. And he ignores some of the things he himself presents which show that under normal conditions there are local functional regions common to all humans, and that after childhood brains become comparatively hardwired.
He also seems to tell a lot of his stories starting in the 50s and 60s, and rarely talks about anything later than the early 90s. Given the book was written in 2007 this is a bit strange. The book’s thesis is that the brain is this great changeable organ, but this view is not really disputed among modern neuroscientists. He keeps taking swings at the ideas of decades past while presenting his scientists as modern-day mavericks, and it’s a bit strange to read.
The book’s set as a series of amazing vignettes showing the miraculous theories and inventions of various scientists, which is also not guaranteed to win my affections. Nor is the NYT blurb ‘the power of positive thinking finally gains scientific credibility’, the parsing of which would take me another post.
All that being said. If you can ignore the author getting in the way of the book, and the emotionally-tinged anecdotes, it’s actually a pretty interesting look at people working with brain plasticity and how it can be used to help people with cognitive of sensory problems.
But there’s better popular science writing out there, much of it written by actual scientists.
So. Of all the pseudoscientific nonsense out there (and there’s a LOT), homeopathy bothers me more than any other I can think of offhand. I’m not entirely sure why, but I think it’s because homeopathy lacks even the prima facie sort of plausibility possessed by modalities like acupuncture or chiropractic.
The background for homeopathy has been covered much more expertly elsewhere, so I’ll just give a quick summary. Back in the 1800s, a doctor named Samuel Hahnemann took a bit of quinine (used as treatment for malaria). It’s also poisonous, and when he took it he felt it induced symptoms similar to those of malaria. He decided that things which cure someone who is sick will create the symptoms of that illness in a healthy individual. This is the ‘like cures like’ concept of homeopathy, that by giving substances to healthy persons and noting how they feel, you can use those substances to cure those symptoms in a sick individual.
Note that this isn’t like vaccination – you aren’t acclimatizing their system or provoking an immune response so your body will recognize a virus later. It’s literally supposed to be curative.
There’s another principle. Hahnemann noticed that when he gave substances to his patients (like arsenic, for example) they ended up healthier when the substance was more dilute. This makes some sense – after all, you’ll be much healthier if you consume almost pure water or a sugar pill than if you consume arsenic or quinine (unless in the latter case you have malaria). Thus the second principle – dilution. Homeopathic ‘medicines’ are typically diluted to 20-30C, each C standing for a 1-in-10 dilution. So take 1mL of a 10mL solution, mix it with 9mL of pure water, and repeat 19-29 more times.
Now, a dilution of 10-23 or so will have about one molecule of the original substance in one mole of the solution (so 1 molecule per 16 grams) of water. It gets much less likely that you’ll find a single molecule of the original substance for every ‘to the minus’ that you go. So at 10-30 you’d have to drink oceans and oceans of a homeopathic solution to actually consume a single molecule of whatever substance was originally there.
Thus. We have a medical principle (like cures like) that’s not actually true, and a technical principle (of increasing potency with increasing dilution) that doesn’t actually make sense.
The key part I’ve left out? Succussion. Hahnemann said it would only work if you shook/tapped the substance between dilutions. He recommended a certain number of taps on the cover of a bible, to ‘potentize’ the substance. It won’t work otherwise, you see.
Homeopathy isn’t naturopathy (which I have my own problems with). It isn’t herbalism. It’s nonsensical magic that ought to be transparently useless at first glance.
I’ll leave you with the video below, and if you want more information I suggest the ‘Homeopathy’ category at Science-Based Medicine.
Every once in a while, whilst looking up papers on PubMed, you come across the strangest things. Sometimes it’s an article title, or the article itself.
Sometimes it’s the journal.
I just found that J Relig Health (Journal of Religion and Health) is listed on Medline when I found the article “Finding a way back home: a spirituality of exile after Hurricane Katrina.” For fun, here’s the abstract:
“Three years ago breath took the form of Hurricane Katrina and passed through our bodies and our lives, leaving us forever changed. We all breathed her, but for those of us living on the Gulf Coast our encounter with Katrina was more intimate, our breathing more conscious, our memory more charged, our lives forever changed. My story takes me from the winds of Hurricane Katrina blasting through the Gulf Coast, through the tube of a machine that helped keep my son’s lung expanded, through the Sinai dessert and the valley of the dry bones, through the in-between spaces of grounded groundlessness, to the forests and rivers of the Berskhire Mountains, where I have relocated and started my life over. My spiritual journey “home” is a dynamic story of Earth, wind, fire, water, flesh, and Spirit.”
Yeah, that’s just the sort of hard science we need. Not saying stories like this don’t have their place, but that place is not the NIH or Library of Medicine. Mind you, they also list Medical Hypotheses.
