Plasticity and Popular Science
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.
