Zombie neuroimaging: High-tech phrenology?

Having a conversation with a professor of social psychology the other day concerning the two recent papers about voodoo neuroscience (voodoo neuroscience & snake oil), I was told something like, “At its best neuroimaging can tell us something interesting things about human psychology and the brain, but at its worst its nothing more than high-tech phrenology. I think the best thing it could do however, would be to locate the part of the brain that makes neuroscientists die-hard reductionists and then have it surgically removed”. Interesting food for thought, but only if you like the taste of brains! Material reductionists, however, would have us all believe that we are deluded zombies devoid of any free will and real consciousness anyway, so perhaps they would be happy with brains on the menu after all? For anyone taking offence, remember science is a method not a belief.

Voodoo - Hoochie choochie and the creative spirit

On the topic of Voodoo, there's a salty-looking exhibition just started in London last week entitled Voodoo: Hoochie choochie and the creative spirit. It's on until April, so mooch your vévé feet down to Regent Street...

The exhibition features those artists, writers and musicians who acknowledge the need to reach a heightened or 'altered state' in order to create their work. We look at the mystery of the creative act; not the inexplicable 'spark', aka inspiration, but the fire; the non-doing before the doing, the summoning up of elemental spirits from within, or without, during the preparation of some visual or musical work, some theory or idea. This welling-up or 'possession', this 'fever in the heart of man', this spirit, this spell, might sometimes be referred to as Voodoo.

Image by Leah Gordon

Voodoo Neuroscience

Following up on an older post on the pseudoscientific appeal of neuroscience (Brain imaging: Old snake oil in new bottles?) an article due for publication in Perspectives on Psychological Science demonstrates how numerous brain imaging researchers have been fudging the books to show very strong relationships between personality correlates and specific-brain region activity. Given the already enormous complexity of the cortex, etc. and the intractable difficulty mapping the mind to the brain, it doesn’t help matters when social neuroscientists and the like just conveniently report only the most significant relationships in their studies and ignore the huge bin full of unrelated data they’ve collected.

Such selective reporting, which appears to be rife in social neuroscience according to this new research by Harold Pashler and his team at MIT and the University of California, violates principles of probability and grossly distorts what can be understood about neuropsychology, thereby painting a far brighter and clearer image of personality in the brain than the genuinely muddy picture we really have. Honing in on particular correlations is all well and good in voodoo, which works based on acausal associative principles, but in science this kind of misreporting is just mumbo jumbo. Perhaps neuroscience isn't actually any more scientific than magic, but at least voodoo sticks to its principles!

Thanks to the BPS Research Digest Blog...

Do you do Voodoo?

They are beloved by prestigious journals and the popular press, but many recent social neuroscience studies are profoundly flawed, according to a devastating critique - Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience - in press at Perspectives on Psychological Science (PDF).

The studies in question have tended to claim astonishingly high correlations between localised areas of brain activity and specific psychological measures. For example, in 2003, Naomi Eisenberger at the University of California and her colleagues published a paper purporting to show that levels of self-reported rejection correlated at r=.88 (1.0 would be a perfect correlation) with levels of activity in the anterior cingulate cortex.

According to Hal Pashler and his band of methodological whistle-blowers, if Eisenberg's study and others like it were accurate, this "would be a milestone in understanding of brain-behaviour linkages, full of promise for potential diagnostic and therapeutic spin-offs." Unfortunately, Pashler's group argue that the findings from many of these recent studies are virtually meaningless. (Read more…)

Day of the Dead

Brace yourselves for a night of magic, ancestor veneration, voodoo, visionary art and music, brought to you by those titans of weirdness and bastions of peculiarity - Strange Attractor, Dreamflesh and Liminal Nation. Themed talks on altered states, magic, death and the archaeology of consciousness by Gyrus, Donal Ruane and Dr David Luke, and Voodoo shamanigans by Stephen Grasso. Raagnagrok All Stars will be providing sonic succor and sustenance. Saturday, 1st November, 7pm till late at the Horse Hospital, London. It's likely to sell out so reserve a place, below the flyer, by flying to the place below...

Day of the Dead

Brain imaging: Old snake oil in new bottles?

In a previous post (Brain scan fails to support validity of ESP), I wrote about those clever Harvard neuroscientists who recently published a brain imaging experiment to find cerebral evidence of telepathy, but which produced no significant results and thereby, somehow, finally disproved the existence of ESP by finding nothing at all. This kind of story belies the perceived arbitration over reality given to the big science of prestigious academic institutions, which ends up reported in the media under some kind of magical veneer that those with the best equipment produce the biggest truth. In reality the claims of this research were just bad science - absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and all that – and this is just one (more) myopically conceived experiment and not the last word on the possibility of paranormal information transfer.

The logic of the ESP brain-imaging article is actually something more akin to what scientists call “magical thinking”, supposedly a kind of illogical associative thinking reserved for the mentally ill, the credulous, and the “primitive” (or in fact anyone who believes in the paranormal). The end result is an article setting to out to disqualify magic through science but which is itself actually propped up on more mumbo-jumbo than a voodoo alter, showing that the scientific elite in this case are actually just peddling cheap sideshow magic under the guise of science and using it to try and convince us that magic doesn’t exist. Oh, the irony.

Anyway, resonating nicely with this mini-rant is a paper just published by Deena Skolnick Weisberg (of Yale, incidentally), in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2008, 20:3, 470-477), entitled, The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations. Weisberg conducted a technologically unsophisticated social psychological experiment to show that people will generally assume that explanations supported by neuroscience are true and accurate, regardless of whether the informational content is actually nonsense or not. Meanwhile, ESP no longer officially exists...

The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations

Explanations of psychological phenomena seem to generate more public interest when they contain neuroscientific information. Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation of a psychological phenomenon may interfere with people’s abilities to critically consider the underlying logic of this explanation. We tested this hypothesis by giving naïve adults, students in a neuroscience course, and neuroscience experts brief descriptions of psychological phenomena followed by one of four types of explanation, according to a 2 (good explanation vs. bad explanation) by 2 (without neuroscience vs. with neuroscience) design. Crucially, the neuroscience information was irrelevant to the logic of the explanation, as confirmed by the expert subjects. Subjects in all three groups judged good explanations as more satisfying than bad ones. But subjects in the two non-expert groups additionally judged that explanations with logically irrelevant neuroscience information were more satisfying than explanations without. The neuroscience information had a particularly striking effect on non-experts’ judgements of bad explanations, masking otherwise salient problems in these explanations.