SilverJacket

Remember Sally

Everything I need to know about the internets I learned from Gabe and Max.

After using the program advertised above, though, I still had one burning question: "Exactly how many internets are there? Which one works best with Binary?" I guess that's two.

Anywho, Gabe and Max were nice enough to provide an answer: five.

Thanks, Gabe and Max!

What's a Battle?*

Today I scheduled interviews for three internship applicants. Three out of three emailed me to ask where our office is.

Seriously? The address on the front page of our Web site. I almost want to not respond and use it as a test for admission. But I can't because these are the cream of the crop. If people with Ivy League credentials and graduate degrees in journalism  don't have the reporting skills to check psychologytoday.com for Psychology Today's street address, how can I expect them to do any kind of research that goes beyond--or even is limited to--Googling stuff? A bit of initiative and resourcefulness, people!

Seriously, I fear not only for my office productivity, but also for the future of journalism and thus democracy itself.

Please tell me I'm overreacting.

*

Neurorealism

If a thought happens in a forest of neural dendrites, and no one is there to measure it, did you really think it? That's the premise of neurorealism--the bias towards believing that psychological phenomena aren't really real unless we have neuroscientific data to prove it. Further, the data can be used to make false claims appear real too--especially using the most seductive kind of brain data, neuroimages.

You can read more about it here in my story for the New York Times Magazine's 2007 Year in Ideas issue, published today.

The timing couldn't have been better. As I was writing it, a group of scientists published an op-ed in the Times titled "This Is Your Brain on Politics" that drew a scathing letter to the editor three days later co-signed by 17 eminent researchers in the field (including Anthony Wagner, in whose neuroimaging lab I worked from 2000-2002), as well as plenty of other bad press.

And last week, the neuropsychologist Daniel Amen, who makes commercial use of SPECT, published an op-ed in the LA Times arguing that we should scan the brains of all potential presidents so we can spot the types of "brain pathology" that would make one forget like Reagan, philander like Clinton, or flub words like Bush. He advocates the technique (and practically demands that the People employ his clinics) essentially as a form of Lite-Brite phrenology. His hyping of a reductionistic approach and of its political application embodies three related terms that Racine articulates in his paper: neurorealim (see above), combined with neuroessentialism* (the belief that your brain defines you as a person), deployed together to push policy changes (neuropolicy.)

On a lighter note, I considered titling the piece Crockusology, after the elusive Dr. Alfred Crockus. The tale, in brief: Since 2003, a man named Dan Hodgins has been claiming in lectures to educators and parents  that a part of the brain called the crockus is four times larger in boys, supposedly explaining why "Girls see the details of experiences... Boys see the whole but not the details." In response to some questioning by prominent linguist and blogger Mark Liberman in September after one incredulous woman brought the apocryphal lump of grey matter to Liberman's attention, Hodgins further explained that "The Crockus was actually just recently named by Dr. Alfred Crockus. It is the detailed section of the brain [sic], a part of the frontal lope [sic]." The doctor and the brain area are all a big crock, but Hodgins has responded to various email inquiries with laughably vague and incorrect elaborations. This presenter's use of PowerPoint slides with pretty pictures to pilot pedagogy perhaps profiles all of Racine's terms even more prominently that the president-pestering psychologist in the newspaper piece. You can follow the gripping case history in full at Language Log.

Of course adding schematics and jargon can make any type of scientific explanation appear more valid, but they may be most potent in studies of the mind, as people have more confidence in tangible reality than in subjective accounts of experience.

Sources for the NYTM article:
-Dave McCabe et al.'s in press Cognition paper "Seeing is believing: The effect of brain images on judgments of scientific reasoning" (pdf)
-Deena Weisberg et al.'s 2008 Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience paper "The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations" (pdf)
-Eric Racine et al.'s 2005 Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper "fMRI in the public eye" (html, pdf)
-Joe Dumit (whose course "Brains and Culture" I took at MIT) was cut from the piece for space reasons, but he has a book titled "Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity" and participated in a 2005 AAAS meeting session titled "Brain Imaging and the 'Cognitive Paparazzi': Viewing Snapshots of Mental Life Out of Context."
*Adina Roskies may have been the first to use the term "neuroessientialism," in a 2002 Neuron paper, "Neuroethics for the New Millenium." (pdf). At least a third independent coining popped up last year on Mind Hacks.

Is Science Over Yet?

This week I spotted the above image on newsweek.com. For a couple of terrifying seconds I thought the fuzzy bulbous thing on the left was the back of a baby's head with a fleshy antenna growing out of the top. Yikes. New DNA indeed.

Tales of Heartbreak, Vol. 1

Three months ago I went out on a date with a woman I'll call Redacted. She's a sweet gal, and pretty, and we had a pleasant two-hour conversation. But there were no sparks. Afterwards she sent me an email:

hey,

thanks again for meeting up with me last night, i had a great time.  :)   and got some studying done afterwards.  :)

redacted

And I replied:

Hey Red,

Thanks for coming all the way outside to hang out. It's fun out here, isn't it?

m

(I was teasing her because she claims she never goes outside anymore thanks to med school; she even lives in housing attached to the hospital.) To me, the simple exchange didn't indicate any interest in continuing the correspondence on either of our parts. I thought that was that and I forgot about her.

But three weeks later, she writes me the following:

hey matt,

i'm sorry for not getting back to you sooner - i had a huge test last friday and it basically took up my life.  but i was glad to meet you for drinks and experience the Real World.  :)

anyways... a while ago a longtime friend of mine told me he had feelings for me and i decided a couple days ago to see where it could go...  would you want to still be friends?  (i understand completely if you don't!)

i hope you're well,
redacted

Um, what? At that point, being friends would have been a step UP in intimacy.

But seriously, how adorable. I told her no worries and good luck with your budding romance.

Then I curled up in bed and cried myself to sleep.