Archive for April, 2007

Apr 12 2007

Friday 13th Is Always Unlucky, Except When It Isn’t

Happy Friday 13th, a non-event if ever there were one. For some time this pseudo-holiday has served, if nothing else, as an adequate excuse for skeptics to remind everyone that superstitions are silly – the hobgoblins of little minds. So before you run off to your Friday 13th Superstition Bash to break some mirrors and walk under ladders, let’s take a closer look at the neuropsychological nature of superstitions.

Superstitions are basically a belief in a magical cause and effect relationship between something we do, or fail to do, and a future good or bad outcome. Wish an actor “good luck” and you will magically jinx them into having a bad performance. But belief in magic is not what creates superstitious beliefs – the beliefs are created by a combination of psychological needs and mental sloppiness. Magic is invoked after the fact as an all-purpose fix to explain our seemingly impossible conclusions.

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Apr 12 2007

Abnormal Neural Networks in Autism and Fragile X

Published by under Neuroscience

New research is shedding light on exactly what is wrong with the brains of people with several genetic disorders that lead to mental retardation – Down syndrome (a chromosomal abnormality where there are three copies of chromosome 21 instead of the usual two), Fragile X (a mutation of the Fmr1 gene on the X-chromosome) and certain types of autism. The problem seems to be in the way new connections, or synapses, are made.

Daniel Madison, PhD, associate professor of molecular and cellular physiology at Stanford University School of Medicine, and his colleagues have been looking at the connections that brain neurons make with each other. These synapses are largely responsible for the “hardwiring” of the brain, the pattern of information processing that results in memories and mental function. They looked at the brains of Fmr1 mosaic mice (so some neurons are normal and some contain the Fmr1 mutation), and discovered that affected neurons were less likely to form new synapses with other neurons.

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Apr 11 2007

Hugh Ross’s Testable Creation Model

Published by under Creationism/ID

Hugh Ross is an old-earth creationist – so he thinks the earth is billions of years old, but God created all life and evolution is bunk. He is desperately trying to paint his version of creationism in a scientific light, but despite the fact that he has a PhD in astronomy, he demonstrates a dramatic and fatal lack of understanding of science. His latest attempt at dressing up creation as science is to frame it as a “testable model,” but all he succeeds in doing is demonstrating his lack of understanding of what “testable” means in the context of science. But he does offer a good example to illustrate this important point.

The most damning criticism of so-called creation science and intelligent design theory is that they are not scientific theories. This fact has been central in denying creationism access to public science classrooms, and so apologists like Hugh Ross are trying to rectify this. In the past their attempts at fooling judges informed by real scientists have all failed, and this new strategy will fail also. They fail for a simple reason – they are wrong, and when you are wrong it’s impossible to formulate a sound argument to defend yourself. A sound argument (with factually correct premises and valid logic) cannot lead to a false conclusion, so creationists must employ false premises and/or invalid logic. They have no choice (unless of course they wish to abandon creationism and embrace evolution).

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Apr 09 2007

Teaching Science to the Public

A recent editorial by Matthew Nisbet and Chris Mooney in the journal Science has sparked an interesting conversation within the science community and the science blogosphere. In the article, Framing Science, Matt and Chris argue that scientists, when communicating to the public, need to put less emphasis on technical details and more emphasis on creating an emotional and political framework into which to conceptually place the topic. Their article has garnered strong criticism and defense, and is a revealing peak at the world of science reporting. Of course I have to weigh in on all this.

Reading the various blog posts on this topic I had the feeling that some bloggers were talking past each other – actually addressing different points. What I will try to do in my blog today is to separate out the various points and try to find the common ground and areas of disagreement.

First let me “frame” the debate. What Matt and Chris are talking about is that scientists need to think about what story they are trying to tell the public, and then craft their message to emphasize that story – rather than get bogged down in dry details, facts, and jargon. Critics argue that they are catering to culture and the media and rather scientists should stand firm in defense of truth and accuracy.

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Apr 06 2007

All Natural Arsenic

The naturalistic fallacy – the notion that all things natural are good (and therefore the unnatural must be bad) is pervasive in our culture, and quite dangerous when applied to medicine. In the context of food and medicine an unhealthy reverence for nature takes the form of assuming that something which is natural must be magically safe and effective. Of course, nature does not care about us and it is more often toxic and deadly than helpful.

In the US the word “natural” is used as a marketing ploy to convey a sense that a product is good and wholesome. This is combined with a terribly unscientific scheme for categorizing foods vs drugs vs supplements and regulating health claims about them. The end result is that the public is being sold many drugs as if they were vitamins, and worse the drugs are largely unknown, unstudied, not purified, may contain contaminants, and have highly variable doses of whatever happens to be in them. Even worse, just about any health claim can be made for these nostrums as long as the company is slightly careful about their wording (really, all they have to do is avoid making specific disease claims – a trivial obstacle for any marketing executive worth his salt).

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Apr 05 2007

The Foibles of Human Memory

To put it bluntly, human memory stinks. Well, everything is relative, so let me clarify – it works fine, even quite well, for the purposes for which it evolved. However, now we humans are trying to survive for 80+ years in a complicated technological civilization with brains that evolved on the savanna and are designed to work for maybe 40 years.

Our memories work well for some things. Memory is largely based on pattern recognition, and this remains our cognitive strong point. We remember patterns well, we can see correlations between different patterns, we can see underlying meaning in patterns. However, this also biases our memory. We tend to anchor our memories to meaningful patterns – and this helps us remember and also we tend to remember the important stuff and forget the not-so-important stuff.

But the flip side of this is that we are not very good at remembering details. The details of our memories tend to fade, even when the big picture remains. Worse, the details change to suit the patterns we think we remember. In other words, we remember well the emotions of an event, the significance it has in our lives, and the meaning we attach to it. The little details then morph over time to enhance the emotion, significance, and meaning of our memory of the event. We even make up new details as necessary.

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Apr 04 2007

Read This Blog…Read This Blog…

One of my favorite old SNL skits was a commercial for a stage hypnotist featuring numerous people all droning in monotone, I loved it, it was much better than Cats. Im going to see it again and again. The humor, of course, lies in the fact that hypnotism does not really work that way. But what is hypnotism?

This remains a tricky question. We know what it isnt. Hypnotists do not put people into a trance or altered state of consciousness. When someone is hypnotized they are awake and their brains appear to be functioning normally (despite the youre getting sleeeepy.. cliche).

Being hypnotized seems to be linked to suggestion. Psychological experiments show that humans in general have a measurable degree of susceptibility to suggestion. Our thoughts and memories can be influenced by having facts, words, or claims suggested to us even if we are not consciously aware of the suggestions. For example, numerous experiments have shown the following: expose a group of subjects to an event (in writing, in video, or even live in front of them), then ask them a series of questions about the event. The details of their recollection can be statistically influenced by making subtle suggestions such as asking what she was wearing; suggesting that a cloaked person whose sex was not apparent was in fact female. In lectures I often show the audience a list of words and ask them to remember them, then I show them words one at a time and they are asked to raise their hands if they remember the word. Words that are related to (suggested by) the original list of words but were not on that list are included and most people report remembering seeing that word, and some even say they can visualize the word on the list.

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Apr 03 2007

The Fantasy Prone Personality

I lead a rich fantasy life. I love science fiction and fantasy books and movies (current favorite show: Battlestar Galactica – really, if you like SciFi and have not seen it, check it out). I have even written fantasy role-playing supplements. I have always been able to withdraw “inside my head” and just weave a compelling fantasy to pass the time. My favorite sciences have always been paleontology and astronomy – I think because through both I was able to mentally transport myself to a completely alien and exotic time and place. And yet, despite all this, I have also made it a lifelong endeavor to make the line between fantasy and reality razor sharp and crystal clear. The same is not true, apparently, for all members of my own species.

In 1981 Wilson and Barber first identified what they called a fantasy-prone personality (FPP) type (this work actually extended from Josephine Hilgard’s observations of people who were very susceptible to hypnosis). These are people who not only lead a rich fantasy life but seem to blur the lines between fantasy and reality. They identify 14 characteristics of fantasy proneness: (1) being an excellent hypnotic subject, (2) having imaginary playmates as a child, (3) fantasizing frequently as a child, (4) adopting a fantasy identity, (5) experiencing imagined sensations as real, (6) having vivid sensory perceptions, (7) reliving past experiences, (8) claiming psychic powers, (9) having out-of-body or floating experiences, (10) receiving poems, messages, etc., from spirits, higher intelligences, and the like, (11) being involved in “healing,” (12) encountering apparitions, (13) experiencing hypnagogic hallucinations (waking dreams), and (14) seeing classical hypnagogic imagery (such as spirits or monsters from outer space).
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Apr 02 2007

Born Believers

There are times when I am discussing the paranormal with a believer that I am struck by the vastness of difference between us. I do honestly try to grasp for the common ground – facts that are in evidence, undeniable logic, or some things which seem to me to be part of the universal human condition. But sometimes I fail – what I think should be common ground crumbles like dust beneath my feet. It is as if we are trying to grapple with brains that have fundamental functional differences, that construct the world in such different ways they simply cannot understand each other.

This question has fascinated me – was I born skeptical? Are true believers born true believers? Do their brains actually work differently than mine? Perhaps a “logic circuit” is absent, or else that part of the brain that needs to believe overwhelms all else. Or is it all culture and experience? Could a bit of training in critical thinking drop the scales from their eyes and make them see reason?

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