"No" to neuroscience

"The Problem with the Neuroscience Backlash"

by

Gary Marcus

June 19th, 2013

The New Yorker

Aristotle thought that the function of the brain was to cool the blood. That seems ludicrous now; through neuroscience, we know more about the brain and how it works than ever before. But, over the past several years, enthusiasm has often outstripped the limits of what current science can really tell us, and the field has given rise to pop neuroscience, which attempts to explain practically everything about human behavior and culture through the brain and its functions.

A backlash against pop neuroscience is now in full swing. The latest, and most cutting, critique yet is “Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience,” by Sally Satel and Scott Lilienfeld. The book, which slams dozens of inconclusive studies that have been spun into overblown and downright dubious fields, like neurolaw and neuromarketing, is a resounding call for skepticism of the most grandiose claims being made in the name of neuroscience. The authors describe it as “an exposé of mindless neuroscience: the oversimplification, interpretive license, and premature application of brain science in the legal, commercial, clinical, and philosophical domains." The book does a terrific job of explaining where and how savvy readers should be skeptical.

Unfortunately, the book is also prone to being misread. This is partly because it focusses largely on neuroscience’s current limitations rather than on its progress. Some, like David Brooks in the New York Times, are using books like “Brainwashed” as an excuse to toss out neuroscience altogether. In Brooks’s view, Satel and Lilienfeld haven’t just exposed some bad neuroscience; they’ve gutted the entire field, leading to the radical conclusion that “the brain is not the mind.” Brooks goes so far as to suggest that “it is probably impossible to look at a map of brain activity and predict or even understand the emotions, reactions, hopes and desires of the mind,” and that “there appears to be no dispersed pattern of activation that we can look at and say, ‘That person is experiencing hatred.’ ” The core of his claim is the idea that, if activity is distributed throughout the brain, it cannot be understood or interpreted.

But that claim is simply false. Just because a given activity or response is spread across the brain—involving many different regions rather just a single section—does not mean it is beyond understanding. It just means we need to work harder to discern its underlying principles. And already, in 2013, using tools that will seem antiquated in a decade, there has been considerable progress in accurately imaging the brain as a way to peek into the workings of the mind. Last summer, for example, Jack Gallant, at U.C. Berkeley, reported a study in which people watched movies while having their brain scanned. After the data was collected, Gallant’s team used complex mathematical techniques to analyze the brain scans. There was no single spot that lit up when people were watching a car chase as opposed to a conversation, but, by looking at the ensemble of brain activity, Gallant’s group at Berkeley could easily distinguish between the two. Over all, they were able to reconstruct, with surprising accuracy, which parts of the movie people were watching at a given time, based on analyses of the patterns of activity displayed across their entire brain.

It is reasonable to think, based on current research, that no single spot of the brain maps to hatred. But there is no principled reason to think that we will never be able to find some neural pattern, or set of patterns, that correspond to that emotion. Another group, in Europe, recently started to analyze emotion using techniques similar to Gallant’s; they found that it may be “possible to discriminate between healthy and depressed individuals based on differences in brain-wide responses to emotional cues.” A soon-to-be-published paper from Carnegie Mellon similarly suggests that emotions can be discerned using complex, whole-brain analyses.

In the current backlash again brain science, it is important to realize that neuroimaging is just one of many tools used in neuroscience. Equally important is the fact that it is widely viewed as rudimentary in its current state—the equivalent of a one-megapixel camera when we are striving to build a gigapixel camera. It seems all but certain that we will continue to understand the brain better as technology allows us to zoom in tighter, with greater precision.

But the idea that the mind is separate from the brain no longer makes sense. They are simply different ways of describing the same thing. To talk about the brain is to talk about physiology, neurons, receptors, and neurotransmitters; to talk about the mind is to talk about thoughts, ideas, beliefs, emotions, and desires. As an old and elegant phrase puts it, “The mind is what the brain does.”

The worst possibility of a full-scale, reckless backlash against neuroscience, to the exclusion of the field’s best work, is that it might sacrifice important insights that could reshape psychiatry and medicine. A colleague at N.Y.U., the neuroscientist Elizabeth Phelps, wrote in an e-mail: “It would be ridiculous to suggest that we shouldn’t use brain science to help in the treatment/diagnosis of mental disorders, but if one takes the [current backlash] to the extreme, that is the logical conclusion.”

If critics are too pessimistic about what the future holds, they are right about one thing: over the past decade, neuroscience has become overprivileged as a method of examining the mind. Journalists, courts, and sometimes even scientists seem to believe that a brain scan can be more telling than a profile of an individual’s behavior. Perhaps as neuroscience progresses, it is possible for objective, physiological assessment of the brain to win out as the ultimate arbiter of truth when it comes to the mind. But that’s a long way off, if it ever will be possible at all. For now, we still need fields like psychology and psychiatry, which take the mind as their starting point, rather than the brain, to complement neuroscience. The basic elements of psychology, like beliefs, desires, goals, and thoughts, will likely always play a key role in our understanding of human behavior, which is why science needs researchers who study the mind every bit as much as it needs researchers who study the brain. Our aim should not be to pick the brain over the mind, or vice versa, but to build stronger bridges between our understandings of the two.

“Cups and Balls” magic trick

"Neuroscientists determine famous trick's surprising ability to manipulate audiences"

by

Charles Q. Choi

February 12th, 2013

Inside Science

Scientists analyzing how magicians Penn & Teller perform one of the oldest known illusions now reveal that some aspects of the magic trick are even more effective at manipulating audiences than the magicians predicted.

These findings not only shed light on basic processes such as cognition, but could help advance the art of magic, researchers suggested.

In recent years, neuroscientists have increasingly been analyzing magicians' performances to gain insights on the human mind.

"We realized that magicians were among the best people at manipulating attention and awareness, far better than scientists," said cognitive neuroscientist Stephen Macknik, director of the laboratory of behavioral neurobiology at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Ariz. "So we've been poaching their techniques, bringing them back to the labs to increase our rate of discovery."

The latest magic trick Macknik and his colleagues investigated is the classic cups and balls illusion. Examples ascribed to ancient Roman conjurers date back to 3 B.C., and some claim it goes back further to ancient Egypt.

The illusion nowadays commonly involves three upside-down cups and three balls, Magicians can make the balls seemingly jump from cup to cup, disappear from one cup and appear in another, turn into other items and so on. (The modern swindler's version is the shell game.)

The balls in the illusion are typically brightly colored, while the cups are usually opaque. Penn & Teller practice a version with three opaque and then three transparent cups.

"It's a great act, and the trick still works even with transparent cups, because they're just that good —  people still can't follow all the movements and see how the trick is done," Macknik said.

"I've seen them do this trick for more than 20 years," said vision scientist Flip Phillips at Skidmore College, in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. "The best part of the whole routine is that, despite the fact that they are telling you what they are doing — they're showing you what they're doing — you're still amazed because you just can't fight the deception."

Teller devised this variation while fiddling with an empty water glass and wadded-up paper napkins for balls at a Midwestern diner. He turned the glass upside down and put a paper ball on top, then tilted the glass so that the ball fell into his other hand. The falling ball was so compelling that it drew his own attention away from his other hand, which was deftly and secretly loading a second ball under the glass. Teller found that the sleight happened so quickly he himself did not realize he had loaded the cup. He surmised he missed it because the falling ball captured his attention.

In the experiments, the volunteers reported when they saw balls get removed from, or placed under, cups by pressing buttons. The researchers also used cameras pointed at the eyes of the volunteers to track their gazes.

The researchers found that while the falling ball did draw audience attention, other aspects of the trick were actually stronger at making the illusion work. For instance, audiences were fooled more often when the magician attempted to drop a ball that was stuck to a cup.

"A lot of times the intuitions we have about the way things work aren't the way things work," said Phillips, who did not take part in this research. "This isn't to put down Teller — Teller's intuition is good. There is research we did on a famous sleight of hand known as the French drop where Teller's intuition on how to sell the trick is perfectly correct."
In addition, magicians often say that success with illusions depends on how well they can use gazes and faces to manipulate where audiences look, Macknik explained. The researchers tested this idea by hiding Teller's face on the video clips with a black rectangle, and found doing so apparently did not affect the illusion.

"We're showing a discovery that magicians missed because they relied on their intuition, and their intuition was wrong," Macknik said.

These findings support recent studies, including one from Macknik and his colleagues, which hinted that the facial expressions and other social cues magicians think are crucial to illusions may not actually be essential.

"A huge amount of training in magic is that social cues matter," Macknik said. "We're starting to wonder if social cues help with any magic tricks. Future research is warranted to look at the effects of social cues in illusions … we'd like to see an effect where they really matter."

These new findings shed light on how and by how much people can be misdirected, which could help magicians improve their art.

Macknik and his colleagues Hector Rieiro and Susana Martinez-Conde detailed their findings online Feb. 12 in the inaugural issue of the journal PeerJ .

How it is done...

[Charles Q. Choi is a freelance science writer based in New York City who has written for The New York Times, Scientific American, Wired, Science, Nature, and many other news outlets.]

"Freewill/determinism" poll

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Freewill...1
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Undecided...1

Might want to be careful here. This dilemma has been around for a long time and I have supported the "freewill" notion. However, current neuroscience is offering a different approach--that we are a product of neurons' activities. This is hard to accept. If true, then the concept of freewill appears to be dead. If it is true, then all humans must be absolved of responsibility. [I would like to see a lawyer argue for that position.] It also casts doubts on the cognitive process.