Neurobonkers.com

What does synaesthesia feel like? [video]

Neurobonkers — Thu, 10 May 2012 12:09:01 +0000

Synaesthesia is a peculiar neurological condition in which the senses are interlinked in unusual and mind bending ways, the genuineness of the condition has been verified by concrete clinical studies. Letters, sound and taste can have colours, days of the week can have personalities, textures can have smells, the list goes on (see below). It’s a phenomenon that’s easy to describe in simple terms but difficult to fully appreciate. It was only recently discovered that the prevalence of synaesthesia may by 88 times higher than previously assumed. Brain imaging experiments have helped shed light on the cause, with the prevailing explanation of synaesthesia being that we are all born with the neural connections interlinking the different sensory areas of our brain, however in normal development most of these connections are pruned whereas synaesthetes maintain the connections. The animation below, made by a student is the best visual depiction of the phenomenon I’ve seen to date.

The different factors that synaesthesia may affect are:

Letters
Numbers
Days of the week
Months of the year
Food stuffs
Personalities
Sounds, tones and music
Smells
Personal associations – e.g. mother-smell
Taste
Shape

Reference:

Simner J, Mulvenna C, Sagiv N, Tsakanikos E, Witherby SA, Fraser C, Scott K, & Ward J (2006). Synaesthesia: the prevalence of atypical cross-modal experiences. Perception, 35 (8), 1024-33 PMID: 17076063 (PDF)

What is ATL trolling?

Neurobonkers — Sun, 06 May 2012 14:40:49 +0000

Above the line trolling is a term used to describe a troll who writes articles, unlike most trolls who reside in internet chat rooms and “below the line” on article discussions. ATL trolls often write for leading tabloid newspapers.

How do you spot an article written by an ATL troll?
An article written by an ATL troll can easily be spotted by the uproar in the comments section below the article. Articles will often contain little to no factual content, instead articles are based on prejudice, idle speculation and wilful ignorance. The ATL troll relies on a toolbox of logical fallacies including the straw man, the ad hominem attack and a dependence on anecdotal evidence in order to whip the reader in to a frenzy of consternation. Invariably a host of less critically minded folk will take the article at face value typically ensuing in a flame war “below the line”.

Why do ATL trolls exist? Ed: Hint – click over there and I get my pocket money.
Online publishers receive revenue through advertising clicks, a clearly misinformed article can attract hundreds of thousands of visits as readers share the article. The phenomenon can be likened to the rubbernecking effect, in which drivers cause a traffic jam as they slow down to view the wreckage of a car crash.

Where did the term originate?
The above the line / below the line terminology is pinched from the ad business, an above the line troll may also be called an ABL troll.

New paper slams UK media for routinely misrepresenting neuroscience research to further ideological agendas

Neurobonkers — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 11:50:33 +0000

A paper published today in the journal Neuron describes how the mainstream media (specifically the Daily Telegraph, Times, Daily Mail, Sun, Mirror and the Guardian) have tackled the topic of neuroscience over the past decade. The paper is a damning indictment of how the press use neuroscience as a tool with which to “portray themselves as dispassionate” whilst preaching their trademark prejudices. The paper describes how the Telegraph used research to wrongly “assert that productive female participation in both the labor market and family life is neurobiologically impossible”, while the Daily Mail miscellaneously linked “women to irrationality” (amongst countless other crimes) and the Times absurdly squealed “are gays dopamine junkies?”. The paper lists a labyrinth of logical fallacies which the media use to misrepresent neuroscience, repeatedly highlighting a tendency for:

“overextensions of research, with implications drawn far outside the original research context. This overextrapolation of research was not limited to idle speculation but sometimes extended to calls for concrete applications.”

The paper assessed the contents of nearly 3,000 articles involving neuroscience over the past decade to see which topics came up most. It’s not hard to see how the data is skewed by the media’s recent obsessions such as fish oil and narcotics. I’ve tossed the figures in to Manyeyes to make the information a little easier to digest:

Subjects Addressed within Media Coverage of Neuroscience
(2000-2010)

The paper concludes that the media has used neuroscience research “applied out of context to create dramatic headlines, push thinly disguised ideological arguments, or support particular policy agendas”. Fighting this tidal wave is the precise reason that I started this blog. For regular readers none of this will come as a surprise. I’ve previously described how the media has misrepresented everything from social networking and love to vaccination, drugs, and cognitive enhancement. I must admit that I find this issue so distressing that I have been left with the unfortunate tenancy to generally rant on the topic uncontrollably.

If you wish to receive updates on my debunking of popular reporting of neuroscience you can follow me on twitter or using one of the subscription options in the sidebar.

Reference:

O’Connor, C., Rees, G., & Joffe, H. (2012). Neuroscience in the Public Sphere Neuron, 74 (2), 220-226 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2012.04.004 (PDF)

Harvard University To Boycott Extortionate Journal Publishers

Neurobonkers — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 19:23:14 +0000

University libraries have for a long time struggled with the increasingly extortionate fees placed upon them by journal publishers. Many universities can no longer afford to pay journal publishers to access the content their students require. Sadly, until now this has been a closet issue, an issue of “prestige”. In what may prove to be a watershed moment, Harvard University have sent the following memo to all faculty members (emphasis mine), outlining the university’s strategy to deal with this problem which includes gently directing researchers towards open access publishers. This announcement sets a powerful precedent that could prove to be a defining moment in the “Academic Spring”.

Major Periodical Subscriptions Cannot Be Sustained

To: Faculty Members in all Schools, Faculties, and Units
From: The Faculty Advisory Council
Date: April 17, 2012
RE: Periodical Subscriptions

We write to communicate an untenable situation facing the Harvard Library. Many large journal publishers have made the scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive. This situation is exacerbated by efforts of certain publishers (called “providers”) to acquire, bundle, and increase the pricing on journals.

Harvard’s annual cost for journals from these providers now approaches $3.75M. In 2010, the comparable amount accounted for more than 20% of all periodical subscription costs and just under 10% of all collection costs for everything the Library acquires. Some journals cost as much as $40,000 per year, others in the tens of thousands. Prices for online content from two providers have increased by about 145% over the past six years, which far exceeds not only the consumer price index, but also the higher education and the library price indices. These journals therefore claim an ever-increasing share of our overall collection budget. Even though scholarly output continues to grow and publishing can be expensive, profit margins of 35% and more suggest that the prices we must pay do not solely result from an increasing supply of new articles.

The Library has never received anything close to full reimbursement for these expenditures from overhead collected by the University on grant and research funds.

The Faculty Advisory Council to the Library, representing university faculty in all schools and in consultation with the Harvard Library leadership, reached this conclusion: major periodical subscriptions, especially to electronic journals published by historically key providers, cannot be sustained: continuing these subscriptions on their current footing is financially untenable. Doing so would seriously erode collection efforts in many other areas, already compromised.

It is untenable for contracts with at least two major providers to continue on the basis identical with past agreements. Costs are now prohibitive. Moreover, some providers bundle many journals as one subscription, with major, high-use journals bundled in with journals consulted far less frequently. Since the Library now must change its subscriptions and since faculty and graduate students are chief users, please consider the following options open to faculty and students (F) and the Library (L), state other options you think viable, and communicate your views:

1. Make sure that all of your own papers are accessible by submitting them to DASH in accordance with the faculty-initiated open-access policies (F).

2. Consider submitting articles to open-access journals, or to ones that have reasonable, sustainable subscription costs; move prestige to open access (F).

3. If on the editorial board of a journal involved, determine if it can be published as open access material, or independently from publishers that practice pricing described above. If not, consider resigning (F).

4. Contact professional organizations to raise these issues (F).

5. Encourage professional associations to take control of scholarly literature in their field or shift the management of their e-journals to library-friendly organizations (F).

6. Encourage colleagues to consider and to discuss these or other options (F).

7. Sign contracts that unbundle subscriptions and concentrate on higher-use journals (L).

8. Move journals to a sustainable pay per use system, (L).

9. Insist on subscription contracts in which the terms can be made public (L).

The memo coyly avoids specifying exactly who the “major providers” to be abandoned are, but I think we can make an educated guess at one of them.

CISPA Could Become Law This MONDAY. World, this affects you.

Neurobonkers — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 09:26:57 +0000

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) is so unlimited in scope that all the proposed new powers of censorship that led to SOPA’s mass response are likely to be brought in to law. CISPA simply makes the terms vaguer than SOPA and gives more rights to huge cooperations over individuals. Morover, CISPA throws the net far wider, effectively ending the internet as we know it. The bill is currently being bulldozed through Congress with the final vote on Monday.

Take action:

Deactivate your Facebook account immediately: Facebook are supporting the bill. As of today facebook.com/neurobonkers is going dark until further notice. (Followers please swap to other forms of subscription – see the side bar).
US citizens: Contact your representative in Congress.
Join over half a million people and sign the Avaas petition.
Publicly announce that you are withdrawing from business with companies giving expressed support:

AT&T
Boeing
BSA
Business Roundtable
CSC
COMPTEL
CTIA – The Wireless Association
Cyber, Space & Intelligence Association
Edison Electric
EMC
Exelon
Facebook
The Financial Services Roundtable
IBM
Independent Telephone & Telecommunications Alliance
Information Technology Industry Council
Intel
Internet Security Alliance
Lockheed Martin
Microsoft
National Cable & Telecommunications Association
NDIA
Oracle
Symantec
TechAmerica
US Chamber of Commerce
US Telecom – The Broadband Association
Verizon

Eye Tracking: What parts of a CV do recruiters actually look at?

Neurobonkers — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 12:30:53 +0000

A new “study” note the inverted commas, reported by TIME Magazine is making headlines for the claim that recruiters spend an average of “six seconds” on each CV before they decide whether it is worth reading. The researchers suggest that 80% of this time is spent on titles and durations of past jobs and education rather than the actual content of the CV. According to TIME, the researchers give such inspiring tips as “don’t be creative”, “don’t focus on your personal achievements” and “have it professionally made”. That’s funny because that’s precisely the opposite of everything I’ve ever been told, and as TIME notes with no hint of irony:

“The standard thought was that recruiters spent at least several minutes on each CV.”

Before you rush out and start rewriting your CV, you should be aware that this “research” is not published in a journal but is self-published by a company that specialises in writing CV’s. Conveniently, they found that CV’s they’d written had a 60% higher level of “usability”. It’s worth noting that in their day-to-day work the company have been accused of operating a “scam” and being guilty of “fraud“, both over separate issues to this more than a little suspect research. For this reason I wouldn’t take this research the slightest bit seriously but I do think it would be interesting to see this research done properly.

NB: The “researchers” claim this type of study has never been done before. If anyone does know of any such research, give me a shout and I’ll post it here.

The Anti-Vaxxer Cheerleaders Posing A Serious Threat To The Herd

Neurobonkers — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 11:12:33 +0000

The Autism-MMR scandal is the greatest scientific fraud in recent history. Last year the British Medical Journal revealed how Andrew Wakefield secretly worked for a lawyer to build a case to sue the makers of the MMR vaccine. Wakefield falsified a now retracted Lancet report on twelve children that he proposed suffured autism as result of the MMR vaccine. Three of the children weren’t even ever diagnosed with autism and all of the children were recruited through an anti-MMR campaign funded by anti-MMR litigation. In essence the finding was to be predicted through simple statistics, autism is relatively common and all children are supposed to be vaccinated, so it shouldn’t be difficult to find twelve children with autism that were vaccinated.

The link is a classic case of illusory correlation, there is an increase in autism diagnosis that vaguely coincides with the introduction of the MMR vaccine. You could equally say that the increase in autism is a result of the introduction of the Euro, satellites or tetris. There is obviously no evidence for any of these claims but if you single out enough cases then some people will be convinced. The risk of illusory correlation is real now more than ever with the recent CDC report that 1 in 88 children (1 in 54 boys) have autism. According to the US National Institute of Mental Health (emphasis mine):

“The increase reported by the CDC might mean we are better at detecting children who meet criteria for ASD, but potentially we still are only halfway to the actual prevalence in the general population… Total population epidemiological studies suggest much or all of the increase is due to better and wider detection.”

US NIMH

Worryingly however the US NIMH report goes on to state:

“Studies of administrative and services data suggest that better detection cannot fully explain the profound and continuing increase… Our working assumption is that there are both more children affected and more detected.”

This brings us back to the table regarding possible factors contributing to the possible rise in autism but we are certainly not to back to square one. There is possibly a real increase in autism prevalence, there is still however no evidence that the MMR jab is responsible. I repeat, there is no evidence that the MMR jab is responsible. Just to clarify, twenty separate studies have demonstrated that there is no evidence for a link between vaccines and autism. There is no evidence to the contrary, not a sausage.

Thus far the impact of the misinformation has been mostly limited to Britain, however recently Donald Trump has for some reason taken it upon himself to misinform millions of Americans that vaccines are causing autism:

Trumps misinformed ramblings are reaching millions

Trump has of course provided no evidence for his crackpot claims. Concerned followers typing “MMR Autism” in to Google would be likely to click on one of the top results..

Google's search rankings show different results to different people

Given the demographics that follow a pompous media courting fat-cat like Trump, it seems likely that many of the millions that will have read Trump’s tweets will skip over the BBC and Wikipedia links and land on the Daily Mail’s coverage or worse on to a serious anti-vaxxer crackpot’s site. This risk is heightened by the effect of Google filter bubbles which lead delusional paranoid types to delusional paranoid websites all too keen to profit from their stupidity.

The Daily Mail use SEO to shoot to the top of Google, above the scientific evidence

The Daily Mail does not actually cite any published research, as Ben Goldacre has reported, the “research” was in fact “a poster presentation, at a conference yet to occur, on research not yet completed, by a man with a well-documented track record of announcing research that never subsequently appears in an academic journal”. The Daily Mail remains the world’s most popular and most search engine optimised on-line news source. Trump’s claims have also been paroted by the Daily Mail’s US equivalent Fox News, the “most trusted” news source in America (that thud was the sound of my head hitting my desk) and quack heaven Natural News who line their story with “alternative” cures for everything from swine flu to aging to sell to the suckers who are unfortunate enough to land there.

Quack Central

It would be all too easy for us to say that those who listen to the likes of Trump, Fox, the Daily Mail and the quack brigade over the scientific evidence are liable to suffer through natural selection but there are two reasons we should avoid this stance. Firstly, the victims are children whose parents are being led astray. Secondly, the anti-vaxxers threaten the herd immunity of the whole of our species, causing infection, death and preventing eradication of disease.

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)

The MMR scandal resulted in such a downfall in vaccine uptake that it directly led to a mumps epidemic and a measles endemic in the UK. It’s difficult to calculate the impact of Trump’s ramblings on global health. Trump has over a million followers, many of whom appear to be spreading his message with the added platform of Fox News. If over coming years we see US epidemics of diseases that are now well contained we will know who to blame.

Update: Yesterday a Media Matters study found that in 2011 ABC, CBS, NBC & FOX spent twice as much time covering Donald Trump as they spent on climate change.

References:

Deer B (2011). How the case against the MMR vaccine was fixed. BMJ (Clinical research ed.), 342 PMID: 21209059 (PDF)

Chen W, Landau S, Sham P, & Fombonne E (2004). No evidence for links between autism, MMR and measles virus. Psychological medicine, 34 (3), 543-53 PMID: 15259839

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2012/autism-prevalence-more-affected-or-more-detected.shtml

http://www.who.int/vaccine_safety/topics/mmr/mmr_autism/en/

http://www.niaid.nih.gov/topics/pages/communityimmunity.aspx

Google’s Vision of The Future: Parodied on Film

Neurobonkers — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 10:39:52 +0000

Google this week announced Google Glass (a full four days after April Fools), a new vision of a future where Google augments our reality through a projection on to eyeglasses. Wired have an interesting report, stating that the project is real and promising but also touching on it’s implications.

Google’s concept video can be seen both as a fluffy vision of the future and as something slightly more chilling:

Tom Scott has parodied the concept excellently in a 25 second short:

Lots worth thinking about.

Update (10/04/2012) Three more parody videos have popped up:

/ht @jpspenc

An incorrect correction in the Daily Mail

Neurobonkers — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 13:39:34 +0000

Update 15/05/2012: The PCC have finally replied, helpfully acknowledging that the Daily Mail’s correction was incorrect, yet somehow concluding that the error was “not significantly misleading”, they therefore plan to do nothing about it.

Press Complaints Commission’s decision in the case of

Williams v Daily Mail

The complainant considered that an article, which reported a recent study by the University of Bristol into the effect of CP55940 on the brains of rats, was a breach of Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Code. In addition, the newspaper’s published clarification of 4 April in relation to the article was not sufficient to address his concerns: the content of the statement was in itself inaccurate.

The terms of Clause 1 (Accuracy) state that the press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information. The complainant considered that that the article had inaccurately reported the study, suggesting that it demonstrated a causal link between cannabis use and the development of serious mental illness, when this had not been the study’s aim or outcome.

The study had looked at the effect that CP55940 had on the brains of rats. CP55940, a synthetic cannabinoid analogue of THC, mimicked the effects of naturally occurring THC, which was one of the psychoactive compounds found in cannabis. The study had found that the effect of CP55940 on rats was similar to the cognitive dysfunction seen in schizophrenia patients.

The complainant said it was fundamentally misleading to present a study that looked at the effect of a synthetic cannabinoid on the brains of rats as evidence that cannabis could lead to schizophrenia. The Commission agreed that the article’s reference to researchers “look[ing] in detail at the changes in the brains of cannabis users” had the potential to be misleading. However, it had to have regard for the fact that the article had made clear – including in a headline reference – that the study had been conducted on rats. In addition, the article had included comments from Dr Matt Jones, the lead author of the study, who expressly drew conclusions from the research about the effects of cannabis on the brain of human users. The researchers who conducted the study considered that it had implications for humans; the Commission considered that the newspaper had been entitled to report their conclusions in this regard to its readers.

The main concern for the Commission was that the headline to the piece had gone further and claimed that cannabis can cause schizophrenia. The Commission has previously ruled that headlines should be considered within the context of the article as a whole, as due to space restraints, they can only represent a limited summary of a potentially complex set of facts. However, in this instance, it did not consider that the body to the piece sufficiently clarified or substantiated the headline. The study had not found a causal link between smoking cannabis and the development of schizophrenia. Accordingly, the Commission established a breach of Clause 1 (i) of the Code. The Commission considered that the newspaper’s clarification and amendment to its online article was appropriate. It was satisfied that this course of action was sufficient to remedy the original breach.

The Commission acknowledged the complainant’s position regarding the accuracy of the statement. However, it did not consider that the reference to “the active ingredient in cannabis” could be said to raise a further breach of Clause 1. The study had used CP55940, which the complainant accepted was an artificial compound of THC, an active ingredient in cannabis. Given the artificial compound was used in the study to mimic the effects of THC, the reference to it as the active ingredient in cannabis was not significantly misleading. The Commission accepted that it would have been preferable to refer to the compound as “one of” the active ingredients in cannabis. However, it did not consider that readers would be significantly misled in this regard.

The complainant had raised concerns regarding the article’s reference that rats had been given cannabis “in a similar dose to a person smoking a joint”. The Commission had contacted the author of the study who had made clear that he did not wish to formally pursue the matter. Without the involvement of the researchers behind the study, the Commission was not in a sufficiently informed position to rule on the accuracy, or otherwise, of the dosage claim. In this instance, the Commission declined to make a ruling under the terms of the Code.

Reference No. 114998

Yesterday, the Daily Mail published a “correction” for an article published in October last year. I wrote in January that this is something I didn’t expect ever to see because “the Daily Mail’s editor Paul Dacre also happens to be chairman of the Press Complaints Commission Editors’ Code of Practice Committee”.

The correction issued yesterday

After a protracted six month long campaign to the PCC by two complainants (1) (2), we have finally received a correction and the correction is wrong. The study did not use cannabis or any chemical present in cannabis.

If interactive Prezi fails to load click here.

The article in question won the Daily Mail’s editor Paul Dacre, the Orwellian Prize For Journalistic Misrepresentation, awarded by Oxford Neuroscientist Dorothy Bishop as a result of my nomination above which shows in the clearest possible terms that the correction delivered yesterday is nothing short of a deliberate, unmitigated lie.

I have filed a complaint with the PCC regarding the correction (PDF). I suggest you do the same (it only takes thirty seconds).

Reference:

Kucewicz MT, Tricklebank MD, Bogacz R, & Jones MW (2011). Dysfunctional prefrontal cortical network activity and interactions following cannabinoid receptor activation. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 31 (43), 15560-8 PMID: 22031901 (PDF).

How Britain Castrated The Father of Artificial Intelligence

Neurobonkers — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 09:47:36 +0000

Radiolab have done a fantastic twenty-minute podcast (MP3) on Alan turing, the man who cracked the Enigma – arguably the pinnacle moment leading to the victory of the Allies in the Second Wotld War. While alive, Turing was never thanked or given acknowledgement for his work but instead suffered suffered a tragic, brutal blow in 1952 when he was arrested for homosexuality. The court ordered Turing to be “cured” with massive doses of Estrogen. The untested experiment resulted in Turing suffering a range of humiliating symptoms which if anything, had the opposite of their intended effect, Turing certainly didn’t turn around and decide to stop being homosexual. To put this abuse in context, Estrogen therapy is today used as a part of male-to-female transgender medical procedures (as well as for female contraceptices).

The side effects were not the worst problem from Turing’s perspective. Turing feared that his work would be dismissed by his peers, he was correct. Turing was sacked from his job at GCHQ and barred from discussing his cryptographic work. Turing killed himself two years after his conviction on 8th June 1954.

At the end of last year, the Government was handed a petition for the pardon of Alan Turing with 21,000 signatures. The government declined this February:

“A posthumous pardon was not considered appropriate as Alan Turing was properly convicted of what at the time was a criminal offence. He would have known that his offence was against the law and that he would be prosecuted. It is tragic that Alan Turing was convicted of an offence which now seems both cruel and absurd-particularly poignant given his outstanding contribution to the war effort. However, the law at the time required a prosecution and, as such, long-standing policy has been to accept that such convictions took place and, rather than trying to alter the historical context and to put right what cannot be put right, ensure instead that we never again return to those times”.

Turing’s leaves behind him not only a remarkable legacy in the field of computing but a stark reminder of the just how brutal an authoritarian government can be, let us not forget that.

Join me and 75,000+ others and sign the campaign to block the authoritarian law that will allow the Government to access all our calls, emails and internet browsing history using the methods of China and Iran, blissfully ignoring the election promise to “reverse the rise of the surveillance state”.