About that PNAS Article: Journalism and Neurosexism

"...to those interested in gender equality there is nothing at all frightening about good science. It is only carelessly done science, or poorly interpreted science, or the neurosexism it feeds, that creates cause for concern."

Cordelia Fine Delusions: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference (Norton 2010), 238.

A couple of days ago the Critical Neuroscience Facebook linked to a splashy article in The Guardian entitled "Male and Female Brains Wired Differently, Scans Reveal". The Independent (hat-tip Cordelia Fine) followed up with an article titled "The Hardwired Difference between Male and Female Brains could explain Why Men are 'better at map reading'". Both articles referred to a recently published academic article appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences under the lofty title "Sex differences in the structural connectome of the human brain". (Hardwired has a rather interesting history as a keyword in neuroscience.)

In the original paper, the authors use a large sample population sufficient to "elucidate sex differences in networks reliably" and from there they segment their sample into three distinct age groups: 8-13 (n= 158 females and 156 males); 13-17 (180 females - 131 males), and, 17-22 (183 females and 141 males). The authors write: "these groups correspond roughly to the developmental stages of childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood" (page 2). Thereafter, the study explored the so-called human connectome of men and women (connectome is a new neuro-culture buzzword which appears historically as a rather new iteration of the old holism vs localism argument that has traditionally plagued the short history of neurology). Using "fiber tractography", the authors describe gender differences via a structural connectome, and thereafter they show many fine illustrations of wiring differences between men and women, and they then provide a series of boilerplate assessments about the ways these differences translate into behavioral practices. I'm always rather surprised by the tin-ear of authors of studies such as these - intuition? really?

Now while the journalists have been very excited to discover that men and women are different and that their brains are different (here comes boilerplate neurosexism), a whole number of rather interesting science studies question arise in the context of this particular paper. I don't want to violate copyright, so I'm not going to copy and paste in Figure 1 from the original paper. But it is a fascinating example of a series of ontological, technological, and statistical translations leading to a 'wiring diagram', i.e. an ostensibly metaphoric image standing in for a series of evidently absent but detectible and determinative differences. These differences in wiring are then cast into normative social frames and categories. Cordelia Fine does a pretty good job in this essay of unpacking those normative claims both in the paper and also in the the subsequent journalism, but there is a great STS paper waiting there also for someone to come along and look at the 'house of cards.' I'm guessing, but I think the real STS story awaits in the difference between functional connectomes and structural connectomes (I stretch but does this not conjure the old debates in anthropology between structuralism and functionalism?!).

Don't ignore that point, but let me add an observation about this paper (I'm thinking aloud here). The authors parcellated with the Deskian atlas using "FreeSurfer" to label the nodes of each subjects' brain into 95 regions of interest, "68 cortical" and "27 subcortical" (a source here). From there, the authors conjectured fiber tracks to the other regions of interest - they say probabilistically! It sounds reasonable. But here is the thing: if the brain differences between women and men are as great as the authors claim, then why do the authors start with a baseline assumption that their 95 regions of interest would be the same between the genders. In other words, why should the authors get to start with a uniform set of regions of interest for both genders, when they have claimed that they show that human brains are allegedly profoundly different. Now I could be mistaken here - the paper is very dense. But to me, the authors appear to have imagined a Platonic ideal brain connectome that is uni-sexed. One has to ask then: could there be 95 different regions of interest that show the brains are more alike then we thought - probabilistically that is! If not, then it would seem that their model doesn't really reflect the one with which they began. 

Like you, I can't wait for the headlines that say - "men and women, different, but not because of their brains."      

The Greatest Unknown Intellectual of the Nineteenth-Century: The Neurophysiologist Emil Du Bois-Reymond

By Gabriel Finkelstein




My book (link)

Gabriel in the archives.

At the most general level my book concerns the intersection of neuroscience, politics, and identity. It does this by analyzing the career of Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818-1896), a physiologist best remembered for his profound and controversial essays and for his mechanistic view of life. Du Bois-Reymond wanted to eliminate all reference to vital forces in biology; to this end he virtually created the modern discipline of electrophysiology. His innovations in this field earned him widespread respect, and ultimately he was awarded a number of prestigious academic positions and a leading role in the direction of German medical education.

Past Monisms

The organs of special sense are adapted to cause the experiences that come to us through their mediation to appear externalized. Recent experiments show that a person who wears glasses so adjusted as to invert the field of vision will soon come to see the world as before, right side up, proving that the conception of position and relation in space is due to a reaction between the experiences of the various organs of sense and that it is not a direct “intuition.” Experiences which reach consciousness through other channels do not have this peculiarity of external reference and seem to belong more directly to us. This distinction is not a primitive one and to a man born blind who suddenly receives his sight the visible world seems to rest on the eye just as the felt objects rests on the finger tip.

The late C. L. Herrick “Energism: The Fundamental Principles of Dynamic Realism” The Monist (January 1905), pp. 46-84 in The Metaphysics of a Naturalist: Philosophical and Psychological Fragments p. 53

Neuroculture Watch

Apparently psychopathy has become a thing. Read all about it here.

The Future of Illusion

Just because!

Neuroculture Watch

Regular readers will recognize that quoting this call for papers is neither an endorsement nor a critique. We always keep track of  the evolution of "neuro" stuff. Do note how the editors have incomporated neuromania as a reflexive turn. This rhetorical strategy is becoming the new means of circumventing critique.  

Neurofilmology. Film studies and the challenge of neuroscience

 

full name / name of organization:

Cinéma&Cie. International Film Studies Journal

contact email:

adriano.daloia@unicatt.it, submissions.cinemaetcie@gmail.com

Special Issue no. 22
Edited by Adriano D’Aloia and Ruggero Eugeni

Over the last two decades, discoveries made in the field of cognitive neuroscience have begun to permeate the humanities and social sciences. In particular, the philosophical and psychological implications of the function of so-called ‘visuomotor neurons’ have caused a breakthrough in the understanding of the mind-body relation and of phenomena such as human consciousness, empathy, intersubjectivity, affect, and aesthetic response to works of art. This special issue of Cinéma&Cie aims to evaluate, from a multidisciplinary and critical perspective, both the relevance of the neurological approach for the psychology and the aesthetics of the film experience and, more generally, the epistemological consequences of this approach in the humanities.

The fundamental (and controversial) insight behind neuroscientific findings is that the complex processes of the human mind find in the brain’s architecture and functioning their neural correlates. This correlation is based on a functional link between observation of goal-directed actions or emotions and sensorimotor activation of the observer (Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia, Iacoboni). Unity of action and perception is allowed by an embodied simulation, a basic functional mechanism by means of which our brain-body system models its interactions with the world (Gallese). This proposal falls fully within the paradigm of embodied cognition, according to which cognition depends upon those experiences that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities that are embedded in a biological, psychological and cultural context (Varela, Thompson and Rosch). In turn, this paradigm is based on both a phenomenological account of the body and human experience (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty) and on the ecological approach to visual perception (Gibson).

Although at an intuitive level the activity of visuomotor neurons and the mirroring mechanism appear to constitute the ground for a new and empirically-based study of film participation, to date a few steps have already been taken in the direction of a neuroembodied theory of the film experience. Indeed, some neuroscientists not only consider cinema as a metaphor for the human mind (Damasio), but also carry out neuroimaging tests on audiences, aiming to outline a ‘neurocinematics’ (Hasson et al.). Since neuroscientific methods and procedures seem not suited to point out aesthetic, cultural or ethical implications, this proposal has been received with scepticism, as problematic and potentially subject to reductionism. Yet philosophical reflections drawn on neuroimaging experiments provide new tools of analysis and interpretation for film theory. For example, tests showing that human beings learn and relate with each other (and with fictional worlds) on the basis of an immediate pre-reflexive and empathetic kind of comprehension would give empirical consistency to the intuitions of the first aesthetic film theories (Epstein, Balázs, Eisenstein) and would revitalised classical filmology (Cohen-Séat, Souriau, Michotte).

In fact, the project of a new multidisciplinary approach to the film experience – Neurofilmology – would remain unproductive if not concretely applied to film aesthetics and viewer participation. More than metaphorically conceivable as an experimental laboratory setting, the film experience offers a space for testing formal solutions (in terms of point-of-view, editing, camera angles, camera movements, colour, lightning, etc.) that provide, control and regulate sensorimotor activation and emotional involvement. While neuroimaging methods cannot provide an aesthetic judgment on the cinematic style, they may serve as ‘an objective scientific measurement for assessing the effect of distinctive styles of filmmaking upon the brain, and therefore substantiate theoretical claims made in relation to them’ (Hasson et al.).

In contemporary film theory, the development of neuroscientific-based models for the study of spectatorship is part of the project of ‘psychocinematics’ (Shimamura) as a natural evolution of the centrality attributed to emotions by cognitivist film scholars (Grodal). Conversely, phenomenological film theory (Casebier, Shaviro, Sobchack) still seems to harbour some resistance to neurophenomenology (Varela), although the search for a post-dualistic neurological foundation of the film experience could allow it to overcome continental philosophy’s rejection of natural science. The study of the neural substratum of the film experience arises as a terrain of encounter and dialogue between cognitive and phenomenological film studies.
This special issue of Cinéma&Cie aims to investigate the possible (or impossible) relationship between cognitive neuroscience and film theories with particular reference to film spectatorship.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
— Neurophilia/neuromania: critical approaches to the neurological account of the film experience
— Beyond the mirror: toward a phenomenological neuroscience in humanities
— Embodied mind/’Emminded’ body: possible convergence of phenomenological and cognitive film studies
— Enactivism vs. interactivism: simulation, narration, virtual reality and the convergence of the real and the fictional
— History of ‘Neurofilmology’: the mind/brain problem in the history of film theories
— Psychocinematics and Neurocinematics: experiments on the spectator between cognitive psychology and neurocognitive science
— Neurophenomenology of the film experience: the film-body revisited
— Film neuroaesthetics: neural substrates of film style
— Camera movements and sensorimotor simulation
— Cinematic empathy: the role of visuomotor neurons in the spectator’s emotional involvement and ethical implications
— Audiomotor neurons: the role of sound in embodied simulation

Submission details
Please send your abstract (300-500 words in English + bibliographical references) and a short biographical note to both adriano.daloia@unicatt.it and submissions.cinemaetcie@gmail.com by September 15, 2013. All notifications of acceptance will be emailed no later than September 30, 2013. If accepted, 4,000-word essays will then be required for peer review by January 31, 2014.


Cinéma&Cie is an international peer-reviewed journal directed by Tim Bergfelder (University of Southampton), Gianni Canova (Libera Università di Lingue e Comunicazione IULM), Erica Carter (King’s College London), Francesco Casetti (Yale University), Philippe Dubois (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3), Ruggero Eugeni (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore), Vinzenz Hediger (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main), Sandra Lischi (Università degli Studi di Pisa), Guglielmo Pescatore (Università di Bologna), Leonardo Quaresima (Università degli Studi di Udine) and published by Carocci editore (Rome).
Journal website: http://cinemaetcie.net/

cfp categories:

film_and_television

A Modern Illustration of J. Z. Young's Octopus

A reader points me to the following video as evidence that J. Z. Young's Octopus experiment would have worked.

Why is Custom not Natural?

Carl L. Becker's The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932) is a classic exploration of the modes of the medieval world that influenced the Enlightenment. At one point Becker contemplates John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and observes that Locke's signal contribution was to show his contemporaries that since God had created nature it followed that the mind of men could be brought into "harmony with the universal natural order". Becker then observes:-

I need not say that the difficulties were great: endless difficulties in the realm of practice; one fundamental difficulty in the realm of theory. Hidden away in the elaborate structure of Locke's Essay was a most disconcerting corollary. It was this: if nature be the work of God, and man the product of nature, then all that man does and thinks, all that he has ever done or thought, must be natural, too, and in accord with the laws of nature and of nature's God. Pascal had long since asked the fundamental question "Why is custom not natural?" Why, indeed! But if all is natural, then how could man and his customs ever be out of harmony with nature? No doubt the difficulty could be avoided by  that there was not disharmony. (p. 66)

Is not this still the question? Even after Dostoevsky; even after Nietzsche? 

Was Clarence Darrow a Proponent of Eugenics?

Robert J. Richards in his majestic 1987 Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior appears not to think so (below two of the many twitter exchanges that generated this question):

@nccomfort @TheNeuroTimes Who do you have in mind as non-Left in the US?  Not Margaret Sanger, the Progressive Movement, Clarence Darrow.
— Steve Fuller (@ProfSteveFuller) July 26, 2013

Richards writes, p. 516:

Abstruse genetics may have spoiled the kernel of eugenics theory. But it took a wicked wit, penetrating journalistic analysis, and the horrors of Nazi racial policy finally to crack the movement's hard shell of socially and economically generated racial prejudice. Just back from Dayton, Tennessee, where he defended one version of evolutionary biology, Clarence Darrow took up the prosecution of another. In The American Mercury, in 1925 and 1926, he examined the "Eugenics Cult." He sympathized with the plight of the eugenicists: "The good old Mayflower stock is suffering the same unhappy fate as the good old pre-Prohibition liquor. It is being mixed with all sorts of alien and debilitating substances." Nonetheless, he was bound to find their analyses guilty of both bad logic and worse taste. He compared the line of the Jukeses with that of Jonathan Edwards, the hell fire preacher of Mayflower stock that eugenicists liked to contrast with the Jukeses. Darrow thought the Jukeses' infamous sexual pollutions as a dry stream compared with the enormous drive gushing from the loins of the Edwardses: Jonathan's grandfather had thirteen children; his grandmother was put away for adultery and immorality; and he himself was one of eleven offspring. But of greatness, the family actually had little. Out of the some forty thousand estimated descendants of Edwards's grandparents, Darrow reckoned only six hundred were of any note - about 1.5 percent of the total. And this despite the Edwardses' social and educational opportunities, which were denied the Jukes family, who lived a poor and squalid rural life. Darrow confessed that if he had to choose for a neighbor a man like Edwards - who preached that "the God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked" - or one who lived the simple life of a dirt farmer, well Max Jukes would be his choice.

Primary Source: Erwin Schrödinger's "What is life?" and the Public Understanding of Science in 1951

While working in the National Archives (London), I stumbled upon another gem from the Festival of Britain, 1951. This one is a script by Erwin Schrödinger focused on the living organism. Schrödinger had published in 1944 his What is life? which was among the more important works of popular science published in the twentieth-century. Interestingly, here Schrödinger only toys around the edges of the mind and brain problem, mentioning perception and sensation only tangentially. His interest here seems to be with the way life introduces order to the universe. You may therefore be able to apprehend in this reductive contemplation Schrödinger's larger resolution of the hard problem of mind.

40 miles up; 40 miles down

Robert Krulwich discovers what it is like to fall from 150,000 feet.

Books should be free. Someone agrees.

Let’s Shake Up The Arrogance: A Reply to Nicholas A. Christakis

Writing in the “New York Times” Nicholas A. Christakis posits that the social sciences have stagnated. Using as his point of reference the decline and disappearance of departments of anatomy, histology, biochemistry and physiology, Christakis claims that “taking a page from Darwin, the natural sciences are evolving with the times”. And the outcome has been whole new fields, discoveries, majors, and everything that Christakis takes to be self-evidently good and right and novel.

What’s needed, Christakis suggests, is for a small rear guard to close once and for all discussions of the old-fashioned topics such as “monopoly power, racial profiling, and health inequality” and move the social sciences on. Vanguard social scientists, he says, should get into the serious business of talking about social neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and behavioural economics. And, ultimately, we should all spend our time being moral entrepreneurs for biology:-

It is time to create new social science departments that reflect the breadth and complexity of the problems we face as well as the novelty of 21st-century science. These would include departments of biosocial science, network science, neuroeconomics, behavioral genetics and computational social science. Eventually, these departments would themselves be dismantled or transmuted as science continues to advance.

Why do social scientists supposedly need to do these things? Because the institutions of social science need to match today’s intellectual challenges, which according to Christakis, they don’t now.

J. Z. Young gives an Octopus a Lobotomy in 1951

While working in Britain's National Archives, I discovered a remarkable primary source. In short, it is a script that physiologist J. Z. Young wrote for the Festival of Britain that took place in 1951. I have not discovered whether Young's script was ultimately incorporated into an exhibit, but in either case it is a remarkable statement about Young's work with Octopuses and about the making and shaping of public understanding of science. Enjoy!

Script on Learning in Octopus by J. Z. Young, M.A., F. R. S.

The Octopus lives in crannies among rocks, occupying one “home” for a long time. It emerges from time to time to collect its prey of crabs of bivalves and carries several home to eat at leisure. Piles of shells thus collect outside the home.

The Octopus sits in the home with only the head and eyes protruding. If a crab comes into view the Octopus leans forwards and comes walking out on its tentacles. If the crab is some way away the Octopus swims swiftly to it by jet propulsion action of its funnel. When it arrives it open its arms and spreads them over the crab which is seized by the suckers and held inside the web and bitten by the parrot-like beak. The bite is poisonous and the crab ceases to struggle within a few seconds and is then either eaten at once or carried around while the Octopus hunts for more.

If the crab is large the Octopus will approach it more cautiously, putting out one arm to touch it and perhaps working several arms round to seize the crab from behind, avoiding its claws.

The experiment consisted in training the Octopus not to attack crab if a white square was also present. This was done by dangling the crab on a thread in front of the square to which a pair of electric wires were attached. When the Octopus came out and attacked the crab it received an electric shock, dropped the crab and retreated home.

Next time the crab and white plate were presented the Octopus makes a very cautious approach, advancing very slowly and “testing” the crab with the tip of a tentacle to discover whether it will get a shock. After receiving the shock a few times in this way the animal ceases to come out at all when the crab and white plate are shown, but continues to attack crabs put in by themselves. The memory of the painful association of the white plate is then carried for several days.

Some progress has been made in finding the part of the brain that stores this memory. The brain of the Octopus has many lobes, arranged on a plan very differently from our own. The uppermost lobe of all consists of a mass of small cells. When this was removed from one of the trained Octopuses the animal immediately lost the “memory” that the white plate was connected with a painful stimulus. Animals that for many days had remained at home when the white plate was shown came out at once after removal of this highest part of the brain. Moreover in spite of receiving shocks they provide quite unable to learn not to attack the white plate. After receiving a shock the operated Octopus would go home, but if the crab and white plate were shown again ten minutes later it would come dashing out and receive another shock.

Thus we can say that the power to learn to refrain from attacking lies in this uppermost part of the brain. This power is clearly very like the memory of higher animals or man. The interest of the experiment is that it opens some hope for finding what changes go on in the brain when animals learn. We now know where to look in the Octopus brain and we hope that by comparing this part with these regions of our own brain that are connected with learning, we may be able to find the common fact that makes memory possible.

Notes of Treatment for Exhibition

1. Living Octopus

Octopus in good condition feed regularly. This would be a very great attraction, but probably too difficult to achieve. There would have to be a good circulation of sea water at about 20 C. The Octopus could be readily obtained at Naples from March – October, less easily in the winter. They would probably fly back all right but this has not been proved.

Before deciding the problem, consult the Zoo. They will advise on the difficulty of maintaining the sea water in a suitable condition. It would mean elaborate backstage tanks. The Zoo have kept Octopuses for some months but have not found them very good subjects. Probably they do not like the strong lighting. Supplies can also be obtained from the Channel Islands at some times of year. I would very much welcome a live acquarium but must advise that the risk of failure is serious. If successful it would make a very attractive exhibit.

2. Models

We have a very good set of still and moving pictures and it would be easy to make good models from these. The enclosed are only a small sample, my photographer being laid up we cannot supply further prints for some weeks but they will be good.

Models with moving parts would difficult unless they were diagrammatic. A possible treatment is by means of a series of models of the Octopus in its training tank. (1) sitting in the home, with head and eyes showing and a pile of crab shells outside, (2) emerging from the home when a crab and white plate are shown (3) swimming in the water, (4) seizing the crab and getting a shock, (5) coming out very cautiously next time, (6) not coming out at all when trained, (7) model of the brain showing the part removed at operation, (8) the Octopus attacking again after the operation.

We can of course supply any number of graphs, to show the progress of learning, number of mistakes, etc. and if you want it, much further matter about controls, operations or other parts of the brain, etc., Some of these would be desirable if the exhibit was to be thoroughly convincing scientifically.

Some of the above models could be made to move without having moving parts. Thus (1) The Octopus could lean forward and change colour when a level lowered the crab into its tank. (2) Very difficult to show in motion because shape changes quickly. (3) Would show well – the Octopus moves in the water by its jet without changing shape. The difficulty would be to know what to make it down when it arrived. (4) Difficult. (5) Possible. The Octopus near the crab could put out a cautious tentacle, touch the crab and draw it quickly back. (6) Slight changes could be shown as in (1).

A diagrammatic moving model could easily be devised to show the whole sequence of events by the movement of an ‘Octopus’ of simplified form.

I incline to think that the living show is too risky, but am sure that we should get excellent results from a combination of naturalistic and diagrammatic models.

"Architects of Adjustment": Notes to Donald S. Napoli's Book

Donald S. Napoli, Architects of Adjustment:The History of the Psychological Profession in the United States (London: Kennikat Press, 1981) is an interesting book. While I was reading it, I took substantial notes. Some of these may be of interest to regular readers.

 

Applied psychology can be said to have begun in the United States in 1890, the year that James McKeen Cattell published the results of the first psychological testing program. Cattell had come out of the so-called structuralist tradition of Wundt’s physiological psychology in Leipzig. Cattell:

p. 12-13

“…gathered the data not in order to learn something about the mind in general but rather to establish statistical uniformities among those tested. He also aimed for something in addition to psychological truth: he wanted to find a means of selecting the college applicants who had the best chances for success. Catell’s quest for practical results typified American science in the nineteenth century. His demand for quantified data marked the beginning of a still-powerful trend in America psychology –shared by academicians and practitioners alike – which held that characteristics of the psyche can and should be expressed in numerical terms.”