"Human Nature": Posts towards a course on "Society, Culture and Biology"

One important point to draw out in a course on "Society, Culture and Biology" is the tension between beliefs in the 'immutable nature of man' and the equally profound view that 'humans are malleable creatures.' It seems that one source of distinction between both views derives from the question of authority. Among ancient philosophers and in natural theology circles it was commonplace to see an immutable nature. That view was contested in a variety of philosophical traditions, but especially by Rousseau and Marx. At issue, then, in the question of an evolutionary human nature, which on its face denotes a mutable but continuous biological nature, is whether humans have evolved to the point where they have emancipated themselves completely from their inherited past. Or whether, in contrast, humans remain deeply enmeshed biological creatures in large part determined by neolithic and paleolithic pasts. Comment if you have any thoughts!  

From Sherrington's "Man on his Nature"

"The seat of an immediate cause can be a saw or chisel; the seat of a final cause is in the brain - the brain may be regarded as, at least in man, the organ of final causes."

Medicine, Health, and History: A Blog by Paul E. Stepansky, Ph.D.

I've been reading Paul E. Stepansky's memoir about his father, The Last Family Doctor: Remembering My Father's Medicine. Over the next few days, I'm going to post notes from this moving book and also review it. It is beautiful, heartfelt, nostalgic, and yet also says something very profound about modern medicine in the United States. This book is one that all doctors and medical students should read. I discovered that Paul Stepansky has also started a blog. Here's a taste:

Three decades after Peabody’s lecture [Francis Peabody on “The Care of the Patient"], I began riding shotgun when my father, William Stepansky, made his daily round of house calls in rural southeastern Pennsylvania. Sometimes, especially with the older patients he visited regularly, I came into the house with him, where I was warmly welcomed, often with a glass of milk and home baked treats, as the doctor’s son and travelling companion. From my time on the road, I learned how my father’s clinical gaze met and absorbed the anxious gazes of family members. It became clear, over time, that his medical obligation was not only to the patient, but to the patient-as-member-of-a-family and to the family-as-medically-relevant-part-of-the-patient. In a lecture to the junior class of his alma mater, Jefferson Medical college, in 1965, he made this very point in differentiating the scope of the family physician’s clinical gaze from that of the pediatrician and internist. Unlike the latter, he observed, the family physician’s interventions occurred “within the special domain of the family,” and his treatment of the patient had to be continuously attentive to the “needs of family as an entity.” It was for this reason, he added, that “family medicine must teach more than the arithmetic sum of the contents of specialties” (my father’s emphasis). Here, in the mid-60s, my father posited a medical-interventional substratum to what would emerge a decade or so later, in the realm of psychotherapy, as family systems theory and “structural family therapy.” And then, 12 years before [George] Engels came on the scene, he offered his conception of “a solid intellectual approach to medicine”:

“To me this means relating the effects of the body systems one upon the other in health and disease through knowledge of the basic sciences – i.e., biochemistry and physiology – through some understanding of the social and environmental stresses on the patient, and finally through insight into the psychological influences of personality structure as it affects health and disease.”

Beautiful, crisp prose and thoughtful - and that's the case for his memoir too.

People...not Brains

In yet another chapter from mereological ethics.... I came across this thoughtful essay by Simon Rippon (hat-tip Andrew Sullivan). Rippon asks why it is that we claim that people with brain cancer (or some sort of brain disease) can be free from responsibility of the crimes they commit, while those with normal brains are not given the same benefit of the doubt. He writes:

But now consider what the brain is: it is, essentially, a biological machine; 100 billion nerve cells living in a chemical soup and firing electrical impulses at each other. And in years to come, as neuroscience improves and expands our knowledge of the brain, we may reach the stage where your lawyer will be able to explain any particular criminal misjudgement as a result of this-or-that chemical overdose or deficit, this-or-that badly routed synapse, the growth of this-or-that cell, or – perhaps – this-or-that quantum random occurrence. How will we respond to these future lawyers? What’s the difference between the idea that this-or-that bit of your brain (albeit perhaps a microscopic bit) made you irrational, and the idea that a large tumour made you irrational? A tumour is not some alien invader: it is a proliferation of your own cells. Is it, then, size that matters here? Surely not!

A number of responses seem in order: Firstly, the law is organized around the person, the victim, the crime and the needs of society. It is not organized around the brain and nervous system of individuals. Criminal misjudgment would still indicate that the person committed a criminal action. Regardless of the reasons that a person committed a crime, the crime would still have been committed and some action would still be required by the state. Arguing from a reductive view that the crime's causes were in the brain would in no way change the fact that a crime had occurred. Rippon appears to be speculating that reductive explanations could be offered as a means of mitigating responsibility for criminal action. The crime, however, was still committed. In other words, there are holistic determinants here that Rippon's reductionist speculation does not address. It is for reasons like this, thankfully, that intoxication rarely works as a defense in rape.

Book Review: Toby A. Appel, Shaping Biology: The National Science Foundation and American Biological Research, 1945-1975 (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).

In the mid-1960s, administrators within the Division of Biological and Medical Sciences (BSM) of the National Science Foundation (NSF) had become convinced that an interdisciplinary “big biology” program was needed. Such a program some felt would possess great rhetorical value in convincing Washington’s political leadership of the need to support biological research.

(Notes to Shaping Biology can be found here.)

Among the advocates of this approach was Herman Lewis. Lewis believed that among the various potential big biology programs, "neurobiology” would prove the most sustainable. He argued that neurobiology: “will probably occupy the position in the last half of this decade [1960s] that molecular biology has had during the first half" (p. 255).

Others were less glib about neurobiology’s prospects. One argued that “establishing new programs in faddish areas” would cast the whole of the BMS in a bad light “by attracting "fund-chasing entrepreneurs" or setting up a "cult of high priests who tend to evaluate proposals not on the basis of whether good experimental procedures are proposed, but whether they meet current fashions and contain the popular catch words" (p. 255).

Yet despite such concerns, by the 1970s neurobiology had become a major area for targeted funding and among the early recipients of NSF largess was Frank O. Schmitt's Neuroscience Research Program at MIT. It was also in this era that federal dollars began flowing towards neuro and psychobiological research on “learning and memory,” because, as one BMS administrator put it: "There is probably no area which so completely permeates and influences the diverse aspects of our complex society as does the topic of learning. We are constantly learning, in school, at work, at home, and in our social relationships." (p. 256)

Such small vignettes appear throughout Toby A. Appel’s excellent and highly readable institutional history of the National Science Foundation’s support of biological research in the United States. Stories like these usefully remind us that often the ‘hot topics’ in science research are driven not by trends and discoveries in science but by the shifting sands of governmental agencies and patrons’ priorities. It is that story that Appel’s Shaping Biology records through ambitious and diligent historical scholarship that traces the early history of biology patronage within the NSF from its foundation in 1951 to the reorganization of the BMS in 1975. While there were many bodies in the US government that supported biological research, it is clear from Appel’s analysis that the NSF was special because it was the only agency that funded the entire spectrum of biology “from molecules to natural history museums." (p. 1)

"If World War II had not been a biologist's war...through the exploitation of biological warfare, World War III might well be."

Shaping Biology is a study with few rivals. As Appel makes clear, from NSF’s origins in Vannevar Bush’s famous call for governmental support of science, the NSF’s founders had hoped to unify the disparate fields of biology. Telling her story through changes that took place in molecular biology, plant biology, systematic biology, and ecology, Appel makes clear that the pursuit of unity would forever haunt the agenda of the BMS. Also haunting the NSF was the question of the ends of biological research. Rockefeller Foundation officers (who prior to the advent of government support of science had been biology’s largest benefactors) saw significant promise in the social application of biological knowledge. And while biology’s wartime contributions throughout 1939-1945 were in some sense disputed by medical scientists, there was also rather pessimistic recognition that: "If World War II had not been a biologist's war...through the exploitation of biological warfare, World War III might well be" (p. 17).

The Origins of Autism Research: A History

A few months ago the editors of Dissertation Reviews invited me to review an excellent dissertation by Dr Bonnie Evans. Evans completed her doctorate in the history of medicine at the University of Cambridge in 2010.  Her study is, I believe, an instant classic. She is bound to become the world expert on the history of autism. Her dissertation is highly original and theoretically sophisticated. Here's a taste of her work through my review (which is published here):

Using legal, institutional, intellectual sources, as well as patient records from the Maudsley to excavate her story, Evans convincingly demonstrates that transformations and formations outside and inside the strata of professional psychiatry and psychology ultimately made and unmade child patients, categorizing them in various generations as “backwards,” “mental defectives,” “subnormals,” “ineducables,” “psychotics,” “schizophrenics,” “autistics,” and “socially impaired,” She concludes that the increasing prominence of the autistic child derived from a confluence of epidemiological understandings about the social and mental abnormalities of children and laws concerned with those children’s protection and education. It was this meeting between law and epidemiology that ultimately constructed the autistic child into a demographic reality and made that child a prevalent, persistent subject. 

As a sidenote: Dissertation Reviews is a truly great resource for historians. They are definitely forward-looking technologically, and their web-design is aesthetically pleasing. They have just started a Science Studies Series, which is bound to be of great value to historians and sociologists of science, medicine and technology.

25% off "The Neurological Patient in History"

Promo Code: NEU12

Expires June 30, 2012

Melvin Kranzberg's six laws of technology

Melvin Kranzberg  (1986) "Technology and History: "Kranzberg's Laws"" Technology and Culture, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 544-560.

1. Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.
2. Invention is the mother of necessity.
3. Technology comes in packages, big and small.
4. Although technology might be a prime element in many public issues, nontechnical factors take precedence in technology-policy decisions.
5. All history is relevant, but the history of technology is the most relevant.
6. Technology is a very human activity - and so is the history of technology.

So how many neurons do you have? Investigating the Origins of a Neuroscience Dogma

"Quantitative methods are tedious and some thought is necessary before the work is begun, for the mere collection of quantitative data has little interest unless it clarifies relationships that were previously obscure."

D. A. Sholl, The Organization of the Cerebral Cortex (London 1956), pp. 29-30

So how many neurons do we have? In their fascinating review (PDF here) published in the European Journal of Neuroscience, Roberto Lent et al pointed out that a number of dogmas had found their way into neuroscience and that the origins of some were hidden in mystery (my discussion of their review is here). One dogma they identified was the idea that humans have 100 billion neurons. As Lent et al observed, the origins of this dogma "in the literature is unknown" (1). Upon investigation, I think that I have uncovered at least one early source for this view. While the numbers are not as large as 100 billion, they are significantly large to be the origins of the claim. Moreover, in some instances, discussions of the number of neurons in the brain were also presented with other numbers, such as for instance the number of cells in the body. It could well be that over time, those numbers were conflated together - but this is, of course, mere historical conjecture.

In 1899, Helen Thompson published an article in the Journal of Comparative Neurology entitled: "The total number of functional neurons in the cerebral cortex of man (etc)." In her paper, Thompson presented work - chiefly in tables - that suggested that the "total number of functional nerve cells in the cerebral cortex of the adult man is, in round number, 9200 million" and that moreover that approximately 1.37% of that brain was functional nerve cells (p. 114).

Thompson noted in her introduction that the classic work on the subject was Karl Hammarberg's 1895 Studien uber Klinik und Pathologie der Idiotie, which permitted estimates as high as 3000 million cells until she published her study. In a note appended to her study, H. H. Donaldson remarked that these findings were difficult to interpret, especially as they pertained to race, gender, and "eminence". Donaldson offered the following data and comment:
 

We assume however, as the records in the Table are from persons having at least normal intelligence, that moderate variations in the number of dendritic branches belonging to the cortical cells and in the associated terminals represent the greatest differences to be expected. We therefore conclude that the largest part of the difference in weight, as exhibited in the Table, is to be referred to the axones, with their medullary sheaths; at the same time recognizing that variations in the mass of the axone are of no value in increasing the complexity of the central system. Accepting this conclusion, the differences in question can be explained in one of three ways. In the larger brain of any group, there is either a greater number of complete neurones, or, second, a more generous development of the axones alone, or, third, a possible combination of both of these conditions. In making a choice between these several explanations thus suggested, a guide may be found in the observation that, within a rather wide range of absolute weight, there is a re-markable constancy in the proportional weights of the several subdivisions (cerebrum, cerebellum and stem) of the encephalon. (p. 146)

Both Thompson and Donaldson's papers were of sufficent interest to warrant a "retrospect" - a type of abstracting service offered by academic journals - in the Journal of Mental Science (vol. 46; 1900; p. 565), where Havelock Ellis, a British psychologist and physician, described it a "valuable paper." In spite of such evidence of the paper's widespread reception, it is nevertheless doubtful that these papers were alone responsible for the origins of this dogma.

We might speculate that a more likely source was the writing of  C Judson Herrick, professor of neurology at the University of Chicago, where Thompson also worked. In his An Introduction to Neurology published in 1916, Herrick paraphrased Thompson's paper via a provocative metaphor, arguing that the problem for the neurologist was to "disentangle the inconceivably complex interrelations of the nerve-fibers which serve all the manifold functions of adjustment of internal and external relations." Herrick noted:

This is no simple task. If it were possible to find an educated man who knew nothing of electricity and had never had heard of a telegraph or telephone, and if this man were assigned the duty of making an investigation of the telegraph and telephone systems of a great city without any outside assistance whatever, and of preparing a report upon all the physical equipment with detailed maps of all stations and circuits and with an explanation of the method of operation of every part, his task would be simple compared with the problem of the neurologists. The human cerebral cortex alone contains some 9280 million nerve cells, most of which are provided with long nerve fibers which stretch away for great distances and branch in different directions, thus connecting each cell with many different centers. The total of possible nervous pathways is, therefore, inconceivably great. (p. 26)

C. Judson Herrick (1868-1960)

In his 1926 Brains of Rats and Men, Herrick enhanced this picture further: "Recently, in conversation with a mathematician, we were commenting on some of the stupendous numbers employed by the astronomers in measuring the distance of the stars. The unit of measure here is the light-year, that is, the distance traversed by light in a year - about six million million miles, or 6x10^12.... Such numbers stun the imagination of the the non-mathematical mind. But a little computation shows that the known complexity of the nervous connections of the human body present possibilities of associational combinations of the nerve cells among themselves that run into numbers of even greater orders of magnitude. (p. 3)" And why was this the case? Again Herrick acknowledged Thompson and Donaldson, but this time he cited a new value from Donaldson, who "estimates that there are about twelve thousand million nerve cells or neurons in the human brain" (p. 4).

If a million cortical nerve cells were connected one with another in groups of only two neurons each in all possible combinations, the number of different patterns of interneuronic connection thus provided would be expressed by 10^2783000. This, of course, is no the actual structure, as we shall see; but the illustration may serve to impress upon us the inconceivable complexity of the ninety-two hundred million nerve cells know to exist is the cerebral cortex (p. 5)

While it is doubtful that these claims were original to Hammarberg, Thompson, Donaldson, and Herrick alone, they were probably partially responsible for the origin of this dogma. It is perhaps useful to note the way in which evocative language was used to crystallize the huge numbers for readers. It was likely in that language, and by evoking languages of astronomy and populations, that those numbers increased generation-by-generation. Again this is but hypothesis. More diligent work is necessary before we can say with certainty that these claims connect to our contemporary ones. They are, nonetheless, a place to start.

Darwin's awesome thoughts on "Mesmerism": Posts towards a course on Society, Culture and Biology

Writing to William Darwin Fox, "one of his earliest correspondents (4)," Charles Darwin commented in December 1844:

With respect to mesmerism, the whole country resounds with wonderful facts or tales... I have just heard of a child, three or four years old (whose parents and self I well knew) mesmerised by his father, which is the first fact which has staggered me. I shall not believe fully till I see or hear from good evidence of animals (as has been stated is possible) not drugged, being put to stupor; of course the impossibility would not prove mesmerism false; but it is the only clear exerimentum crucis, and I am astonished it has not be systematically tried. If mesmerism was investigated, like a science, this could not have been left till the present day to be done satisfactorily, as it has been I believe left. Keep some cats yourself, and do get some mesmeriser to attempt it. One man told me he had succeeded, but his experiments were most vague, as was likely from a man who said cats were more easily done than other animals, because they were so electrical!

Francis Darwin ed. The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Including an Autobiographical Chapter, 2 volumes. (New York: Basic Books, Inc, 1959): i; p. 341 

More Neoliberalism: "Ad men use brain scanners to probe our emotional response"

Since you seem so worried, tell me: "What do they want?"

Rupert Neate reports in The Guardian that "Neuromarketers are using MRI scanners and electrode caps to work out our hidden reactions to their adverts."

We put a cap on your head that measures your brain impulses," said AK Pradeep, a pioneer of neuromarketing science and chief executive of NeuroFocus, one of the biggest players in a booming industry. "We measure all parts of your brain continuously. Second by second, we measure how much attention you're paying. We get [to learn] what emotions you're experiencing and what memories you're memorising.

According to Neate:

Gemma Calvert, a former Oxford University neurologist who founded rival company Neurosense, said neuromarketing has "completely changed our understanding of the brain" and is now so advanced that she is "able to predict how customers will behave." 

"Shaping Biology": Notes to Toby A. Appel's Excellent Book

Toby A. Appel, Shaping Biology: The National Science Foundation and American Biological Research, 1945-1975 (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).

Toby A. Appel's study of American biological research and the National Science Foundation is an excellent institutional history. As I was reading it, I took fairly extensive notes from the work. These may well interest regular readers. Where appropriate, I provide a bit of context. Certain themes struck me as particularly salient for understanding the history of neurobiology and neuroscience.

Posts towards a course on "Society, Culture and Biology"

Evolutionary psychology; proteomics; genomics; neuroscience; sociobiology;  molecular biology; ethology; genetics; biology; physiology; zoology, botany - the twentieth-century biological sciences transformed multiple dimensions of human life. With many applications in industry, bio-medicine, agriculture, and technology, there were few domains of human life untouched by biology's footprint.

Yet to describe these topics without also recognizing their social, cultural, and political dimensions would be naive. And to ignore as well the way in which the human sciences - medicine, psychology, history, economics, sociology, anthropology, and political science - intermingled, translated, connected, extended and critiqued biological theories and facts across the nineteenth- and twentieth century would be a mistake too.

But what would a course analyzing the co-construction of the human and biological sciences accomplish? In what ways would it be useful for our postmodern society? Why would we need it? Would it simply be another boring, truncated chapter in the ideological script of triumphant science? Should it be a critical course that analyzes and evaluates in an almost Whiggish way "the good", "the bad", and "the ugly" of the human and biological sciences? Or should such a course seek, rather, to provide a contextualized, empirically-situated account that does not dwell in a large way upon the political questions such material raises?

Such questions cannot be simply answered. The history of biology is filled with noteworthy achievements. From Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection to the contemporary discovery of the biological mechanisms underpinning the production of proteins, biology has transformed human understanding of our place in nature and also brought us closer to understanding the origins, variability and diversity of life on our planet. Yet, at the same time, such tragic legacies as forced sterilization in the United States, the Tuskegee syphilis study, Nazi racial hygiene policies, Lysenko-ism, and the frontal lobe lobotomy, reveal to us that biological knowledge sometimes converges frequently and sharply with dominant social and cultural values. Such instances remind us that on many occasions biology has served as a poorly-designed tool of power.

Science is a means of pursuing knowledge. Yet scientific knowledge has often been allegedly useful for determining social and politic ends. On many occasions scientific knowledge has been used to reinforce dominant ideologies, naturalize ascendant human institutions, and to justify claims of civilizational superiority. The biological sciences have not been alone in this project: biology, psychology, genetics, anthropology, sociology, economics, and even history have been prominently used for these ends. The consequences, both positive and negative, are deserving of deeper analysis, evaluation, and critique.But where to go from here?

Below are prospective topics: What's missing? Is the approach too traditional? How could it be more vanguard? Comments would be greatly appreciated.

North Carolina will Compensate Victims of Forced Sterilization

Our recent posts on the history of eugenics acquire some additional salience with this news. Among the shocking facts:

...a task force set up by North Carolina found that starting [in] the 1950s the state increasingly focussed its programme - which the task force dubbed a "eugenics" programme - on welfare recipients.  

What the neuro-humanities will look like...

The Economist 'demolishes' free will, and one can almost imagine what Jonathan Swift would say:

...we assign responsibility for desired public outcomes to decision-making units [in our brains] that communicate well internally and have internally shared interests in that outcome. So in general, it makes a lot of sense to make individuals responsible for themselves: modules inside one person's brain may be distinct but they're usually in very close communication and generally share a common interest. However, some brain modules don't communicate well and may conflict with each other. One module in your brain wants to be fit; a different one wants to drink that soda. Taking as a given for the moment that we have a public interest in people being fit, it may make sense to have social institutions work collectively with the modules in everyone's brains that want to be fit, rather than depending on each individual to resolve the contest between their get-fit module and their drink-soda module. The shift in thinking here isn't necessarily so different from the Freudian development of the idea of the subconscious mind. But like psychoanalysis, neuroscience's challenge to the idea that individuals are coherent subjects who make their decisions consciously and can be held responsible for them tends to shift the way one thinks about society and politics. In many cases, it's not only unfair to hold individuals accountable for the actions of the modules in their heads, it's also completely counterproductive, while solutions pursued at either a neuropsychological-pharmacological level or at a social level would be the effective ones.

Note also that the way the author confounds "will," "intent," and "accountability". Amazing.

Styles of Autism Research, 1971-2010

Autism research and publications between 1971 and 2010 (hat-tip Emily Singer).

Dogmas in Neuroscience and Further Thoughts on the Limits of Neurohistory

6 classically recognized layers of the cortex

"How many neurons do you have?" In a fascinating review (link to PDF here) published in the European Journal of Neuroscience, Roberto Lent, Frederico Azevedo, Carlos Andrade-Moraes, and Ana Pinto point out that in some marvelous and mysterious way a number of dogmas have found their way into neuroscience.


Due to "strong adherence to tradition", they suggest in their paper's introduction, some views about the nervous system have been "extensively reproduced in papers and textbooks, becoming undisputed dogmas of neuroscience." (1) Waving at Thomas Kuhn's classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the authors conclude that: "Dogmas are fundamental to science. They serve the purpose of being challenged, and eventually replaced by other transient truths." (7). In a brilliant dissection in between these remarks, the authors seek out and problematize the empirical basis of four dogmas:  1) The idea that the cerebral cortex is the highest achievement of brain evolution; 2) the claim that the human brain has 100 billion neurons and 10 times more glial cells; 3) the dogma that the human brain is exceptionally complex as compared with those of other primates, and finally 4) the claim that brains grow in evolution and development by the addition of uniform modules. Putting it simply: this is a hell of a good paper.

The authors offer several important contentions. In their introduction, they wonder whether quantitative neuroscience can be described properly as a discipline? They ponder where the idea of a 100 billion neurons came from and point out that "its origin in the literature is unknown" (1). They agree that it is a supposition that sizes of the brain or areas of the brain correlate with cognitive abilities (2). The authors moreover observe that the cerebellum has greater role in cognitive and affective functions than is typically imagined (3). They show why quantifying the number of brain cells is a serious business (it will help resolve challenges in studies of dementia) and equally why the arbitrary number of 100 billion needs to analyzed in the context of the functional role of glial cells (5). They ask why, despite considerable controversy, it has been widely accepted that 147,000 (on average) neurons populated the cortical columns (7). They wonder whether it really is reasonable to claim humans as outliers among animals in terms of ecephalization quotients, given that there appear to be different species-specific scaling rules. They write:

We conclude that that the human brain is not exceptional in the absolute composition of neurons and glial cells, the main operators of its computational functions. It is, rather, a result of the linear scaling rule characteristic of primates. We are not special in nature, but only big-brained primates. Having big brains and being primates, we have acquired a gigantic number of computational units that have made us capable of superior cognitive performance.(6)

Good stuff - although I would qualify the word "superior." And it raises several points related to the possibility of neurohistory (other thoughts here and here). One is a question of responsibility. Sweeping histories, grand narratives, and big stories have long been the stock-in-trade of popular histories. (H. G. Well's Outline of History, a wonderful book by the way, is but one example.) But such histories have a way of hardening ideas and dogmas that are actually controversial or in need of refinement and elaboration even as the question of scientific facticity (as the comments about dementia above make clear) has considerable importance.

Secondly doesn't the existence of these dogmas, as well as the observation we don't know the origins of the claim that we have 100 billion neurons, only elevate further the fact that in order to even begin a neurohistory project we would need a clearer, deeper, and refined history of neuroscience and neurology? The dogmas that Lent et al. describe point towards other unsettled questions. They ask, for example, "to what extent is it true that the number of neurons in the brain declines with aging?" "Do males" really have a "higher number of neurons than females?" To this one, a colleague of mine, adds, and just when "did we begin to believe that we use 10% of our brains?" And as Anne Harrington pointed out a long time in her brilliant book Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain even the notion that the hemispheres act differently has a long history. Isn't it time for historians and philosophers to be mindful about these facts?

Reflections on the Ethics of Vegetative State Awareness

A comment at the Institute for Science and Ethics on the implications of "Bedside detection of awareness in the vegetative state", a cohort study published in The Lancet (2011), really got me thinking:

Science is invaluable in discovering what the world, including ourselves, is like. But it can never alone tell us what we should do. The big question – how such patients should be treated – remains as open as ever. We need more science to find out what the life of such patients is like. But we also need ethics to decide what we do when we discover that.

Firstly that seems to me precisely why we need the humanities and social sciences. Ethics without history, philosophy, literature or art to me seems equivalent to imaging science without ethics. But, of course, that requires believing that one appropriate approach to the question of ethics is based upon an analysis of the intent behind action. And I think that an understanding of intent can only come from the moral frames as recorded, observed, and analyzed in history and the human sciences or appreciated imaginatively in literature and art.

I've noted a rather popular fondness for approaching ethical questions purely in terms of the consequences of action. This approach is typical among my students. Such a view, while compelling, does beg the question in the case of these medical patients whether anyone would have anything but good will towards them and about this situation? I mean is there really anyone who is callously thinking about this in only economic or sadistic terms?

And since we cannot really know the outcome of our choices here, and since we know from the history of science and medicine that our choices in situations like these tend to be determined by fleeting social and cultural values, is not the best choice here to assume good will? I'm not really this Kantian, but the idea that somehow we will be able to use new scientific findings to think through such problems as these in order to better understand the consequences our actions, strikes me as painfully naive.

Nigel Thrift on contemporary academics

What does it mean to be an academic? Nigel Thrift paints us a picture:

...I am now pretty sure, the lecture in its old form, understood as a direct oral presentation intended to present information or to teach students about a particular subject and delivered by a lecturer standing at the front of the room and giving out information and judgments, will become a minority teaching method. Instead, what were lectures will be recorded for students to consult–many universities have already produced a library of such presentations–and the time previously put by for lectures will be used as a surgery, as a time for problem-solving, clarification, and the like. This is a no less time-consuming method of teaching–indeed, it may involve more work. But I think it is likely to become the norm in many disciplines.

These comments sound about right to me - and I say that having just penned my 20 Tips for Teaching. I've been recently taking the f-MRI tutorial in exactly the way that Thrift points out. In some sense, I think this is a loss. I love lecturing. But the academy moves on....

20 Tips for Teaching a 3:3 or 4:4 without TAs

Hello world!

Today I’m looking forward to spring term and, once again, I am putting together my course syllabi. And these activities brought to mind great advice about teaching that I received from my mentors as an undergraduate and graduate student. And it also reminded me of some tips I put down on paper a while ago for a colleague who, as I had already done, was about  to discover the ‘joys’ of a 4:4 teaching load. At the time, my own teaching load was high (then 4:4), but now I teach a more 'manageable' 3:3. I thought I'd pass on my lessons learned by fire.

These tips are likely only useful to those of you with heavy teaching loads and the determination to keep active as a researcher. I personally don’t see any tension between the classroom and research. If you are a college lecturer with a heavy load and trying to be an active researcher, reader and writer, then I hope these ‘tips’ will be of benefit to you.

Neuroanthropology's take on the Sexual Revolution

Greg Downey, Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Macquarie University in Sydney, has an interesting post at Neuroanthropology on evolution, anthropology, and gender and sexuality. I won't say that I fully agree with his argument. But I would like to endorse its complexity, subtly and nuance. So much of what we read these days offers rather trivial narratives about the interplay of human evolution, neuroscience, and culture and society that this essay (and video) comes to us like a breath of fresh air. At least, someone is thinking!

This idea that we have an inherently contradictory sexuality, the sixth point, is important because a one-sided narrative (say, for example, an argument that humans are ‘naturally’ bonobo-like, polyamorous and peaceful) shouldn’t be simply pitted against a pre-existing, opposing one-sided account, like the Mars-Venus contrast. I’ll come back to this point in part three of this series, but my fear of the over-corrective is the reason that I’m a touch uncomfortable with Ryan and Jethá’s (2010) book, Sex at Dawn. Although many of their innovative ideas are well worth considering, if for no other reasons to cleverly counter-balance other pervasive accounts of human sexuality in evolution, the book does run the danger of a competing partiality, however important the corrective may be.

The statistical prevalence of institutions like male dominance, female-centred family structure, and widespread idealization of monogamy (even alongside equally-widespread patterns of extra-pair mating and other forms of sexuality) is incontrovertible. Our discussion of sexual evolution has to be consistent with observable facts, both now and in our phylogenetic past, and we can’t be cherry-picking data to fit a feminist Darwinist or bonobo-ist polyamorous account any more than to fit an anti-feminist one.

Different proclivities in a species need not be harmonized by natural and sexual selection, nor need sexual selection be one-directional; the presence of unresolved conflicts in instincts or behavioural tendencies can produce a more flexible and responsive behavioural repertoire and a two-way form of social selection is likely in a highly intelligent primate. (Of course, unresolved tendency can also produce confusion and ambivalence, but that’s for part three). For example, a tendency toward male domination underwritten by sexual dimorphism and high levels of male aggression can be pitted against tendencies towards greater egalitarian sexual relations grounded in female sibling solidarity, female mate choice, and foraging versatility. Together, opposing tendencies can produce a behavioural repertoire that tips in quite different directions given the right conditions.

"An Academic Writes" about the REF

I rather enjoyed Learning with 'e's defense of the upcoming REF in Britain:

Secondly, doubt has been expressed over the capabilities of the appointed REF panel of experts (pictured above during their innaugural meeting in 1906) to fairly or competently judge the quality of research outputs across the board. I am happy to refute these claims, on the basis that three of the members of the panel are close friends of mine and the fourth is a member of my own family. I can assure all those who have made such claims, that the panel are all exceptionally talented people who are extremely knowledgeable in their respective fields and each is totally impervious to bribes or any other form of cajolement. Some also sit on the editorial boards of Social Realism and other journals I have published in, so their integrity is not to be doubted. Those who doubt any of the panel's capabilities, academic or otherwise can be assured. Each and every one of the expert panel has been certified.

Featured Physiologist: Henry Hallet Dale (1875-1968)

Henry Dale, Life Magazine, 1936

Henry Hallet Dale (1875-1968), son of Charles James Dale and Francis Anne Hallet, was born in London, the third of seven children. Educated at Tollington Park College and The Leys School Cambridge, Dale matriculated at Trinity College Cambridge in 1894, where he worked under physiologist John Langley. A brief wanderjahr in Germany in 1903 saw Dale working with Paul Ehrlich, the 1908 Nobel Prize winner who developed the anti-syphilitic Salvarsan, coined the term chemotherapy, and developed and elaborated side-chain-theory. Dale eventually completed his MD at Cambridge in 1909, and he became the Director of the Department of Biochemistry and Pharmacology at the National Institute for Medical Research in 1914. While in this position, Dale became increasingly concerned with the problem of standards in biology, especially as they pertained to anti-syphilitic medications, and eventually he became a leader in the development of international standards for biologically active substances. Such work was likely the reason he became Director of the National Institute for Medical Research in 1928. A regular adviser to British Medical Research Council, Dale was also active clinical research his entire professional life. He eventually developed much of basis for the theory of chemical transmission of nerve impulses, especially in his work on histamine, adrenalin, and acetylcholine – work for which he and Otto Loewi were awarded the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. Remembered as a warm, happy conversationalist, Dale’s expertise and advice were widely sought. He received many prestigious awards across the whole of his life. He married Ellen Harriet in 1904, and they had two daughters and one son.

 This article is part of an on-going series of biographies published in this blog.

"a journalist posed the question, ‘When did you become interested in the natural world?’ Attenborough simply replied, ‘When did you stop?’"

"Is a child a 'natural scientist'"? So asks Lizzie Crouch in a warm and reflective little essay:

Maybe it would be more helpful to think in terms of the fact everyone has a natural inquisitive side that can help a child grow into scientist? Then we could have children and adults of all ages reconnect with this inner child to help them connect with science? 

Book Review: Sheila Faith Weiss, The Nazi Symbiosis: Human Genetics and Politics in the Third Reich. University of Chicago, 2010.

"It is one of the greatest lies of the French Revolution to maintain that all humans are equal. Nature knows no equality," so a young student wrote in answer to a biology exam in Nazi Germany (244). Such a certainty no doubt informed the crimes of Carl Schneider as well. A professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Heidelberg, Schneider experimented upon mentally handicapped children and murdered many of them at the Eichberg Asylum near Wiesbaden (177). The theoretical realities taught in the classroom had to be practiced as hard “measures to ensure the preservation of the Volk” in the real world (237).

Aware, of course, as we are of this appalling legacy of Nazism, it is no shock that totalitarianism’s advocates constructed a path from their acts of murder to written justifications that found their way into high school curriculum. Indeed, the moral abyss into which biomedicine, biology, neurology and psychiatry had fallen in Nazi Germany by 1939 was deep and widespread among those fields which had become corrupt and decadent. Yet, and this is an important point, there were always a few in Germany who stood firmly against Nazi ideology and protested the way in which science had been harnessed to the Fascist state. As Slavoj Zizek said a few years ago at Birkbeck College (University of London), the film Schindler’s List reminds us all of one crucial question that can always be asked of this tragedy: why did some resist and why didn’t others?

Even as Sheila Faith Weiss’s illuminating, original, archivally-driven, and deeply troubling book The Nazi Symbiosis reconstructs the relationship between Nazism and eugenics, it reminds us over and over again of the salience of that question. There were always a few who stood against the ends to which the Third Reich used science and medicine. Why there were not more, is a question that should haunt all people today. It is furthermore a fact that every scientist, doctor, and academic should remember.

Hardwired: The History of a Word

Metaphors, words that refer to one thing in order to explain a likeness, similarity or analogy with another different thing, are rife in neuroscience. Some of them are really difficult to detect: neurotransmitter, for example, appears on the surface to be innocuous enough, until one recalls that Adrian, Gasser, Dale, Lucas, and others were using the relatively new technologies of vacuum tubes and oscilloscopes, and then suddenly a host of implications become possible. Sherrington referred occasionally to the telegraph as a means of explaining the integrative action of the nervous system, and there are countless other examples.

Among the most commonly used metaphors in neuroscience – or at least popular neuroscience writing – is the word “hardwired”. “Hardwiring” sounds serious and informative and conjures up a host of images, which may or may not be of use (example here). For better or for worse, it is a word with which we are now encumbered. It is perhaps useful then to ask where and when this adjective originated and how it came to influence neuroscience.

The OED notes that the first usage of the word was in computing, where it meant: “employing or containing permanently connected circuits designed to perform a specific, unchangeable, function; (of a function) achieved by such circuits; built into a device in this way.” It finds that first usage in Mechanised Accounting in 1969 and then notes its appearance in this form in several places thereafter including Scientific American in 1973.

"Hardwired" was first used in connection to the function of the brain and the nervous system in an article in New Scientist published in 1971 in reference to the links between the eyes of a kitten and its brain. A similar use appeared in 1975 in Scientific American and again it appeared in the context of vision and the cortex. On their own these references probably do not explain how the word disseminated into neurobiology, evolutionary studies, neurology and psychology. That fact can probably be attributed to Carl Sagan. In his 1977 The Dragon’s of Eden: Speculation on the Evolution of Human Intelligence, Sagan observed:

What is the information content of the brain? Let us consider two opposite and extreme poles of opinion on brain function. In one view, the brain, or at least its outer layers, the cerebral cortex, is equipotent: any part of it may substitute for any other part, and there is no localization of function. In the other view, the brain is completely hard-wired: specific cognitive functions are localized in particular places in the brain. Computer design suggests that the truth lies somewhere between these two extremes. On the one hand, any nonmystical view of brain function must connect physiology with anatomy; particular brain functions must be tied to particular neural patterns or other brain architecture. On the other hand, to assure accuracy and protect against accident we would expect natural selection to have evolved substantial redundancy in brain function. This is also to be expected from the evolutionary path that it is most likely the brain followed.

It is difficult to know why Sagan mobilized this language. Certainly he would have been aware of trends in A-I and A-Life, computing, and physics. He may also have been reading Scientific American and picked up on the language there. There can be little doubt, as Margaret Boden’s Mind as Machine makes clear, that linkages between the cognitive sciences and computing were legion.

Carl Sagan (1934-1996)

Yet what is interesting is that Sagan did not abuse the metaphor in the way that it has been subsequently. He adopted a quite modest and refined approach that can be usefully contrasted with the rather more shrill uses of the word in our contemporary moment.

"You’ve said that neuroscience is changing the way we understand sin. Can you tell me about that?"

Conservation biologist Michael Soule tells us in an interview at The Last Word on Nothing that sin is definitely hardwired:-

Sin was kind of a mystery behaviorally and biologically until about the last 20 years, when people started looking at human behavior under the lens of functional magnetic resonance and electroencephalography and other forms of visualizing what the brain is doing when it is feeling or thinking about certain things, or when the person is behaving in certain ways.

Almost all of the sins have been looked at and been located in the brain. It’s pretty crude at the moment. But still, we know the sins are in the brain, which means that the biological basis is clear. We’re hard-wired to behave in self-biased ways.

Over the last several hundred thousand years, we’ve also become hard-wired to behave in a social way. Which means that the self has to submit to the group in some way, to subordinate its greed and envy and gluttony and so forth to what the group needs to survive. Because we depend on our groups to survive and prosper.

(Hat-tip Andrew Sullivan.)

Notes From a Guantánamo

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Adopted 10 December 1948 by the United Nations) 

Article 5: No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Article 6: Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.

Article 30: Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.

The New York Times has two articles today (here & here) about the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay. The injustice and inhumanity is horrifying. There can be no reasonable justification for these crimes. The doctors who aided torture, the officers who followed illegal orders, the lawyers who argued that the State could act with such impunity, and especially the politicians who gave these orders must be brought to trial. Guantánamo must be closed; the medical men and women, especially, must be named and brought to account for their crimes against humanity. A taste of these men's stories. (Similarities can be found here.)

One tells us about how doctors were involved in his torture:

I was taken to Kandahar, in Afghanistan, where American interrogators asked me the same questions for several weeks: Where is Osama bin Laden? Was I with Al Qaeda? No, I told them, I was not with Al Qaeda. No, I had no idea where bin Laden was. I begged the interrogators to please call Germany and find out who I was. During their interrogations, they dunked my head under water and punched me in the stomach; they don’t call this waterboarding but it amounts to the same thing. I was sure I would drown. At one point, I was chained to the ceiling of a building and hung by my hands for days. A doctor sometimes checked if I was O.K.; then I would be strung up again. The pain was unbearable.

One tells us about his experiences in a world beyond the law:

In 2008, my demand for a fair legal process went all the way to America’s highest court. In a decision that bears my name, the Supreme Court declared that “the laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.” It ruled that prisoners like me, no matter how serious the accusations, have a right to a day in court. The Supreme Court recognized a basic truth: the government makes mistakes. And the court said that because “the consequence of error may be detention of persons for the duration of hostilities that may last a generation or more, this is a risk too significant to ignore.”

APA Scared of Alphabet. Especially letters: M, S, D

"Keep quiet. Don't say a word."

The "neuro-ing" and "psych-ing" of psychiatry and neurology continues with this new story brought to our attention by Mind Hacks:-

The American Psychiatric Association have used legal threats to force a critical blog to change its title because they didn’t like it being called ‘DSM Watch’.

The ‘DSM Watch’ website, now called ‘Dx Revision Watch‘, is one of the better websites keeping track and critiquing the upcoming changes to psychiatry’s diagnostic manual, the DSM-5.

No more free academic labor

That's the message of BishopBlog, which has an important discussion of Elsevier's attempts to curtail open access publishing by the NIH. Best passage:

I want my response to this story to go beyond just tut-tutting and shaking my head.  Academics do have some power here. We provide the articles for Elsevier journals, and we do a lot of unpaid work reviewing and editing for them. None of us wants to restrict our opportunities for publishing, but these days there are a lot of outlets available. When deciding where to submit a paper, I suspect that most academics, like me, take little notice of who the publisher of a journal is. I focus more on whether the journal has a good editor, my prior experience of publication lags, and whether Open Access is available. But as from now, I shall include publisher in the criteria I adopt, and avoid Elsevier as far as I can. 

The Nazi Symbiosis: Notes to Sheila Faith Weiss' Excellent Book

Of late, The Neuro Times has been addressing various contentions related to the Neuro-Reality-Check Conference hosted at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.

Of particular interest to many may be Steve Fuller's contentions (here) that historians and humanists need to recognize the importance of neuroscience for their own work. This post is not the appropriate place for a reply to Fuller's argument. I do, however, think that Sheila Faith Weiss's recent book crystallizes a number of concerns that are central to critical approaches to neuroscience, especially contemporary claims (for example) about neuroscience and neurology in arguments by humanists, social scientists, and legal scholars. In this sense, neurohistorians, Fuller, as well as those of us who are critics of these approaches, may find passages from Sheila Faith Weiss's volume examining race science, eugenics, and genetics especially illuminating. I offer these excerpts from her work as a means for all of us to further explore the ethical and moral positions and limitations imposed upon all of science.

Sheila Faith Weiss's work is, of course, not directed at neuroscience. Nor is it directed at debates addressed here at The Neuro Times. It would be a disservice to her book to try to force it into these conversations. But various portions of her book may help those of us working on critical neuroscience (or celebrating neuroscience's achievements) to better understand some of the political questions at stake in our debates. These cliff-notes are no substitution for reading her excellent book, which will be reviewed on this blog shortly.

I hope these notes are sufficient to raise a number of questions about the symbiosis and bargains being struck between the human sciences and neuroscience today. I am not - NOT - suggesting any moral equivalence between the 'neuro-turn' and National Socialism. Our context is different. Our times are different. But as the Dictionary of Neurology's slogan goes: history may not repeat, but it might sometimes rhyme. Here, then, is Weiss's thesis which we may all use and consider wisely:-

“…what explains the ethically reprehensible path taken by human heredity and eugenics under National Socialism was the unique manner in which human genetics and politics served as “resources” for each other. This deadly symbiosis radicalized both the science of human heredity as well as Nazi racial policy; it accounts for the heinous practices of all too many German human geneticists. The damage caused by this symbiosis, I might add, is not completely undone; its effects continue to cast a long shadow on humanity’s collective memory of the twentieth century as well as the history of genetics. It reminds readers that the historically contingent nature of the symbiotic relationship between German human geneticists and the Nazi state notwithstanding, it is more important than ever to remain vigilant and avoid taking the first morally compromising steps in science – steps that can lead us in a direction that we surely would not wish to go.” (p. 18)  

Notes below.

Alex Rosenberg's "The Atheists Guide" reviewed

Richard Marshall reviews Alex Rosenberg's The Atheists Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions. A book worth contemplating; money passages:

Dan Dennett we might suppose is less sanguine than Critchley and his beard signals a different kind of hip from the Critchley angst. He’s a hard-nosed naturalist philosopher guy who loads up evolutionary theory to dispel the Cartesian idea of mind body dualism, sharing platforms with Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker and the evangelical wing of the Darwinists. It’s the brain, stupid, is what his slogan could be. Consciousness is just what our brains produce and he explains the mechanism in terms of what he calls an intentional stance. But after making the case that the brain works in terms of matter and purely causal laws he makes a move not unlike Critchley’s and in the last three chapters of his masterpiece Darwin’s Dangerous Idea explains that we are not brains. Person talk, he says, isn’t affected by brain talk, and the evolutionary acid that erodes meaning at brain state level doesn’t go further into the ontological realm of persons. As with Critchley, if there’s a nihilism on offer, it’s a pretty comfortable one, a tame and domesticated dog that is trained to bark only at targets its master doesn’t like. It kind of leaves everything where the atheist hoped it would be: evolution underwrites the rationalism of being an atheist but doesn’t corrode our human image.

Rosenberg, as I said at the start, is having none of this. His position is a mad-dog scientism. ‘Scientism’, in the past used as a term of abuse, he reclaims as a term of honour. What he argues is for a naturalism of reductive physicalism. Reductive physicalism claims that everything is just bosons and fermions. Physics explains these. They are without purpose, without meaning, are blind, law governed entities that have no encoded propositional or intentional scripts. So the problem is how we can understand ourselves as having intentionality, free-will and purpose if this is the case.

And then this...

But then, if there are no categorical imperatives (except linguistically) don’t abhorrent values become equal with decent ones? If there’s nothing in the naturalistic worldview to underwrite goodness then Hitler is equal to Gandhi. Rosenberg accepts this but says we shouldn’t worry. Rosenberg says we are all just hard-wired to be nice. Morals are for him a type of norm expressivism. There are facts paired to norms that form a core system that’s universal, shared as a kind of species bedrock. As a species we’ve evolved the same values. There are other facts then that these pairings interact with, local ones including eco systems. So Rosenberg argues that as a species we share the same values and and that all moral disagreement is about factual matters if it persists beyond clearing up background cultural things.

Go Rest, Young Man: Anne Stiles is Changing Everything We Ever Thought About Silas Weir Mitchell

The Neuro Times has long admired the terrific work of Anne Stiles. And finally she has published an excerpt from her work on Silas Weir Mitchell. She is slowly changing everything we thought we knew about vampires, men, neurasthenia, and the rest cure.

Although the Rest and West cures involved wildly different therapeutic strategies, both were designed to treat the same medical condition: neurasthenia. First described by American neurologist George Beard in 1869, neurasthenia’s symptoms included depression, insomnia, anxiety and migraines, among other complaints. The malady was not just an illness, he said, but also a mark of American cultural superiority. According to Beard, excessive nervousness was a byproduct of a highly evolved brain and nervous system. A “brain-worker” who excelled in business or the professions might experience nervous breakdowns if he overtaxed his intellect. His highly evolved wife and children could easily succumb to the same malady, particularly if they engaged in excessive study or “brain work.”

While men and women could experience the same neurasthenic symptoms, the different treatments they received reflected cultural stereotypes of the day. The Rest Cure ensured that women remained in their “proper” sphere: the home. Mitchell and his medical peers discouraged female patients from writing, excessive studying or any attempt to enter the professions. Mitchell told Gilman, who underwent the Rest Cure in 1887 during a bout of postpartum depression, to “live as domestic a life as possible” and “never to touch pen, brush or pencil again.”

By contrast, nervous men were encouraged to engage in vigorous physical activity out West, and to write about the experience. These activities would supposedly rehabilitate them for further success in commerce and intellectual pursuits. As Mitchell wrote in his 1871 book “Wear and Tear: Or Hints for the Overworked,” neurasthenic men could strengthen their nervous systems by engaging in “a sturdy contest with Nature.” Such a challenge would allow a man to test his willpower and reinforce his masculinity, which had been weakened by the feminizing effects of nervous illness. (Mitchell elsewhere lamented that under great nervous stress, “The strong man becomes like the average woman.”) The West Cure also promoted physical fitness, allowing patients to attain the manly, muscular build popular at the time.

Should junior scientists review manuscripts?

The Spandrel Shop asks the question and notes:

The desire to review manuscripts is something I often hear from either postdocs or junior PIs and I admit to seeking them out as a postdoc as well. I think it is a good idea to be involved in the review process from early on, as it helps improve one's own writing. It also sharpens your feel for what reviewers will look for when you submit something. However, I don't see the benefit of carrying a heavy review load pre-tenure. 

While I don't disagree with this view, I would add that I find the opportunity to examine other scholar's works-in-progress educational, illuminating, and humbling. There are many smart people out there, and it is very nice to encounter them anonymously and to have something to do with making their work clearer and better. Peer reviewing can also be self-validating. It establishes a valuable sense of belong to a community while also affirming your expertise. I guess my advice would be this: review as often as is reasonable and always remember that there is another person on the other side who will likely feel hurt and humiliated by anything you say that is critical.

A Heart of Darkness

We Were Wanderers On A Prehistoric Earth from James W Griffiths on Vimeo.


Conrad and nature resurface, and we find some truth through literature and film.

Will the Director Please Stand-up: Neuro-Cinema Coming Soon to a Theater Near You

Apparently Saint John’s Health Center will soon launch "Neuro-cinema and Beyond", a three-part film series focused on the brain. They will also be introducing "neuro.bytes": 

Directors needed

Additionally, in an effort to create awareness on a national level, internet video spots called “Neuro.bytes” will be aired online and through various other outlets. These video shorts include interviews from Los Angeles-area residents and physician and employees at Saint John’s and JWCI. Such questions asked are:

• What is your favorite brain function and why?
• Where does creativity come from?
• What is the most frustrating thing about your brain?
• If you could enhance one aspect of your brain, what would it be?

Philosopher Steve Fuller Defends Neuro-History: Neuro-Reality-Check (Part V)

Guest Author, Professor Steve Fuller 

Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology  Department of Sociology, Warwick University

Thanks for drawing attention to my general education course focused on the brain (PDF here).  While it does indeed make the brain appear to be the focal point of Western intellectual history, it is not guilty of some of the other crimes charged in Casper’s essay, especially the attachment to a bio-evolutionary meta-narrative. In fact, one of the historically interesting features of the brain (and neuroscience, more generally, to speak somewhat anachronistically) is its semi-detachment from foundational problems in biology, while always remaining central to defining the human condition. And whatever one makes of McGilchrist’s split-brain historiography, it is interesting to see just how many of the defining debates in Western culture feed back into speculations about the human brain, the science of which has been consistently pursued only over the past couple of generations.

In this respect, the significance of the brain as a cultural trace (or ‘boundary object’) predates and has related variously to its strict scientific study.  As a matter of fact, the nascent field of ‘neurohistory’ has been largely preoccupied with the long-term effects of significant shifts in dietary regimes. The people undergoing those shifts did not understand – or perhaps even studied – the effects but noted them and tried to promote or inhibit them in various ways, in line with their other more deliberately pursued agendas. What neurohistory promises here is a kind of long (or deep) history of collective mood formation and change. I see it as a materialist version of psychohistory, somewhat akin to the Annales School and, more generally, historical psychology and collective memory studies – all of which were formed in the late 19th and early 20th century, long before the current (even if early) stages of neuroscience.

Of course, particular neurohistorical theses may be true, false, undecidable or simply not worth pursuing. But Casper appears to object to the very idea of neurohistory. His grounds seem to be twofold: (1) The research frontier changes too quickly for historians to draw any lasting intellectual sustenance from neuroscience (or perhaps even tell what the frontier is); (2) The research itself is suspiciously fashionable, with lots of money and power propping it up, perhaps for insidious ends, and probably not in proportion to its true intellectual merit.  I think both of these grounds are self-incapacitating for the critical historian of science. Indeed, Casper’s rhetoric runs dangerously close to turning the historian into an impotent bystander to his own times, carping from the sidelines, Cassandra-like. To be sure, such roles do encourage a certain amount of positive feedback, so I understand if Casper or perhaps readers of The Neuro Times do not find Cassandra such an unattractive precedent.

A new e-book by Tom Stafford

Tom Stafford publishes an e-book, which you can buy at whatever price you want. The description:

These are dreams in which you know you are dreaming, and can take control of the reality of your dreams. Nights of adventure, problem solving, exploration and indulgence can all be yours on the wild frontier of your own consciousness.

The Neuro Times has been a fan for a long time of Mind Hacks, where Stafford blogs. Mind Hacks is undoubtedly one of the most forward looking blogs in the business. In the future, they will be regarded as an obvious model for academic publishing - they combine rigor, expertise, professionalism and marketing all in one package. Just over the last two weeks we have seen essays on the ethics of drone wars, Tolstoy, nodding syndrome, dementia, and copyright. Its an impressive and original output. And forward looking in the 'new' old Age of publish or perish.

Props to Prefrontal.org: First Laugh of the New Year

Craig Bennett, at Prefrontal.org, has an extremely funny cartoon about fMRI. It is too good to copy and paste here! But it goes with this and this.

Is this the origins of the expression 'becoming with'?

Edward O. Wilson, Biophili, 1984, p. 139 

I have argued in this book that we are human in good part because of the particular way we affiliate with other organisms. They are the matrix in which the human mind originated and is permanently rooted, and they offer the challenge and freedom innately sought.  To the extent that each person can feel like a naturalist, the old excitement of the untrammeled world will be regained.  I offer this as a formula of re-enchantment to invigorate poetry and myth: mysterious and little known organisms live within walking distance of where you sit. Splendor awaits in minute proportions.