Until a few days ago, the situation seemed fairly clear: Hauser was guilty of several counts of misconduct, according to a Harvard committee, and there was no reason to doubt that judgement. Although the details of the investigation were never made public, it was generally believed that he'd fabricated the data from at least one experiment, as I explained previously.[A paper Hauser recently retracted], published in 2002, reported that rhesus monkeys can distinguish a novel string of sounds from a control sequence, an issue which has important bearing on their capacity for language. The novel and control sound sequences must be alternated... But the video of the experiment contains only novel sequences.Wade also quoted two former students of Hauser's who praised his "unimpeachable scientific integrity” and who said his critics were “scholars known to be virulently opposed to his research program”, and quotes an anonymous Harvard academic as saying the investigation was "lawyer-driven", unnecessarily long, and unfair to Hauser.
Critics like Dr. Altmann at first charged that the controls had never been done, and that since control conditions are reported in the paper, they must have been concocted. But Altmann... now says his earlier accusation was “heavily dependent on the knowledge that Harvard found Professor Hauser guilty of misconduct.” When he gave the issue further thought, he saw an alternative explanation.In the experimental setup, the monkey is in a soundproof box. The researchers can see the computer is playing a sound but cannot hear it. What could have happened is that the computer, through a programming error, substituted a second test sound for the control sounds, and the researchers, unaware of the problem, wrote up their report assuming the control sounds had been played...
Even so, it is far from clear how the data on the video led to the reported results. This would be a devastating error, but not fraud. “It is conceivable that the data were not fabricated, but rather that the experiment was set up wrong, and that nobody realized this until after it was published,” Dr. Altmann wrote.
...there has been no stepping back. As I make very clear... the information I have received, when taken at face value, leads me to maintain my belief that the data that had been published in the journal Cognition was effectively a fiction - that is, there was no basis in the recorded data for those data. I concluded, and I continue to conclude, that the data were most likely fabricated...Essentially, Altmann says that while in theory Hauser could have made an innocent mistake, Harvard's investigation specifically ruled out this and concluded that no innocent explanation was possible.
It is true that I did write here that there existed an alternative explanation for what happened, based on a sequence of errors. However, for that interpretation to be correct ... the information I had been given, by Harvard’s Dean, would have to have been incorrect.
So at the end of the day, it comes down to this: Do I believe what the Dean [of Harvard] told me were the results of a long, careful, and painstaking investigation, or do I simply make up a “Just So Story” instead?...What are we to make of all this? The issue is extremely important - the "fabrication" of data in the Cognition paper was the most serious allegation against Hauser, and (to my knowledge) the only thing which proved that his misconduct was deliberate as opposed to sloppy.
This entire saga is about the misrepresentation of truth. It is ironic that the journalists who profess to expose truth place such little value in it.
Until a few days ago, the situation seemed fairly clear: Hauser was guilty of several counts of misconduct, according to a Harvard committee, and there was no reason to doubt that judgement. Although the details of the investigation were never made public, it was generally believed that he'd fabricated the data from at least one experiment, as I explained previously.[A paper Hauser recently retracted], published in 2002, reported that rhesus monkeys can distinguish a novel string of sounds from a control sequence, an issue which has important bearing on their capacity for language. The novel and control sound sequences must be alternated... But the video of the experiment contains only novel sequences.Wade also quoted two former students of Hauser's who praised his "unimpeachable scientific integrity” and who said his critics were “scholars known to be virulently opposed to his research program”, and quotes an anonymous Harvard academic as saying the investigation was "lawyer-driven", unnecessarily long, and unfair to Hauser.
Critics like Dr. Altmann at first charged that the controls had never been done, and that since control conditions are reported in the paper, they must have been concocted. But Altmann... now says his earlier accusation was “heavily dependent on the knowledge that Harvard found Professor Hauser guilty of misconduct.” When he gave the issue further thought, he saw an alternative explanation.In the experimental setup, the monkey is in a soundproof box. The researchers can see the computer is playing a sound but cannot hear it. What could have happened is that the computer, through a programming error, substituted a second test sound for the control sounds, and the researchers, unaware of the problem, wrote up their report assuming the control sounds had been played...
Even so, it is far from clear how the data on the video led to the reported results. This would be a devastating error, but not fraud. “It is conceivable that the data were not fabricated, but rather that the experiment was set up wrong, and that nobody realized this until after it was published,” Dr. Altmann wrote.
...there has been no stepping back. As I make very clear... the information I have received, when taken at face value, leads me to maintain my belief that the data that had been published in the journal Cognition was effectively a fiction - that is, there was no basis in the recorded data for those data. I concluded, and I continue to conclude, that the data were most likely fabricated...Essentially, Altmann says that while in theory Hauser could have made an innocent mistake, Harvard's investigation specifically ruled out this and concluded that no innocent explanation was possible.
It is true that I did write here that there existed an alternative explanation for what happened, based on a sequence of errors. However, for that interpretation to be correct ... the information I had been given, by Harvard’s Dean, would have to have been incorrect.
So at the end of the day, it comes down to this: Do I believe what the Dean [of Harvard] told me were the results of a long, careful, and painstaking investigation, or do I simply make up a “Just So Story” instead?...What are we to make of all this? The issue is extremely important - the "fabrication" of data in the Cognition paper was the most serious allegation against Hauser, and (to my knowledge) the only thing which proved that his misconduct was deliberate as opposed to sloppy.
This entire saga is about the misrepresentation of truth. It is ironic that the journalists who profess to expose truth place such little value in it.
According to the BBC (and many others)...Libido problems 'brain not mind'The research in question (which hasn't been published yet) has been covered very well over at The Neurocritic. Basically the authors took some women with a diagnosis of "Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder" (HSDD), and some normal women, put them in an fMRI scanner and showed them porn. Different areas of the brain lit up.
Scans appear to show differences in brain functioning in women with persistently low sex drives, claim researchers.The US scientists behind the study suggest it provides solid evidence that the problem can have a physical origin.
According to the BBC (and many others)...Libido problems 'brain not mind'The research in question (which hasn't been published yet) has been covered very well over at The Neurocritic. Basically the authors took some women with a diagnosis of "Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder" (HSDD), and some normal women, put them in an fMRI scanner and showed them porn. Different areas of the brain lit up.
Scans appear to show differences in brain functioning in women with persistently low sex drives, claim researchers.The US scientists behind the study suggest it provides solid evidence that the problem can have a physical origin.
Korsakoff's was memorably illustrated on House (Season 1 Episode 10, to be exact). Here's a clip; unfortunately, it's overdubbed in Russian, but you can hear the original if you pay attention.
The patient's stories are tragic, although we can take solace in the fact that they presumably don't know that. The confabulations ranged from the mildly odd:Patient HS was a 59-year-old man admitted after being found disoriented in the street. [he] had undergone clipping of an ACoA aneurysm 25 years previously. He had been left with a profound confusional state, memory impairment, and confabulation. As a result, HS had been unable to return to work and had spent at least part of the intervening period homeless...To the surreal:
He... continued to produce spontaneous confabulations involving temporal distortions (believing that he had undergone surgery only 18 months previously) and other source memory distortions (confusing memories of interactions with the examiner with interactions with other patients).
GN was disoriented to place, situation, and time and produced consistent confabulations, for example, believing that the year was 1972 and that he was in a hospital in America after being shot. He regularly produced markedly bizarre confabulations, for example, reporting that he had attended a party the night before and met a woman with a bee’s head. He frequently attemptedAnyway, in order to try to discover the mechanism of confabulation, they gave the patients some memory tests. The results were clear: the confabulating patients had no problems remembering stuff, but were unable to tell where they remembered it from.
to act upon his mistaken beliefs, for example, attempting to leave the hospital to attend meetings.
But Turner et al found that this lack of awareness for the source of information, wasn't just limited to when things happened. The confabulating patients were also unable to tell the difference between things they'd actually heard, and things they'd only imagined.
Turner MS, Cipolotti L, & Shallice T (2010). Spontaneous confabulation, temporal context confusion and reality monitoring: A study of three patients with anterior communicating artery aneurysms. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society : JINS, 1-11 PMID: 20961471
Korsakoff's was memorably illustrated on House (Season 1 Episode 10, to be exact). Here's a clip; unfortunately, it's overdubbed in Russian, but you can hear the original if you pay attention.The patient's stories are tragic, although we can take solace in the fact that they presumably don't know that. The confabulations ranged from the mildly odd:Patient HS was a 59-year-old man admitted after being found disoriented in the street. [he] had undergone clipping of an ACoA aneurysm 25 years previously. He had been left with a profound confusional state, memory impairment, and confabulation. As a result, HS had been unable to return to work and had spent at least part of the intervening period homeless...To the surreal:
He... continued to produce spontaneous confabulations involving temporal distortions (believing that he had undergone surgery only 18 months previously) and other source memory distortions (confusing memories of interactions with the examiner with interactions with other patients).
GN was disoriented to place, situation, and time and produced consistent confabulations, for example, believing that the year was 1972 and that he was in a hospital in America after being shot. He regularly produced markedly bizarre confabulations, for example, reporting that he had attended a party the night before and met a woman with a bee’s head. He frequently attemptedAnyway, in order to try to discover the mechanism of confabulation, they gave the patients some memory tests. The results were clear: the confabulating patients had no problems remembering stuff, but were unable to tell where they remembered it from.
to act upon his mistaken beliefs, for example, attempting to leave the hospital to attend meetings.
But Turner et al found that this lack of awareness for the source of information, wasn't just limited to when things happened. The confabulating patients were also unable to tell the difference between things they'd actually heard, and things they'd only imagined.Turner MS, Cipolotti L, & Shallice T (2010). Spontaneous confabulation, temporal context confusion and reality monitoring: A study of three patients with anterior communicating artery aneurysms. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society : JINS, 1-11 PMID: 20961471
Back in 1991, Mark Knopfler sang"Sex and money are my major kicksNow twenty years later a team of French neuroscientists have followed up on this observation with a neuroimaging study: The Architecture of Reward Value Coding in the Human Orbitofrontal Cortex.
Get me in a fight I like the dirty tricks"
Two categories (high and low intensity) of erotic pictures and monetary gains were used. Nudity being the main criteria driving the reward value of erotic stimuli, we separated them into a “low intensity” group displaying women in underwear or bathing suits and a “high intensity” group displaying naked women in an inviting posture. Each erotic picture was presented only once to avoid habituation. A similar element of surprise was introduced for the monetary rewards by randomly varying the amounts at stake: the low amounts were €1-3 and the high amounts were €10-12.You've gotta love neuroscience. Although the authors declined to provide any samples of the stimuli used.
Anyway, what happened?As hypothesized, monetary rewards specifically recruited the anterior lateral OFC ... In contrast, erotic rewards elicited activity specifically in the posterior part of the lateral OFC straddling [fnaar fnaar] the posterior and lateral orbital gyri. These results demonstrate a double dissociation between monetary/erotic rewards and the anterior/posterior OFC ... Among erotic-specific areas, a large cluster was also present in the medial OFC, encompassing the medial orbital gyrus, the straight [how appropriate] gyrus, and the most ventral part of the superior frontal gyrus. [immature emphasis mine]In other words, the posterior-primitive, anterior-abstract relationship did seem to hold, at least if you accept that money is more abstract than porn. (Many other areas were activated by both kinds of rewards, such as the ventral striatum, but these were less interesting as they've been identified in many previous studies.)
Sescousse G, Redouté J, & Dreher JC (2010). The architecture of reward value coding in the human orbitofrontal cortex. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 30 (39), 13095-104 PMID: 20881127
