Pharmaceutical Company Threatens Blogger

Boiron, a multinational pharmaceutical company, have threatened an Italian blogger with legal action, the BMJ reports.



Many people are concerned when big pharmaceutical companies do this kind of thing. So I don't think we should make any exception merely because Boiron's pharmaceuticals happen to be homeopathic ones.



Samuel Riva, who blogs (in Italian) at blogzero.it, put up some articles critical of homeopathy

which included pictures of Boiron’s blockbuster homoeopathic product Oscillococcinum, marketed as a remedy against flu symptoms. The pictures were accompanied by captions, which joked about the total absence of any active molecules in homoeopathic preparations

Boiron wrote to Riva's internet provider threatening legal action, if the offending references to Boiron weren't taken down. They also wanted them to lock Riva out of his blog, the BMJ says. In response Riva removed the references to Boiron, including the pictures and captions, but kept the posts on homeopathy in general.



Hmmm.



Above you can see a new picture I made of a Boiron product, with some captions you may find interesting. I've made sure to limit these to quotes from Wikipedia, and from Boiron USA's own website, and some simple mathematical calculations.



Beyond that, I make no comment whatsoever.



Turone F (2011). Homoeopathy multinational Boiron threatens amateur Italian blogger. BMJ (Clinical research ed.), 343 PMID: 21840920

Pharmaceutical Company Threatens Blogger

Boiron, a multinational pharmaceutical company, have threatened an Italian blogger with legal action, the BMJ reports.



Many people are concerned when big pharmaceutical companies do this kind of thing. So I don't think we should make any exception merely because Boiron's pharmaceuticals happen to be homeopathic ones.



Samuel Riva, who blogs (in Italian) at blogzero.it, put up some articles critical of homeopathy

which included pictures of Boiron’s blockbuster homoeopathic product Oscillococcinum, marketed as a remedy against flu symptoms. The pictures were accompanied by captions, which joked about the total absence of any active molecules in homoeopathic preparations

Boiron wrote to Riva's internet provider threatening legal action, if the offending references to Boiron weren't taken down. They also wanted them to lock Riva out of his blog, the BMJ says. In response Riva removed the references to Boiron, including the pictures and captions, but kept the posts on homeopathy in general.



Hmmm.



Above you can see a new picture I made of a Boiron product, with some captions you may find interesting. I've made sure to limit these to quotes from Wikipedia, and from Boiron USA's own website, and some simple mathematical calculations.



Beyond that, I make no comment whatsoever.



Turone F (2011). Homoeopathy multinational Boiron threatens amateur Italian blogger. BMJ (Clinical research ed.), 343 PMID: 21840920

A Ghostwriter Speaks

PLoS ONE offers the confessions of a former medical ghostwriter: Being the Ghost in the Machine.





The article (which is open access and short, so well worth a read) explains how Linda Logdberg became a medical writer; what excited her about the job; what she actually did; and what made her eventually give it up.



Ghostwriting of course has a bad press at the moment and it's recently been banned by some leading research centres. Ghostwriting certainly is concerning, because of what it implies about the process leading up the publication.



However, it doesn't create bad science. A bad paper is bad because of what it says, not because of who (ghost)wrote it. Real scientists can write bad papers without a ghostwriter's help.



When pharmaceutical companies pay a ghostwriter, they are not doing this to get access to special dark arts that real scientists are innocent of. As far as I can see, it's just more efficient to use a specialist writer to do your scientific sins, when you're doing it all the time.



Rather like every evil sorcerer has an apprentice to do the day-to-day work of sacrificing animals and mixing potions.



Logdberg says:

My career came to an end over a job involving revising a manuscript supporting the use of a drug for attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), with a duration of action that fell between that of shorter- and longer-acting formulations.



However, I have two children with ADHD, and I failed to see the benefit of a drug that would wear off right at suppertime, rather than a few hours before or a few hours after. Suppertime is a time in ADHD households when tempers and homework arguments are often at their worst.



...Attempts to discuss my misgivings with the [medical] contact met with the curt admonition to ‘‘just write it.’’ But perhaps because this particular disorder was so close to home, I was unwilling to turn this ugly duckling of a ‘‘me-too’’ drug into a marketable swan.

Many scientists will recall being in that kind of situation, albeit in a different context.



When writing a grant application, for example, you are almost literally trying to sell your proposed research to the awarding committee, on several levels. You need to sell the importance of the scientific question; the likely practical benefits of the research; the chance of success using your methods; what makes you the right person to do this work, and so on.



Writing a paper is much the same, although in this case you're selling research you've already done, and the data you collected.



Turning ugly ducklings into fundable, or publishable, swans, is part and parcel of modern science. Of course, the ducklings are not always as ugly as in the case Logdberg describes, but they are rarely as beautiful as they eventually end up.



Logdberg, L. (2011). Being the Ghost in the Machine: A Medical Ghostwriter's Personal View PLoS Medicine, 8 (8) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1001071

A Ghostwriter Speaks

PLoS ONE offers the confessions of a former medical ghostwriter: Being the Ghost in the Machine.





The article (which is open access and short, so well worth a read) explains how Linda Logdberg became a medical writer; what excited her about the job; what she actually did; and what made her eventually give it up.



Ghostwriting of course has a bad press at the moment and it's recently been banned by some leading research centres. Ghostwriting certainly is concerning, because of what it implies about the process leading up the publication.



However, it doesn't create bad science. A bad paper is bad because of what it says, not because of who (ghost)wrote it. Real scientists can write bad papers without a ghostwriter's help.



When pharmaceutical companies pay a ghostwriter, they are not doing this to get access to special dark arts that real scientists are innocent of. As far as I can see, it's just more efficient to use a specialist writer to do your scientific sins, when you're doing it all the time.



Rather like every evil sorcerer has an apprentice to do the day-to-day work of sacrificing animals and mixing potions.



Logdberg says:

My career came to an end over a job involving revising a manuscript supporting the use of a drug for attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), with a duration of action that fell between that of shorter- and longer-acting formulations.



However, I have two children with ADHD, and I failed to see the benefit of a drug that would wear off right at suppertime, rather than a few hours before or a few hours after. Suppertime is a time in ADHD households when tempers and homework arguments are often at their worst.



...Attempts to discuss my misgivings with the [medical] contact met with the curt admonition to ‘‘just write it.’’ But perhaps because this particular disorder was so close to home, I was unwilling to turn this ugly duckling of a ‘‘me-too’’ drug into a marketable swan.

Many scientists will recall being in that kind of situation, albeit in a different context.



When writing a grant application, for example, you are almost literally trying to sell your proposed research to the awarding committee, on several levels. You need to sell the importance of the scientific question; the likely practical benefits of the research; the chance of success using your methods; what makes you the right person to do this work, and so on.



Writing a paper is much the same, although in this case you're selling research you've already done, and the data you collected.



Turning ugly ducklings into fundable, or publishable, swans, is part and parcel of modern science. Of course, the ducklings are not always as ugly as in the case Logdberg describes, but they are rarely as beautiful as they eventually end up.



Logdberg, L. (2011). Being the Ghost in the Machine: A Medical Ghostwriter's Personal View PLoS Medicine, 8 (8) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1001071

Debating Greenfield

British neuroscientist Susan Greenfield regrets the recent controversy over certain of her remarks, and calls for a serious debate over "mind change" -

"Mind change" is an appropriately neutral, umbrella concept encompassing the diverse issues of whether and how modern technologies may be changing the functional state of the human brain, both for good and bad.

Very well, here goes. I wonder if Greenfield will reply.



As Greenfield points out, the human brain is plastic and interacts with the environment. Indeed, this is how we are able to learn and adapt to anything. Were our brains entirely unresponsive to what happens to them we would have no memory and probably no behaviour at all.



The modern world is changing your brain, in other words.



However, the same is true of every other era. The Victorian era, the Roman Empire, the invention of agriculture - human brains were never the same after those came along.



Because the brain is where behaviour happens, any change in behaviour must be accompanied by a change in the brain. By talking about how behaviour changes, we will, implicitly, also be discussing the brain.



However it doesn't work in reverse. Changes in the brain can't be assumed to mean changes in behaviour. Greenfield cites, for example, this paper which purports to show reductions in the grey matter volume of certain areas of the brain cortex in Chinese students with internet addiction compared to those without.



The obvious comment here is that it doesn't prove causality, as it is only a correlation. Maybe the reason they got addicted was because they already had these brain changes.



However, there is a more subtle point. Even if these were a direct consequence of excessive internet use, it wouldn't mean that the internet use was changing behaviour.



We have no idea what a slight decrease in grey matter volume in the cerebellum, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and supplementary motor area would do to cognition and behaviour. It might not do anything.



My point here is that rather than worrying about the brain, we ought to focus on behaviour. Because that is also focussing on the brain, but it's focussing on the aspects of brain function that actually matter.



Greenfield then poses three questions.

1. Could sustained and often obsessive game-playing, in which actions have no consequences, enhance recklessness in real life?

It's possible that it could, although I don't think we do live in an especially reckless society, given that crime rates are lower now than they have been for 20 years.



However, the question assumes that game playing has no consequences. Yet in-game actions do have in-game consequences. To a non-gamer, these may seem like no consequences, because they're not real.



Yet in the game, they're perfectly real, and if you spend 12 hours a day playing that game, and all your friends do as well - you are going to care about that. Those consequences will matter, to you, and with luck, you'll learn not to be so impulsive in the future.



In World of Warcraft, for example, actions have all too many consequences. If you impulsively decide to attack an enemy in the middle of a raid, you could cause a wipe, which would, quite possibly, ruin everyone's evening and get you a reputation as an oaf.



Exactly as your reputation would suffer if you and your friends went for an evening at the opera, and you stood up in the middle and shouted a profanity. Ah, but that's real life, the response goes. Is it? Is a performance in which hundreds of people sit solemnly, while grown adults dress up and pretend to be singing gods and fairies on the instructions of a deceased anti-semite, any more real than this?

3. How can young people develop empathy if they conduct relationships via a medium which does not allow them the opportunity to gain full experience of eye contact, interpret voice tone or body language, and learn how and when to give and receive hugs?

I do not think that this accurately represents the experience of most children today. However, assuming that it were true, what would be the problem?



If everyone's relationships were conducted online, surely it would be more important to learn how to navigate the online world, than it would be to learn how to interpret body language, which (webcams aside), you would never see, or need to see.



If the brain is plastic and adapts to the environment, as Greenfield argues, then surely the fact that it is adapting to the information age is neither surprising nor concerning. If anything, we ought to be trying to help the process along, to make ourselves better adapted. It would be more worrying if it didn't adapt.



Some might be concerned by this. Surely, there is value in the old way of doing things, value that would be lost in the new era. Unless one can point to definite reasons why the new state of affairs is inherently worse than the old - not just different from it - it is hard to distinguish these concerns from the simple feeling of nostalgia over the past.



The same point could have equally well been made at any time in history. When our ancestors first settled down to farm crops, an early conservative might have lamented - "Young people today are growing up with no idea of how to stab a mammoth in the eye with a spear. All they know is how to plant, water and raise this new-fangled 'wheat'."

Debating Greenfield

British neuroscientist Susan Greenfield regrets the recent controversy over certain of her remarks, and calls for a serious debate over "mind change" -

"Mind change" is an appropriately neutral, umbrella concept encompassing the diverse issues of whether and how modern technologies may be changing the functional state of the human brain, both for good and bad.

Very well, here goes. I wonder if Greenfield will reply.



As Greenfield points out, the human brain is plastic and interacts with the environment. Indeed, this is how we are able to learn and adapt to anything. Were our brains entirely unresponsive to what happens to them we would have no memory and probably no behaviour at all.



The modern world is changing your brain, in other words.



However, the same is true of every other era. The Victorian era, the Roman Empire, the invention of agriculture - human brains were never the same after those came along.



Because the brain is where behaviour happens, any change in behaviour must be accompanied by a change in the brain. By talking about how behaviour changes, we will, implicitly, also be discussing the brain.



However it doesn't work in reverse. Changes in the brain can't be assumed to mean changes in behaviour. Greenfield cites, for example, this paper which purports to show reductions in the grey matter volume of certain areas of the brain cortex in Chinese students with internet addiction compared to those without.



The obvious comment here is that it doesn't prove causality, as it is only a correlation. Maybe the reason they got addicted was because they already had these brain changes.



However, there is a more subtle point. Even if these were a direct consequence of excessive internet use, it wouldn't mean that the internet use was changing behaviour.



We have no idea what a slight decrease in grey matter volume in the cerebellum, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and supplementary motor area would do to cognition and behaviour. It might not do anything.



My point here is that rather than worrying about the brain, we ought to focus on behaviour. Because that is also focussing on the brain, but it's focussing on the aspects of brain function that actually matter.



Greenfield then poses three questions.

1. Could sustained and often obsessive game-playing, in which actions have no consequences, enhance recklessness in real life?

It's possible that it could, although I don't think we do live in an especially reckless society, given that crime rates are lower now than they have been for 20 years.



However, the question assumes that game playing has no consequences. Yet in-game actions do have in-game consequences. To a non-gamer, these may seem like no consequences, because they're not real.



Yet in the game, they're perfectly real, and if you spend 12 hours a day playing that game, and all your friends do as well - you are going to care about that. Those consequences will matter, to you, and with luck, you'll learn not to be so impulsive in the future.



In World of Warcraft, for example, actions have all too many consequences. If you impulsively decide to attack an enemy in the middle of a raid, you could cause a wipe, which would, quite possibly, ruin everyone's evening and get you a reputation as an oaf.



Exactly as your reputation would suffer if you and your friends went for an evening at the opera, and you stood up in the middle and shouted a profanity. Ah, but that's real life, the response goes. Is it? Is a performance in which hundreds of people sit solemnly, while grown adults dress up and pretend to be singing gods and fairies on the instructions of a deceased anti-semite, any more real than this?

3. How can young people develop empathy if they conduct relationships via a medium which does not allow them the opportunity to gain full experience of eye contact, interpret voice tone or body language, and learn how and when to give and receive hugs?

I do not think that this accurately represents the experience of most children today. However, assuming that it were true, what would be the problem?



If everyone's relationships were conducted online, surely it would be more important to learn how to navigate the online world, than it would be to learn how to interpret body language, which (webcams aside), you would never see, or need to see.



If the brain is plastic and adapts to the environment, as Greenfield argues, then surely the fact that it is adapting to the information age is neither surprising nor concerning. If anything, we ought to be trying to help the process along, to make ourselves better adapted. It would be more worrying if it didn't adapt.



Some might be concerned by this. Surely, there is value in the old way of doing things, value that would be lost in the new era. Unless one can point to definite reasons why the new state of affairs is inherently worse than the old - not just different from it - it is hard to distinguish these concerns from the simple feeling of nostalgia over the past.



The same point could have equally well been made at any time in history. When our ancestors first settled down to farm crops, an early conservative might have lamented - "Young people today are growing up with no idea of how to stab a mammoth in the eye with a spear. All they know is how to plant, water and raise this new-fangled 'wheat'."

What Big Eyes You Have

According to the BBC, a new study has found that northern peoples have bigger eyes - and bigger brains.


Actually, the paper in question talked about eyes but didn't make much of the brain finding, which is confined to the Supplement. Nonetheless, they did find an effect on brain size too. Peoples living further from the equator have larger eye sockets and also larger total cranial capacity (brain volume), apparantly. The authors include Robin Dunbar of "Dunbar's Number" fame.

Their idea is that humans evolved larger eyes because further from the equator, there's on average less light, so you need bigger eyes to collect more light and see well.

They looked at 19th century skulls stored in museum collections, and measured the size of the eye sockets (orbits). They did this by filling them with a bunch of little glass balls and counting how many balls fit. They had a total of 73 "healthy adult" skulls from 12 different places, ranging from Scandinavia to Kenya.

Latitude essentially meant northern-ness because only one population (Australian Aborigines) were from far south of the equator.

Total brain size also increased with latitude, but eye size increased even faster, so the eye:brain ratio increased. They don't really discuss the brain size finding, except to suggest that it might be accounted for by increased visual cortex (though there's no direct evidence of that), but here it is, showing latitude vs. cranial capacity in ml.

The idea that northern peoples are brainier unfortunately has a long history. For example, it's been suggested that the coldness of northern climes meant that life was harder, so people evolved to be smarter to survive.

The heat of the Sahara was easy living compared to the deadly horrors of an English winter, in other words. Hmm.

The idea that higher latitudes are darker, so you'd need bigger eyes, and then a bigger brain (at least the visual parts of the brain) to process what you see, is certainly more plausible than that theory. However, the data in this paper seem pretty scanty.

Measuring skulls by filling them with little balls was cutting edge neuroscience in the 19th century. However, nowadays, we have MRI scanners. Although usually intended to image the brain, many MRI scans of the head also give an excellent image of the skull and eyes. Millions of people of all races get MRI scans every year.

Nowadays, people have medical records, so we can tell exactly how healthy people are. The people who became these skulls in a museum were said to be healthy, but how healthy a 19th century Indian or Kenyan could hope to be, by modern standards, I'm not sure. Certainly there's an excellent chance that they were malnourished and I suspect this would make your eyes and skull smaller.

Pearce, E., & Dunbar, R. (2011). Latitudinal variation in light levels drives human visual system size Biology Letters DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2011.0570

What Big Eyes You Have

According to the BBC, a new study has found that northern peoples have bigger eyes - and bigger brains.


Actually, the paper in question talked about eyes but didn't make much of the brain finding, which is confined to the Supplement. Nonetheless, they did find an effect on brain size too. Peoples living further from the equator have larger eye sockets and also larger total cranial capacity (brain volume), apparantly. The authors include Robin Dunbar of "Dunbar's Number" fame.

Their idea is that humans evolved larger eyes because further from the equator, there's on average less light, so you need bigger eyes to collect more light and see well.

They looked at 19th century skulls stored in museum collections, and measured the size of the eye sockets (orbits). They did this by filling them with a bunch of little glass balls and counting how many balls fit. They had a total of 73 "healthy adult" skulls from 12 different places, ranging from Scandinavia to Kenya.

Latitude essentially meant northern-ness because only one population (Australian Aborigines) were from far south of the equator.

Total brain size also increased with latitude, but eye size increased even faster, so the eye:brain ratio increased. They don't really discuss the brain size finding, except to suggest that it might be accounted for by increased visual cortex (though there's no direct evidence of that), but here it is, showing latitude vs. cranial capacity in ml.

The idea that northern peoples are brainier unfortunately has a long history. For example, it's been suggested that the coldness of northern climes meant that life was harder, so people evolved to be smarter to survive.

The heat of the Sahara was easy living compared to the deadly horrors of an English winter, in other words. Hmm.

The idea that higher latitudes are darker, so you'd need bigger eyes, and then a bigger brain (at least the visual parts of the brain) to process what you see, is certainly more plausible than that theory. However, the data in this paper seem pretty scanty.

Measuring skulls by filling them with little balls was cutting edge neuroscience in the 19th century. However, nowadays, we have MRI scanners. Although usually intended to image the brain, many MRI scans of the head also give an excellent image of the skull and eyes. Millions of people of all races get MRI scans every year.

Nowadays, people have medical records, so we can tell exactly how healthy people are. The people who became these skulls in a museum were said to be healthy, but how healthy a 19th century Indian or Kenyan could hope to be, by modern standards, I'm not sure. Certainly there's an excellent chance that they were malnourished and I suspect this would make your eyes and skull smaller.

Pearce, E., & Dunbar, R. (2011). Latitudinal variation in light levels drives human visual system size Biology Letters DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2011.0570

Ban These Sick Ape-Man Frankensteins

According to a new report, urgent action is required to stop scientists creating a monstrous race of apes with fully functional human brains (just as Christine O'Donnell warned us about those mice), thus causing Planet Of The Apes to come true.

OK, that's not quite what the Academy of Medical Sciences said. But judging from most of the media coverage, you might think it was.

The report is actually about "Animals containing human material" and it notes that under British law, experiments of this kind are covered by generic animal research rules, but there are no special animal-human regulations.

Should there be?

I think there should be. We as a society allow experiments on animals or animal embryos that we don't allow on humans, even on human embyros. Clearly, we need to decide what we're going to do about organisms that have both human and animal DNA, or whatever. This doesn't mean restricting it - to clear up the rules could also facilitate such research, by making it explicit what is allowed.

However, we should tread carefully here. This is an area where our intuitions can lead us astray.

Although we have absolutely no idea how to make an animal-human "hybrid", or even whether it's possible at all, the very idea of it has many people worried. It's probably a case of the uncanny valley and lots of cultural baggage (Planet of the Apes et al).

So, for whatever reason, we have a hang-up about making monstrous ape-men. Fair enough. So long as we remember that this is entirely hypothetical, and that it might, for all we know, be literally impossible.

Yet other things in this debate are very real. Over-zealous regulation of research could easily end up delaying, say, a cure for Alzheimer's for, say, 10 years. That would be dooming tens of millions of people to suffering and death.

The problem is, that's hard to picture. It's hard to imagine how bad Alzheimer's is unless you have personal experience. Even if you do, it's hard to multiply that badness by ten million anonymous, hypothetical people. "One ape-man is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic".

Delaying science is easy to do (for politicians), and hard to picture why it's bad. Whereas "a monstrous ape-man" is the exact opposite. Easy to imagine - just look at the media interest in this story - yet nowhere close to being reality.

This is a problem. The human mind and the way we think about these issues is a problem. Even when that mind is safely inside a nice normal human skull.

Ban These Sick Ape-Man Frankensteins

According to a new report, urgent action is required to stop scientists creating a monstrous race of apes with fully functional human brains (just as Christine O'Donnell warned us about those mice), thus causing Planet Of The Apes to come true.

OK, that's not quite what the Academy of Medical Sciences said. But judging from most of the media coverage, you might think it was.

The report is actually about "Animals containing human material" and it notes that under British law, experiments of this kind are covered by generic animal research rules, but there are no special animal-human regulations.

Should there be?

I think there should be. We as a society allow experiments on animals or animal embryos that we don't allow on humans, even on human embyros. Clearly, we need to decide what we're going to do about organisms that have both human and animal DNA, or whatever. This doesn't mean restricting it - to clear up the rules could also facilitate such research, by making it explicit what is allowed.

However, we should tread carefully here. This is an area where our intuitions can lead us astray.

Although we have absolutely no idea how to make an animal-human "hybrid", or even whether it's possible at all, the very idea of it has many people worried. It's probably a case of the uncanny valley and lots of cultural baggage (Planet of the Apes et al).

So, for whatever reason, we have a hang-up about making monstrous ape-men. Fair enough. So long as we remember that this is entirely hypothetical, and that it might, for all we know, be literally impossible.

Yet other things in this debate are very real. Over-zealous regulation of research could easily end up delaying, say, a cure for Alzheimer's for, say, 10 years. That would be dooming tens of millions of people to suffering and death.

The problem is, that's hard to picture. It's hard to imagine how bad Alzheimer's is unless you have personal experience. Even if you do, it's hard to multiply that badness by ten million anonymous, hypothetical people. "One ape-man is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic".

Delaying science is easy to do (for politicians), and hard to picture why it's bad. Whereas "a monstrous ape-man" is the exact opposite. Easy to imagine - just look at the media interest in this story - yet nowhere close to being reality.

This is a problem. The human mind and the way we think about these issues is a problem. Even when that mind is safely inside a nice normal human skull.

What Did Marc Hauser Do?

Marc Hauser, the cognitive psychologist who's been under scrutiny over a case of scientific misconduct since August last year (see past posts), has resigned from Harvard University.


He'd already been suspended from teaching, but until this announcement, it looked as though he might be able to hang on and resume his research, which focussed on the evolution of language and morality. Not any more. Hauser says he's quitting the field that made him famous:

“While on leave over the past year, I have begun doing some extremely interesting and rewarding work focusing on the educational needs of at-risk teenagers. I have also been offered some exciting opportunities in the private sector,” Hauser wrote in a resignation letter to the dean, dated July 7. “While I may return to teaching and research in the years to come, I look forward to focusing my energies in the coming year on these new and interesting challenges.”

So that's the end of the Hauser controversy, then?

Not really. The problem is, we still don't know what actually happened. It's hard for anyone to draw a line under this and move on, as Hauser seems to be doing.

Harvard have been reluctant to reveal any more than the barest details of the case. When the allegations first appeared, they set up an internal investigation. In August 2010 this concluded that Hauser was "soley responsible" for 8 cases of scientific misconduct.

But no-one - outside Harvard's investigative committee - knows what they were. He's been found guilty, and he's been punished, but no-one knows the crimes or the evidence against him.

Am I alone in finding this situation unsatisfactory?

Marc Hauser has published hundreds of scientific papers as well as various books. Only a small number of papers were implicated in the misconduct allegations. But to scientifically evaluate the rest of Hauser's work, we need to know what happened - and how easy the misconduct was to detect.

It makes a big difference, for example, whether the misconduct was the kind of thing that could have been going on, leaving no trace, for many years prior to this.

The lack of firm facts has led to discussion of the case being dominated by rumours and speculation. In October last year, for example, a newspaper published an article claiming that the case against Hauser might not be as strong as it first seemed.

This led to a rebuttal by Gerry Altman, then Editor of Cognition, a journal from which Hauser retracted a paper. Altman said that based on the information he had, Hauser was indeed guilty. But he admitted that he was going on what the Harvard investigation told him; he had not had access to the full data.

When Harvard found Hauser guilty, the Dean of his Faculty justified their secrecy:

The work of the investigating committee as well as its final report are considered confidential to protect both the individuals who made the allegations and those who assisted in the investigation.

Our investigative process will not succeed if individuals do not have complete confidence that their identities can be protected throughout the process and after the findings are reported to the appropriate agencies.

Furthermore, when the allegations concern research involving federal funding, funding agency regulations govern our processes ... For example, federal regulations impose an ongoing obligation to protect the identities of those who provided assistance to the investigation.

However, while this is certainly important, I don't see why it would prevent Harvard from releasing the conclusions of the report. They don't need to name the people who gave evidence against Hauser - but they do need to spell out what he did, and what they think he didn't do, so that the scientific community can come to their own conclusions as to the validity of the rest of Hauser's work.

In his letter, the Dean closed by saying that Harvard were going to

form a faculty committee this fall to reaffirm or recommend changes to the communication and confidentiality practices associated with the conclusion of cases involving allegations of professional misconduct.

I hope so.

What Did Marc Hauser Do?

Marc Hauser, the cognitive psychologist who's been under scrutiny over a case of scientific misconduct since August last year (see past posts), has resigned from Harvard University.


He'd already been suspended from teaching, but until this announcement, it looked as though he might be able to hang on and resume his research, which focussed on the evolution of language and morality. Not any more. Hauser says he's quitting the field that made him famous:

“While on leave over the past year, I have begun doing some extremely interesting and rewarding work focusing on the educational needs of at-risk teenagers. I have also been offered some exciting opportunities in the private sector,” Hauser wrote in a resignation letter to the dean, dated July 7. “While I may return to teaching and research in the years to come, I look forward to focusing my energies in the coming year on these new and interesting challenges.”

So that's the end of the Hauser controversy, then?

Not really. The problem is, we still don't know what actually happened. It's hard for anyone to draw a line under this and move on, as Hauser seems to be doing.

Harvard have been reluctant to reveal any more than the barest details of the case. When the allegations first appeared, they set up an internal investigation. In August 2010 this concluded that Hauser was "soley responsible" for 8 cases of scientific misconduct.

But no-one - outside Harvard's investigative committee - knows what they were. He's been found guilty, and he's been punished, but no-one knows the crimes or the evidence against him.

Am I alone in finding this situation unsatisfactory?

Marc Hauser has published hundreds of scientific papers as well as various books. Only a small number of papers were implicated in the misconduct allegations. But to scientifically evaluate the rest of Hauser's work, we need to know what happened - and how easy the misconduct was to detect.

It makes a big difference, for example, whether the misconduct was the kind of thing that could have been going on, leaving no trace, for many years prior to this.

The lack of firm facts has led to discussion of the case being dominated by rumours and speculation. In October last year, for example, a newspaper published an article claiming that the case against Hauser might not be as strong as it first seemed.

This led to a rebuttal by Gerry Altman, then Editor of Cognition, a journal from which Hauser retracted a paper. Altman said that based on the information he had, Hauser was indeed guilty. But he admitted that he was going on what the Harvard investigation told him; he had not had access to the full data.

When Harvard found Hauser guilty, the Dean of his Faculty justified their secrecy:

The work of the investigating committee as well as its final report are considered confidential to protect both the individuals who made the allegations and those who assisted in the investigation.

Our investigative process will not succeed if individuals do not have complete confidence that their identities can be protected throughout the process and after the findings are reported to the appropriate agencies.

Furthermore, when the allegations concern research involving federal funding, funding agency regulations govern our processes ... For example, federal regulations impose an ongoing obligation to protect the identities of those who provided assistance to the investigation.

However, while this is certainly important, I don't see why it would prevent Harvard from releasing the conclusions of the report. They don't need to name the people who gave evidence against Hauser - but they do need to spell out what he did, and what they think he didn't do, so that the scientific community can come to their own conclusions as to the validity of the rest of Hauser's work.

In his letter, the Dean closed by saying that Harvard were going to

form a faculty committee this fall to reaffirm or recommend changes to the communication and confidentiality practices associated with the conclusion of cases involving allegations of professional misconduct.

I hope so.

The Brain Is Not Made Of Soup

A critical article about psychiatry has been doing the rounds. Regular Neuroskeptic readers will be all too familiar with the issues here, but to many people they're news.

Here's an article summarizing the original piece. The author's the head of a British think tank, but not a specialist in mental health, so he's probably a good example of the ''intelligent layman":

Neither – in relation to the fastest rising [mental health] diagnoses – is there any evidence of chemical imbalances in the brains of patients. In other words, the problem the [psychiatric] drugs are supposed to solve is an illusion.

There's no evidence of fairies in my garden, either. The concept of a 'chemical imbalance' in the human brain is one of the most fantastic oversimplifications in science, and one of the worst legacies of the modern pharmaceutical industry.

A bowl of soup could have a chemical imbalance. If you're making a chicken broth and you accidentally put in an extra spoonful of coriander, it'll taste horrible. Not enough salt, and it'll be bland. A soup is simple: too much or too little of one thing, and it comes out wrong.

Or...does it? Actually, flavour isn't just the sum of the ingredients. You might put in some extra coriander, and also put in some chilli powder, and that would end up delicious whereas if you left the coriander the same, it would be overwhelmed by the chilli. But you'll need to rethink the paprika as well...

Soups are pretty complicated.

The brain is a restaurant with a hundred billion tables. At each table sits a food critic. An army of chefs prepares an infinity of soups - no two are the same, although some areas of the restaurant tend to get certain kinds - and a legion of waiters serves them up, collects the old bowls and takes them to the kitchen to be washed and refilled.

Each critic has his own preferences. If she gets the right soup, she'll be happy. One soup will be great for one critic, disgusting to another. Some critics demand an ever-changing series of courses, others want the same thing day in day out.

Whether the restaurant gets a good review will depend on the composition of the soups, of course, but on so much else as well: are they delivered on time? Do the waiters collect the empty bowls quickly enough - or do they do it too fast, snatching soup away before it's been eaten? Who are the critics, anyhow?

This is still far too simple. In fact, the waiters and the chefs and the dishwashers are the critics, and how they do their job depends on what soup they're getting. That depends on how they've done their jobs in the past... and everyone's also a musician, playing their part in a symphony that we can't hear and couldn't begin to understand if we did.

Our technology for investigating the chemistry of the brain is comically crude. We can't even take a sample of all of the soups in the whole restaurant, mix them all up and measure their average ingredients. You can do that in animals, but for ethical reasons, not in humans. No-one has ever measured the chemical composition of a living human brain.

We can approximately measure a few very common ingredients. After death we can measure a few more. We can also do a kind of straw poll of critics to see what they like, but we don't know which particular critics answer it, or what soups they are in fact being served. Every month, someone discovers a whole new ingredient.

We can sneak into the kitchen and chuck some spice into the pots, to see what kind of noise the critics make. We can't hear what they're saying, we can only measure the volume from different parts of the restaurant. Some of the most informative studies come from measuring the composition of the waste that gets thrown out in the bins every night.

So next time someone confidently tells you that mental illness either is, or isn't, a chemical imbalance, ask them - which one?

The Brain Is Not Made Of Soup

A critical article about psychiatry has been doing the rounds. Regular Neuroskeptic readers will be all too familiar with the issues here, but to many people they're news.

Here's an article summarizing the original piece. The author's the head of a British think tank, but not a specialist in mental health, so he's probably a good example of the ''intelligent layman":

Neither – in relation to the fastest rising [mental health] diagnoses – is there any evidence of chemical imbalances in the brains of patients. In other words, the problem the [psychiatric] drugs are supposed to solve is an illusion.

There's no evidence of fairies in my garden, either. The concept of a 'chemical imbalance' in the human brain is one of the most fantastic oversimplifications in science, and one of the worst legacies of the modern pharmaceutical industry.

A bowl of soup could have a chemical imbalance. If you're making a chicken broth and you accidentally put in an extra spoonful of coriander, it'll taste horrible. Not enough salt, and it'll be bland. A soup is simple: too much or too little of one thing, and it comes out wrong.

Or...does it? Actually, flavour isn't just the sum of the ingredients. You might put in some extra coriander, and also put in some chilli powder, and that would end up delicious whereas if you left the coriander the same, it would be overwhelmed by the chilli. But you'll need to rethink the paprika as well...

Soups are pretty complicated.

The brain is a restaurant with a hundred billion tables. At each table sits a food critic. An army of chefs prepares an infinity of soups - no two are the same, although some areas of the restaurant tend to get certain kinds - and a legion of waiters serves them up, collects the old bowls and takes them to the kitchen to be washed and refilled.

Each critic has his own preferences. If she gets the right soup, she'll be happy. One soup will be great for one critic, disgusting to another. Some critics demand an ever-changing series of courses, others want the same thing day in day out.

Whether the restaurant gets a good review will depend on the composition of the soups, of course, but on so much else as well: are they delivered on time? Do the waiters collect the empty bowls quickly enough - or do they do it too fast, snatching soup away before it's been eaten? Who are the critics, anyhow?

This is still far too simple. In fact, the waiters and the chefs and the dishwashers are the critics, and how they do their job depends on what soup they're getting. That depends on how they've done their jobs in the past... and everyone's also a musician, playing their part in a symphony that we can't hear and couldn't begin to understand if we did.

Our technology for investigating the chemistry of the brain is comically crude. We can't even take a sample of all of the soups in the whole restaurant, mix them all up and measure their average ingredients. You can do that in animals, but for ethical reasons, not in humans. No-one has ever measured the chemical composition of a living human brain.

We can approximately measure a few very common ingredients. After death we can measure a few more. We can also do a kind of straw poll of critics to see what they like, but we don't know which particular critics answer it, or what soups they are in fact being served. Every month, someone discovers a whole new ingredient.

We can sneak into the kitchen and chuck some spice into the pots, to see what kind of noise the critics make. We can't hear what they're saying, we can only measure the volume from different parts of the restaurant. Some of the most informative studies come from measuring the composition of the waste that gets thrown out in the bins every night.

So next time someone confidently tells you that mental illness either is, or isn't, a chemical imbalance, ask them - which one?

My Grandma: Neurophilosopher

John Galliano is the British designer who got videoed being a bit unpleasant and ended up in court on racism charges.


His defence is that he was drunk and/or high. Which from the video he fairly obviously was. But here's an interesting quote from his lawyer:

Some things may have come out of his mouth that didn’t come from his brain.

So where did they come from, then... hmm. Don't answer that.

I doubt that the lawyer was actually trying to say that Galliano's mouth was moving of its own accord or under the control of some other organ. Rather she was expressing the idea that "my brain" in this context doesn't mean, literally, the whole of the grey blob of neurons in my skull.

Rather "my brain" means, roughly, "that part of my brain responsible for rational thought".

My grandmother once talked about a friend who'd had a stroke. She said, as far as I can remember, "Sometimes the stroke means you can't talk or walk, which is bad enough, but sometimes it gets into your brain and that can be really nasty."

Of course she knew that all strokes happen in the brain. What she was saying was that some strokes, but not all, affect the part of the brain responsible for "me" as a person - thoughts, emotions, and so forth.

So, this is all anecdotal evidence, but there seems to be a popular, common-sense temptation to believe in the "me part" of the brain, a tendency which neuroscientists are not immune to and which can lead to dubious conclusions.

I'd love to see someone do a proper study of what non-neuroscientists, ideally people with little exposure to neuroscience like children, think about the brain. A bit like this, but really in depth. I suspect that you'd find that many of the ideas underpinning today's neuroscience had their origins in pre-scientific, common sense intuitions.

We neuroscientists are human, and we have neuro-intuitions too. But if neuroscience has taught us anything, it's not to trust those.

My Grandma: Neurophilosopher

John Galliano is the British designer who got videoed being a bit unpleasant and ended up in court on racism charges.


His defence is that he was drunk and/or high. Which from the video he fairly obviously was. But here's an interesting quote from his lawyer:

Some things may have come out of his mouth that didn’t come from his brain.

So where did they come from, then... hmm. Don't answer that.

I doubt that the lawyer was actually trying to say that Galliano's mouth was moving of its own accord or under the control of some other organ. Rather she was expressing the idea that "my brain" in this context doesn't mean, literally, the whole of the grey blob of neurons in my skull.

Rather "my brain" means, roughly, "that part of my brain responsible for rational thought".

My grandmother once talked about a friend who'd had a stroke. She said, as far as I can remember, "Sometimes the stroke means you can't talk or walk, which is bad enough, but sometimes it gets into your brain and that can be really nasty."

Of course she knew that all strokes happen in the brain. What she was saying was that some strokes, but not all, affect the part of the brain responsible for "me" as a person - thoughts, emotions, and so forth.

So, this is all anecdotal evidence, but there seems to be a popular, common-sense temptation to believe in the "me part" of the brain, a tendency which neuroscientists are not immune to and which can lead to dubious conclusions.

I'd love to see someone do a proper study of what non-neuroscientists, ideally people with little exposure to neuroscience like children, think about the brain. A bit like this, but really in depth. I suspect that you'd find that many of the ideas underpinning today's neuroscience had their origins in pre-scientific, common sense intuitions.

We neuroscientists are human, and we have neuro-intuitions too. But if neuroscience has taught us anything, it's not to trust those.

So I'm Finally On Twitter

After holding out for years, on the grounds that I "don't have time to spend on Twitter", I have given in and joined Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/Neuro_Skeptic.

I still don't think I have time for it, but I guess we'll find out.

Please note that I'm Neuro_Skeptic, not "neuroskeptic", who is someone else entirely.

So I'm Finally On Twitter

After holding out for years, on the grounds that I "don't have time to spend on Twitter", I have given in and joined Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/Neuro_Skeptic.

I still don't think I have time for it, but I guess we'll find out.

Please note that I'm Neuro_Skeptic, not "neuroskeptic", who is someone else entirely.

What Is Mental Distress?

"Mental distress" is term which has recently become popular in Britain. It's most often used as a replacement for "mental illness". I'm rather puzzled by this. In this post, I analyze this phrase.

The first thing that leaps out is that "mental" is redundant. What other kind of distress is there? Distress is mental, by default.

This awkward wording seems to be a result of the fact that it's an attempt to fuse some of the features of "mental illness" with some of the implications of "distress", a kind of verbal alchemy. What is mental distress? It's not mental illness, but it's not exactly not mental illness.

Fair enough. Mental illness is a problematic concept, so I'm all in favor of rethinking it. But I'm worried. My worry is that "mental distress" takes the worst features of mental illness and perpetuates them in the guise of being a new and radical idea.

*

Were I to go around making sweeping statements about "the mentally ill" or "people with mental illness", someone would call me out on it, like this - Mental illness is an umbrella term, for all kinds of different experiences! You can't talk about all those people as if they're the same. They're individuals!

Which is quite right.

But it's equally bad to talk about "mental distress" in the same way, and this happens as well. I don't know if mental distress is more often used as a blanket statement, but it's certainly not immune and it's no better. See for example the top Google hit for mental distress:

The first signs of mental distress will be different for the onlooker than it is for the person in distress...

Changes in sleep patterns are a common sign, and appetite may also be affected. Lethargy, low energy levels, feeling antisocial and spending too much time in bed may indicate the onset of depression. Wanting to go out more, needing very little sleep, and feeling highly energetic, creative and sociable, may signal that a person is becoming 'high'.

The first time it happens, the effects of hearing or seeing things that other people don't are likely to be especially dramatic...

Perfectly true, of some people. Not all. In this paragraph "mental distress" seems to mean "bipolar disorder", but in the course of the article it morphs into several other forms. All mental distress.

It's not good enough to make sweeping statements and say "...Of course, everyone is different, but..." That's a cop-out, not a serious attempt to be helpful. It's like being really offensive, and then quickly adding "No offence". If you think everyone's different, talk about them all differently.

I think there's a good case to be made that we shouldn't talk about "mental illness" at all. Take, say, bipolar disorder, social anxiety, and antisocial personality. I'm really not sure that these have anything in common.

They've only been considered to belong to the single category of "psychiatric disorders" for about 50 years. 100 years ago, bipolar was insanity, social anxiety was a character trait, or a 'nervous' problem, and antisocial behaviour was just evil. Different professionals dealt with each one, and few thought of them as being linked.

I'm not saying that we should go back to that. But categories are up for debate. "Mental distress" is a new label, but it's a 50 year old category.

*

My second problem is that "mental distress" implies that everyone who has it, is distressed. But they're just not - at least not if you're using that term as a replacement for "mental illness".

If you're bipolar, and in a manic or hypomanic episode, you might well be the opposite of distressed. More subtly, if you're severely depressed, you might be too low to be distressed. "Distress" implies an acute emotional response. Severe depression paralyses the emotions.

Maybe "mental distress" isn't like normal everyday distress. Maybe mania or depression are mental distress, but not distress. But that's rather confusing. If mental distress isn't distress, what on earth is it? You can't redefine words like that, unless you're Humpty Dumpty.

*

If "mental distress" implies that all mental illness is distress, it also works in reverse: it implies that all distress is a form of pathology. Taken seriously, this would lead to absurd conversations:

"Are you mentally distressed?"
"No, I'm fine. I'm just distressed."

It would also lead to even more people being treated in the mental health system. Already we're told that 1 in 4 people experience mental illness, but almost everyone gets distressed now and again.

You might say that you don't consider mental distress to be a form of pathology. I'm against medicalization! Mental distress isn't an illness! If so, fine, but to be consistent, you're going to have to stop talking about treatments. And causes. And symptoms. Those are all medical words. Discussions of mental distress are chock full of them.

Indeed, if you want to demedicalize "mental distress", you should probably just call it... distress. The "mental" part is a hangover from "mental illness", after all. If you're serious, you ought to junk that and stick with distress.

This would be perfectly clear, it doesn't require us to redefine words or use awkward phrases. Let's give it a go: "Mental illness" is distress. Easy. Unfortunately, when you put it like that, it looks a bit like a sweeping oversimplification, doesn't it? Hmm.

On the other hand, if you're not looking to demedicalize mental illness, why throw out the word illness?

The problem is that many people like the sound of demedicalization, but they're not sure how far they want to go. And in large organizations, some people will want to go much further than others.

Mental health charities seem to be particularly prone to this, so you often see them assuring people that "mental illness is an illness like any other", while simultaneously saying that seeing it just as a medical illness is far too narrow and unhelpful!

This is a serious debate, and it deserves a careful discussion. The compromise term "mental distress" seems to bridge this gap, and allows people with very different views to sound like they're agreeing with each other. This is not the best way to resolve debates like this. People still disagree with each other. They just lack the words to talk about it.

What Is Mental Distress?

"Mental distress" is term which has recently become popular in Britain. It's most often used as a replacement for "mental illness". I'm rather puzzled by this. In this post, I analyze this phrase.

The first thing that leaps out is that "mental" is redundant. What other kind of distress is there? Distress is mental, by default.

This awkward wording seems to be a result of the fact that it's an attempt to fuse some of the features of "mental illness" with some of the implications of "distress", a kind of verbal alchemy. What is mental distress? It's not mental illness, but it's not exactly not mental illness.

Fair enough. Mental illness is a problematic concept, so I'm all in favor of rethinking it. But I'm worried. My worry is that "mental distress" takes the worst features of mental illness and perpetuates them in the guise of being a new and radical idea.

*

Were I to go around making sweeping statements about "the mentally ill" or "people with mental illness", someone would call me out on it, like this - Mental illness is an umbrella term, for all kinds of different experiences! You can't talk about all those people as if they're the same. They're individuals!

Which is quite right.

But it's equally bad to talk about "mental distress" in the same way, and this happens as well. I don't know if mental distress is more often used as a blanket statement, but it's certainly not immune and it's no better. See for example the top Google hit for mental distress:

The first signs of mental distress will be different for the onlooker than it is for the person in distress...

Changes in sleep patterns are a common sign, and appetite may also be affected. Lethargy, low energy levels, feeling antisocial and spending too much time in bed may indicate the onset of depression. Wanting to go out more, needing very little sleep, and feeling highly energetic, creative and sociable, may signal that a person is becoming 'high'.

The first time it happens, the effects of hearing or seeing things that other people don't are likely to be especially dramatic...

Perfectly true, of some people. Not all. In this paragraph "mental distress" seems to mean "bipolar disorder", but in the course of the article it morphs into several other forms. All mental distress.

It's not good enough to make sweeping statements and say "...Of course, everyone is different, but..." That's a cop-out, not a serious attempt to be helpful. It's like being really offensive, and then quickly adding "No offence". If you think everyone's different, talk about them all differently.

I think there's a good case to be made that we shouldn't talk about "mental illness" at all. Take, say, bipolar disorder, social anxiety, and antisocial personality. I'm really not sure that these have anything in common.

They've only been considered to belong to the single category of "psychiatric disorders" for about 50 years. 100 years ago, bipolar was insanity, social anxiety was a character trait, or a 'nervous' problem, and antisocial behaviour was just evil. Different professionals dealt with each one, and few thought of them as being linked.

I'm not saying that we should go back to that. But categories are up for debate. "Mental distress" is a new label, but it's a 50 year old category.

*

My second problem is that "mental distress" implies that everyone who has it, is distressed. But they're just not - at least not if you're using that term as a replacement for "mental illness".

If you're bipolar, and in a manic or hypomanic episode, you might well be the opposite of distressed. More subtly, if you're severely depressed, you might be too low to be distressed. "Distress" implies an acute emotional response. Severe depression paralyses the emotions.

Maybe "mental distress" isn't like normal everyday distress. Maybe mania or depression are mental distress, but not distress. But that's rather confusing. If mental distress isn't distress, what on earth is it? You can't redefine words like that, unless you're Humpty Dumpty.

*

If "mental distress" implies that all mental illness is distress, it also works in reverse: it implies that all distress is a form of pathology. Taken seriously, this would lead to absurd conversations:

"Are you mentally distressed?"
"No, I'm fine. I'm just distressed."

It would also lead to even more people being treated in the mental health system. Already we're told that 1 in 4 people experience mental illness, but almost everyone gets distressed now and again.

You might say that you don't consider mental distress to be a form of pathology. I'm against medicalization! Mental distress isn't an illness! If so, fine, but to be consistent, you're going to have to stop talking about treatments. And causes. And symptoms. Those are all medical words. Discussions of mental distress are chock full of them.

Indeed, if you want to demedicalize "mental distress", you should probably just call it... distress. The "mental" part is a hangover from "mental illness", after all. If you're serious, you ought to junk that and stick with distress.

This would be perfectly clear, it doesn't require us to redefine words or use awkward phrases. Let's give it a go: "Mental illness" is distress. Easy. Unfortunately, when you put it like that, it looks a bit like a sweeping oversimplification, doesn't it? Hmm.

On the other hand, if you're not looking to demedicalize mental illness, why throw out the word illness?

The problem is that many people like the sound of demedicalization, but they're not sure how far they want to go. And in large organizations, some people will want to go much further than others.

Mental health charities seem to be particularly prone to this, so you often see them assuring people that "mental illness is an illness like any other", while simultaneously saying that seeing it just as a medical illness is far too narrow and unhelpful!

This is a serious debate, and it deserves a careful discussion. The compromise term "mental distress" seems to bridge this gap, and allows people with very different views to sound like they're agreeing with each other. This is not the best way to resolve debates like this. People still disagree with each other. They just lack the words to talk about it.