Mindreaders redux; Nature slaps the NY Times!

The journal Nature has published an editorial slapping the New York Times for its incredibly stupid decision to run advertising posing as (really shoddy) science on its op-ed page a few Sundays back (see here for more, and here for the original "op-ed" piece). In Nature's editorial is a rebuke for some aspects of cognitive and affective neuroscience research that deserves quoting:

[H]ow do you find out what people are feeling? ... Apparently just asking them was simply not good enough. So how did [the researchers] uncover the innermost thoughts of their 20 subjects? The[y] used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan the subjects' brains while they viewed images of political candidates ... A group of cognitive neuroscientists was swift to object to its conclusions — which veer close to a modern-day phrenology.

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Hubristic Neuroscience (or, Mindreaders!)

Oh, barf.

On Sunday (Nov. 11), the New York Times published an op-ed piece written by a team of neuroscientists, led by a researcher named Marco Iacoboni from UCLA, and including a couple of folks from a company called FKF Applied Research. In this wildly overstated piece, they described a study in which people viewed pictures of political candidates and watched video clips of speeches made by these candidates. While doing all of this, their brain activity was measured in an fMRI tube. In the article, the authors made a variety of amazing claims about how activity in certain brain regions corresponds in an apparently one-to-one manner with emotional states. I had no idea that brain-reading was such a precise science! An example of this kind of bunkum: "When viewing images of [Hillary Clinton], these voters exhibited significant activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, an emotional center of the brain that is aroused when a person feels compelled to act in two different ways but must choose one. It looked as if they were battling unacknowledged impulses to like Mrs. Clinton." Whoa. I think these folks are trying to doing some more-traditional mind-reading here, along with that of the neuroscientific variety.

Thankfully, many folks have called out the Times and the researchers, including Martha Farah at the University of Pennsylvania, the bloggers at Mind Hacks, and Daniel Engber at Slate, among others. This is not the first time that Iacoboni and his colleagues from FKF have pulled off these kinds of shenanigans, bypassing any kind of peer review to present wild claims to a credulous public about what neuroscientists can do: In early 2006, Iacoboni and friends scanned the brains of subjects who were watching Super Bowl commercials. The results of this study were disseminated widely ("instant science" - that is, not peer-reviewed, nor up to snuff for publication in a scientific journal) on Edge.com and to the press (see here, for example). What a waste.

I've done my part here. I just want to make sure that at least a few more people are aware of the crap being perpetrated by some in the scientific community.

P.S. I discovered that the Times yesterday published a letter to the editor expressing displeasure with the Times and the researchers, signed by a group of top neuroscientists. The heart of the matter: "As cognitive neuroscientists who use the same brain imaging technology, we know that it is not possible to definitively determine whether a person is anxious or feeling connected simply by looking at activity in a particular brain region. This is so because brain regions are typically engaged by many mental states, and thus a one-to-one mapping between a brain region and a mental state is not possible."

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Singular "their" and deep anaphors

On Language Log today, the linguist Geoffrey Pullum posted an interesting question that's worth pondering (my boldfacing below is simply to highlight a separate, interesting observation):

Compare the following two sentences:

1. Do not speak to the driver or distract their attention without good cause.
2. *Do not speak to the king or distract their attention without good cause.

Example 1 is closely modeled on a sign found behind the driver's cab on route 29 Lothian Buses in Edinburgh. It is clearly grammatical and acceptable. (Prescriptivists might object to it, but as you know, singular antecedents for forms of the pronoun they are attested in the finest English authors since Middle English times; the prescriptivists just haven't paid attention to the evidence of literary usage.) Example 2 contrasts in only one word, yet is clearly ungrammatical (or strikingly unacceptable at the very least). Why? What is the difference between driver and king that is responsible for the contrast?

My gut sense is that this is a similar situation to the one highlighted in a paper entitled "Comprehending Conceptual Anaphors" (Gernsbacher, 1991, in the journal Language and Cognitive Processes; large PDF link) by psychologist Morton Gernsbacher about what she called conceptual anaphors, which are illustrated nicely by the sentences, I think I'll order a frozen margarita. I just love them. Gernsbacher argued that a pronoun like this is not, strictly speaking, referring to the word margarita in the first sentence, but is instead referring to the concept of margaritas. In this case, it's a so-called deep anaphor because it finds its referent not in the surface form (that is, the words themselves) of an utterance, but in the meaning of an utterance. I think that the driver example posted by Pullum is nearly analogous to the margarita example. Consider the following variant of the king example that doesn't sound too bad to my ears:

George W. Bush acts like a king, but at least most of them haven't seemed so childish.

How does that sound to you? Using king so that it refers to a class rather than an individual seems to make all the difference. I think in Pullum's driver example, the sign is meant to be able to refer to any driver who happens to be present, whereas in the king example the referent of king is a particular person.

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The Creation Museum = Comedy Gold!

The blogger John Scalzi recently visited The Creation Museum (I refuse to link to this nonsense) and posted on Flickr some of the pictures he took. The captions that have been added since are hilarious. A taste (that's a woman and a young girl engaged in some kind of activity whilst a wave of water, visible through the window in their Flinstones-esque dwelling, rushes toward them, presumably to wash away their sin, or some such bullshit):



One caption: Those girls are obviously playing some early form of Dungeons and Dragons.

What an enormous source of comedy this "museum" is. Check out this awesome saddled dinosaur that can be viewed (and, I assume, sat upon) at the CM:



Almost every day you can read or hear about how U.S. students (and adults) are far behind much of the developed world in math and science. Is it any wonder why?

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Atheist loses mind, becomes theist

In the New York Times Magazine on Sunday (November 4) there appeared a lengthy article about Antony Flew, a professor of philosophy who taught at a variety of universities in the U.K. I'd heard of Flew a few times, probably because he was a favorite son among atheists (i.e., I can't place precisely where I'd heard of him). As the NYT Magazine article makes clear, he rose to fame in the atheist world initially because of his essay, "Theology and Falsification," in which he makes a clean little argument (1055 words, according to MS Word) about why the existence of some kind of deity can neither be proved nor disproved.

Anyhow, a few years ago, Flew announced that he was more a less a theist, an event which caused quite an uproar among folks who follow these sorts of things. And this fall, a book that Flew is the co-author of, There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, is being released. The article in the NYT Magazine makes it pretty clear that Flew has been subtly (but not apparently maliciously) manipulated by a number of Christian scholars (some in the sciences, some in the humanties). Further, his co-authorship of the book in question is likened to that of a star athlete who has a ghostwriter pen an autobiography. Worse than all of this, it appears that Flew is sinking slowly into dementia, and is being used by these Christians to advance their agenda via a very weird appeal to an authority they would never have considered an ally while his mind was sharp.

Very sad.

(Via Metafilter, like so much else that's good on the Web.)

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