Mystery Joker Parodies Neuroscience

Someone has created a hilarious spoof paper poking fun at neuropsychoanalysis (but all of fMRI takes some hits too): A Triple Dissociation of Neural Systems Supporting ID, EGO, and SUPEREGO.

Featuring gems such as

• Authors "Steven Z. Fisher and Stephen T. Student" with contact details "mother@amaliastate.edu".
• "Twenty-four healthy participants (all 19-year-old white, male undergraduates who sat near each other in an Introductory Psychology course and were raised in upper middle class suburban New
  England neighborhoods) were scanned but 17 were excluded for not following instructions or falling asleep in the scanner."
• "If you’re like us, you’ve probably been thinking that Social Neuroscience, Neuroeconomics, and Developmental Social Cognitive Affective Clinical Neuroscience are just not cutting edge enough
  anymore. Do not despair. This study represents the first of what is likely to be a productive and active new field of Psychoanalytic Neuroscience."

It really is very funny, but it's also deadly accurate in its highlighting serious problems that plague a certain genre of neuroimaging papers. Who made it? The PDF appeared on Dropbox a couple of weeks ago and, while a few people have Tweeted about it, no-one has claimed ownership, yet.

For the record, it wasn't me.

Hot Sex Prevents Breast Cancer

Breast cancer is caused by sexual frustration. Women should ditch their unsexy husbands and find a real man to satisfy them if they want to reduce the risk of the disease.

That's according to An Essay on Sexual Frustration as the Cause of Breast Cancer in Women: How Correlations and Cultural Blind Spots Conceal Causal Effects, a piece that was published today in The Breast Journal.

Wtf. Really -

Endocrinological processes are important targets in breast cancer research. These processes are also important in human sexual behaviors. I hypothesize that these processes are capable of adjusting or distorting biological active forms of specific sex hormones depending on experienced sexual stimuli. These aberrantly metabolized sex hormones will ultimately lead to breast cancer.

...My thesis is that breast cancer is essentially caused by sexual frustration. The focus of this hypothesis is aimed at the (un)consciously experienced tension and sexual dissatisfaction between the chosen mate based on socio-economic, intellectual, ethnic or cultural motives and the nonchosen potential mate who has more appealing sexual incentive properties.

In most western societies the improved economic independence of women has not changed to such a degree that long-term partners are chosen entirely according to sexual incentive properties. If the selected partner has no or weak sexual incentive properties for the other member of the couple, it is likely that sexual frustration will follow in the long run (6), which ultimately will cause breast cancer in some women...

WHY HIGHER SOCIOECONOMIC GROUPS OF WOMEN ARE MORE AT RISK
...higher socio-economic group of women pay more than average attention to the assets or status of the potential partner(7)....The chances of some women from higher socio-economic classes to find a sexually compatible mate are considerably reduced. This is due to an often self-imposed very limited range of potential partners. In this group of women, high status of the potential partner compensates for the acceptance of physically less attractive men (9)...

HEIGHT AS RISK FACTOR IN BREAST CANCER
...These women have a disadvantage because they have a smaller pool to choose from if they want a man they will not tower over. This increases the chances to settle for a sexually incompatible partner...

BREAST CANCER RISK IN NUNS...

There are 15 references, but they're all about sex, not cancer. Thus we get a citation to support the statement that "If the selected partner has no or weak sexual incentive properties for the other member of the couple, it is likely that sexual frustration will follow in the long run (6)", but not for the rather more controversial idea that disappointment in the bedroom somehow leads to malignant mutations in the DNA of cells of the mammary epithelium.

Well, except the line that "aberrantly metabolized sex hormones" are responsible, which is the scientific equivalent of waving your hands and saying "woo".

How did this happen?

The Breast Journal, so far as I can see, publishes lots of sensible research. It may not be a major journal but it's MEDLINE indexed and ranked 143/184 for impact in the field of oncology, which means there are 40 cancer journals in the world that have less impact than it.

If I had published there, I'd be a bit miffed that my work was appearing in the same pages. Thankfully I haven't but as a scientist I'm still insulted that this has been published in a scientific journal, and will be appearing on the shelves of libraries around the world under the heading "science".

Stuger, J. (2011). An Essay on Sexual Frustration as the Cause of Breast Cancer in Women: How Correlations and Cultural Blind Spots Conceal Causal Effects The Breast Journal DOI: 10.1111/j.1524-4741.2011.01206.x

Scanning The Brain While Looking At Scans

A new study investigated what goes on in the brain when doctors make a diagnosis.

Radiologists use X-rays and other imaging techniques to diagnose diseases - but in this study, they went into the scanner themselves. Brazilian researchers Marcio Melo et al used fMRI to record neural activity while the radiologists were shown an array of chest X-rays.

Some of the scans showed evidence of disease, which the doctors were required to diagnose. There were also two control conditions, in which the stimuli were still X-rays but with little pictures of either animals or letters embedded in them, instead of diseases.

The image above shows how it worked. As well as pneumonia, one patient has a severe case of Alligator Lung, while the other looks like they've got the Influenza 'B' virus.

Now, the point of all this was to compare the mental process of making a diagnosis to that of seeing an object. The idea is that a trained radiologist sees particular diseases in the scans, in the same way that anyone can see an alligator.

Activity during diagnosis, object-recognition and letter naming was very similar (compared to doing nothing); this presumably represents the visual and language areas involved in looking at the image, recognizing what it is, and saying it out loud:

There were some slight differences, with the left inferior frontal cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex being more activated by diagnosis than animals. But this difference disappeared after controlling for the number of different possible descriptions the radiologists reported thinking about for each image.

The authors conclude that

These results support the hypothesis that medical diagnoses based on prompt visual recognition of clinical signs and naming in everyday life are supported by similar brain systems.

Which seems fair enough, although it's important to remember that the diagnoses in this study were quite easy ones. The mean response time was just 1.3 seconds and only 6% of those split-second diagnoses were wrong. Unfortunately diagnosis is not always that easy.

Anyway, this study is all very well, but why stop at chest X-rays? Last year I speculated on the fun neuroscientists could have with a real-time fMRI machine:

You could lie there in the scanner and watch your brain light up. Then you could watch your brain light up some more in response to seeing your brain light up...

We really need to scan people while they're looking at brain scans. Only then will we be able to understand the neurological basis of being a neurologist, and find the brain's looking-at-a-blob blob.

Melo M, Scarpin DJ, Amaro E Jr, Passos RB, Sato JR, Friston KJ, and Price CJ (2011). How doctors generate diagnostic hypotheses: a study of radiological diagnosis with functional magnetic resonance imaging. PloS ONE, 6 (12) PMID: 22194902

Neuroskeptic: The Video Game

As a Christmas present, here's something I've been working on over the holidays - Neurubiks.

It's a free puzzle game. The brain is broken. Can you can restore neuro-harmony?

Download it here.

Features:

• A bit like a Rubik's cube, but less annoying. 
• Millions of possible puzzles.
• Easy to learn - just click on the blobs.
• Neuroanatomically accurate.
• Perfect for killing time while running fMRI analyses.

Notes:

If you like it, hate it, find bugs or have any suggestions, please let me know in the comments.

If I knew Flash, I would have programmed this in Flash. If any Flash developers like Neurubiks and are interesting in helping develop it please do get in touch.

Apologies to the color-blind. The game is all about colours I'm afraid. Let me know if you have any ideas for making it more color-blind-friendly.

"Mad Honey" Sex Is A Bad Idea

A cautionary tale from Turkey - do not eat poison honey to try to spice up your sex life.

"Mad honey" is honey made by bees from the nectar of toxic Rhododendron flowers. In places where wild Rhododendrons grow, including Turkey, it's a health hazard. The dangers of mad honey were known to the ancient Greeks and Romans, and it's reported that leaving tainted honeycombs in the path of invading armies was a popular military tactic.

2000 years later, some people still haven't quite got the message. According to a case report from cardiologists Yarlioglues et al, a married couple deliberately ate some mad honey "for reasons of sexual performance".

After eating one teaspoon per day for a week, they decided to crank it up a notch and ate a full tablespoon of the stuff. But their attempt to heighten their Turkish delight quickly turned sour, as they both suffered symptoms of confusion, chest pain, low blood pressure and slowed heartbeat. After presenting themselves to hospital, doctors discovered that they had both suffered an acute inferior myocardial infarction - a mild heart attack.

It's not clear whether the sex was a contributing factor.

The randy Rhododendron fans were lucky - following treatment, they both recovered. In fact, the authors say "To our knowledge, no fatal cases of mad-honey poisoning have been reported since ancient Roman times." However, it seems that some people are still willing to try their luck.

The toxin in mad honey is gryanotoxin. It acts by potentiating the opening of sodium channels, which are found both in the heart and the brain. This may be why it produces a combination of cardiovascular and psychoactive effects.

Mikail Yarlioglues et al (2011). Mad-Honey Sexual Activity and Acute Inferior Myocardial Infarctions in a Married Couple Texas Heart Institute Journal

Beware Good Theories

The ancient Greeks had a lovely theory. Certain places on the earth (caves, mostly) were, they thought, gateways to the underworld. Plants growing near these places could absorb the deadly essence of Hades and became poisonous.

Snakes and other venemous creatures got their poison by consuming these plants. And stinging insects got their little doses of poison by feeding off dead snakes.

Isn't that a great narrative? It explains everything, in a nice logical progression. OK, it presupposes what we would call a "supernatural" force as the ultimate origin of poison, but other than that, it's an entirely "scientific" account. In accordance with Occam's Razor, it proposes a single unified process underlying diverse phenomena.

It is, in other words, a perfect scientific theory. It's completely wrong, on every point, but we only know that because we now understand atoms, molecules, chemistry and biochemistry, which the Greeks had no way of knowing. At the time, the Hades theory was surely the best possible theory about where poison came from.

The moral of this story is, beware nice theories based on incomplete data.


Reference: Greek Fire, Poison Arrows and Scorpion Bombs, which I'm currently reading, all about chemical and biological weapons.

Modern War-fMRI : Graphics Cards for Science

Videogames and neuroscience have a rocky relationship.

On the one hand you have Susan Greenfield and her games-hurt-the-brain theory. But she's not representative of neuroscientists as a whole: games have also helped neuroscience, for example, in this study of the neural correlates of "flow" experiences.

Now neuroscientists have another reason to be thankful for games, according to a new paper. It turns out that modern 3D graphics cards - which mostly exist in order to render videogame visuals - can be used to do fMRI data analysis.

According to Sweden's Eklund et al, a graphics card can perform intensive fMRI analysis hundreds of times faster than a regular processor of the equivalent speed, because graphics processors make use of parallel computing optimized for 3D images and that's ultimately what all brain scans are.

They developed a way to run non-parametric statistical analyses of brain imaging data. Proponents say that non-parametric stats have many advantages over conventional parametric ones - and they're certainly becoming increasingly popular. But they involve doing far more calculations. Thousands of times more, in some cases.

It turns out though that armed with 2.5 GHz CPU and three NVidia GTX 480s, and making use of NVidia's graphics programming language, they were able to cut the time to analyse one person's brain with 100,000 permutations, from 24 hrs to just 9 minutes. The whole setup cost $4000, so it's not cheap, but they say it's "a fraction of the price for a PC cluster with equivalent computational performance" i.e. one relying on lots of general purpose processors, rather than graphics cards. Even on GTX480 did the job very well.

Best of all, this gives neuroscientists an excuse to spend their grant money on awesome gaming rigs. Why do I want the latest GForce on my work computer? To do non-parametric data analysis, obviously. Sure, it would also allow me to run Modern Warfare 3 at the highest settings... but that's not why I want it.

Eklund A, Andersson M, Knutsson H (2011). Fast random permutation tests enable objective evaluation of methods for single-subject FMRI analysis. International journal of biomedical imaging, 2011 PMID: 22046176

You Use Your Partner To Phone And Play Angry Birds. Literally.

WITH lots of weddings expected on Tuesday, people in love across the world are getting ready for their latest fix.

But should we really characterize the intense devotion shown by people in love, as love? A recent experiment that I carried out using neuroimaging technology suggests that love-related terms like “romance” and “soulmates” aren’t scientifically accurate - not compared to a word we use to describe our relationships with our smartphones. That word is “owning an iPhone.”

As a branding consultant, why am I even writing this article for the NYT? Never mind. Earlier this year, I carried out an fMRI experiment to find out whether iPhones were really, truly addictive, no less so than alcohol, cocaine, shopping or video games (sic)... wait, are those last two actually addictive? Whatever, let's just say they are.

In conjunction with the San Diego-based firm MindSign Neuromarketing (kerching! Wait, did I write that, or just think it?), I enlisted eight men and eight women between the ages of 18 and 25. Our 16 subjects were exposed separately to audio and to video of a wife or husband.

In each instance, the results showed activation in both the audio and visual cortices of the subjects’ brains. In other words, when they were exposed to the video, our subjects’ brains didn’t just see their partner, they “heard” them, too. This powerful cross-sensory phenomenon is known as "the brain storing information about people and objects, and retrieving it in response to related stimuli", or "memory" to use the technical term.

But most striking of all was the flurry of activation in the insular cortex of the brain, which has also been associated with seeing an iPhone. The subjects’ brains responded to the sound of their partner as they would respond to the presence or proximity of a top of the range smartphone (with free WiFi in thousands of locations!)

In short, the subjects didn’t demonstrate the classic brain-based signs of addiction when they were shown pictures of their lovers. Instead, they made calls and played Angry Birds on them.

---

The silliness of equating insula activation on fMRI with love and using this to argue that we love our iPhones as a recent crap OpEd in the New York Times did, has been excellently covered over at [Citation Needed], Neurocritic and many others. I'm sure you've heard plenty about this story already.

But let's set aside the fact that loads of other things, by no means limited to disgust and drug addiction, are known to involve the insula in fMRI. Let's assume (as the NYT piece did) that the only two things that had ever been shown to activate the insula were seeing an iPhone and seeing someone you love.

This study still wouldn't show that people love their phones. You could equally well turn the whole thing on its head and argue that it shows that we think of people we love as something to make phone calls with. Hey, the brain activity is the same as when you look at an iPhone.

This might strike you as implausible, but given the fMRI data alone, you have no grounds for saying one interpretation is more or less plausible than the other.

There are countless other interpretations, each equally plausible given the imaging data. Maybe the insula is only about love, and the activation to the iPhone is due to conditioned association (you call people you love on it). Maybe it's about objects you see every day, which includes your phone and people you love. Maybe...

The only reason to prefer any particular interpretation would be because you have evidence from outside neuroimaging - from other areas of neuroscience or psychology. So if you discovered that insula lesions cause people to be unable to fall in love (they don't, as far as I know) then you could make a case for the love interpretation. But only then.

Neuroimaging, on its own, can't tell us anything about the brain. It's like a peek under the hood of your car. If you already know how a car works, you can look under the hood and work out what's going on, and what's gone wrong. But only if you have that prior knowledge. Otherwise, it's just a big set of metal pipes.

The Growing Campaign for Bert and Ernie to Marry

I never knew this, but apparently a lot of people out there suspect that Bert and Ernie are gay, and now pressure is mounting for the two to marry. There's an official change.org petition as well as a Facebook page. My question is, aren't all puppets technically genderless? So isn't this really about marriage equality for puppets?