Daydreaming, neural connectivity and intelligence

Jonah Lehrer from The Frontal Cortex reports on research that links resting state activity (the state in which daydreaming occurs) in the brain with the stimulation of long-range neural connectivity and hence intelligence. He refers to an article by Whitfield-Gabrieli and Gabrieli in Mind Matters and states:

"(they) ... outline some interesting new research on the link between resting state activity - the performance of the brain when it's lying still in a brain scanner, doing nothing but daydreaming - and general intelligence. It turns out that cultivating an active idle mind, or teaching yourself how to daydream effectively, might actually encourage the sort of long-range neural connections that make us smart. At the very least, it's time we stop discouraging kids from staring out the classroom window, because mind wandering isn't a waste of time."

He quotes Whitfield-Gabrieli and Gabrieli in their discussion of research by Ming Song:

"Like prior researchers, they found that the posterior cingulate cortex is the hub of the human brain - it is the most widely and intensively connected region of the human brain at rest. Moreover, the strength of connectivity among distant brain regions was greater in people with superior than average IQ scores. Another 2009 study came to a similar conclusion, and noted that the strongest relations between resting connectivity and IQ were observed in the frontal and parietal brain regions, which have been most associated with performance on IQ tests.

Thus, remarkably, the strength of long-distance connections in the resting brain can be related to performance on IQ tests. We are often impressed when people make creative connections between ideas - perhaps long-range connectivity in the brain empowers such mental range."

Interesting stuff indeed, but still no justification for therapies that focus without evidence for effectiveness on the claimed improvement of inter- and intra-hemispheric connectivity.

Trauma debriefing in schools ineffective?

I have long wondered about the effectiveness of trauma debriefing in schools and whether it may not cause more harm than good. ScienceDaily may have the answer:

Recent systematic reviews indicate that psychological debriefing of adults does not prevent post-traumatic stress disorder and it may even increase the risk of this disorder. While there is little research on the effectiveness and safety of these interventions in schools, "the evidence clearly points to the ineffectiveness of these interventions in preventing post-traumatic stress disorder or any other psychiatric disorder in adults. (They) urge that psychological debriefing not be performed after traumatic incidents in schools, and that more research is needed to assess psychological and mental health interventions prior to implementation in schools.

It has become the custom in South Africa that after traumatic events trauma debrievers from different disciplines and presumably different competencies descend on schools en masse. I'm not sure that they do any good, or may even cause harm.

Vygotsky and Piaget: Outdated theories?

Donald Clark in Donald Clark Plan B can usually be trusted to cut through to the quick. His take on Vygotsky and Piaget will not endear him to educationists who hold them dear. Vygotsky especially is held in high regard by so-called progressive educators.

Donald Clark has the following to say about Vygotsky:

"Why have learning academics been so keen to resurrect an old Marxist theorist, dress up half-baked sociology and pretend it’s psychology? Having worked my way through 'Thought and Language' and 'Mind in Society' along with several other Vygotsky texts, I'll be damned if I can see what all the fuss is about. He is to the psychology of learning what Lysenko was to genetics. Indeed the parallel with Lysenko is quite apposite. Forgoing the idea of genetics he sees interventionist, social mediation as the sole source of cognitive development. Vygotsky is a sort of ‘tabla rasa’ Lamarkian learning theorist. ... Vygotsky puts learning before development - a sort of social behaviourist. This is in direct contradiction to almost everything we now know about the mind and its modular structure (this sentence used outside the original sequence). He is simply wrong."

He also does not spare Piaget:

"... there’s almost nothing left of his theories that is remotely useful to a new teacher. His four-stage theory of child development has been so completely wiped out by subsequent studies, that there’s nothing left. It’s merely an exercise in the history of science. What’s shocking is the way he’s still revered and taught in (such) courses. It’s like teaching Lamarck, not Darwin.

The good news is that his mistakes led to more rigorous studies that really did unravel child development, although one wonders why he is taught at all. The bad news is that the hole was filled by an even less rigorous and more flawed theorist, Lev Vygotsky. Don’t get me started on him!

What's worrying is the fact that teachers are coming out with a fixed view of child development based on 'ages and stages' that are quite wrong. This leads to amateurish teaching methods and a lack of understanding of when and how to teach numeracy and literacy. The 'whole-language' teaching fiasco in primary schools was the perfect storm of this amateurish approach.

The sad fact is that education and training is still soaked in this dated theory, as they suffer badly from 'groupthink'. The community literally thinks that theories are sound if a) they've been around for a long time (sorry, but in science, especially psychology, the opposite is true) b) everyone does it (that's precisely the problem)."

I'm not an expert on Vygotsky and Piaget, but I can't fault Donald Clark's conclusions. My concern is that these theories are often taught uncritically in education faculties at universities (at least in South Africa). As I've remarked in the past, critical and scientific thinking do not feature strongly in most teachers' training (in South Africa). Purveyors of scientifically questionable educational techniques often mention Piaget and Vygotsky as influences on their eclectic theories. This makes their theories seem more familiar to teachers and fool their bullshit detectors, which are rarely effective in any case. My solution? Teach student teachers the rudiments of critical and scientific thinking!

NLP - the cradle of budding quacks?

During my journeys into the dark heart of educational quackery (OK, that's a bit over the top, but I like it), I was struck by how often quacks claim the magic über quack affirmation - NLP Master Practitioner. What should be a source of embarrassment to be mentioned behind closed doors, becomes a beacon to attract the gullible. Which self help guru coined the phrase "... turn the negatives into positives"? NLP is clearly a quacking granfalloon, but it also seems to be the cradle of many budding educational quacks.

Wikipedia is a usually a good source to start reading up on any topic. It is also for Neuro-linguistic Programming. The danger with Wikipedia articles on questionable practices is that they may been be written by practitioners in mufti. In this case Dave Snowden, a critic of NLP, is one of the authors/editors of the article, which makes for a more objective view. It is always instructive to look at the discussions between the authors/editors on the discussion pages of any Wikipedia article. In this case there are interesting discussions between Snowden and some NLP supporters. The discussions range from guardedly civilized to downright hostile.

I'm not going to spend too much time here on NLP, as there's a lot of information on the Web. Here are two useful links:

Wikipedia on NLP.
Barry Beyerstein on pseudoscience.

Where will Chopra draw the line?

Deepak Chopra, the doyen of quantum quacks, is not a happy man. He has been quite vocal lately about the constant criticism he attracts from science based skeptics. He seems to be specifically irritated by Michael Shermer. But let him speak:

"It used to annoy me to be called the king of woo woo. ... I had an unpredictable reaction. I realized that I would much rather expound woo woo than the kind of bad science Shermer stands behind. He has made skepticism his personal brand, more or less, sitting by the side of the road to denigrate "those people who believe in spirituality, ghosts, and so on," as he says on a YouTube video." (This after a square-off with Michale Shermer on Larry King Live).

Chopra explained his views at the Indian Astrology Conference:

"Western science is still frozen in an obsolete, Newtonian worldview that is based literally on superstition -- and we can call it the superstition of materialism -- which says you and I are physical entities of the physical universe, ..."

Here he was essentially referring to his understanding of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics. The Copenhagen interpretation (especially as he (mis)understands it), however, is not generally accepted. See here for a good discussion by Wadhawan and Kamal.

Regarding medical practice, Chopra and co-authors made the
following statement in an article entitled The Mythology Of Science-Based Medicine in the Huffington Post:

"We are not suggesting that Americans adopt any and all alternative practices simply because they are alternative. These, too, must demonstrate their effectiveness through objective testing."

That is exactly what proponents of science-based medicine have been saying all along! Someone, I can't recall who, said that there are only two types of medicine - scientifically supported and scientifically unsupported. In view of that, I wonder how Chopra would judge something such as "Prof" William Nelson's Quantum Xrroid Consciousness Interface, or SCIO/QXCI, a bullshit device that I've blogged about before here and here.

I'm interested to know, where will Chopra draw the line? Why then, should all so-called alternative medicine not be subjected to objective scientific validation?

Back to the future

Techno-junkies, but anti-science; conspiracy minded, but gullible; cynical, but superstitious. These are some of the contradictions I see in people around me. Constantly on their Blackberry's, jabbering about Botox and whether to innoculate their children. Big pharma is screwing them, but quantum quacks are trusted. AGW is a conspiracy, but they call up the dead. Their tolerance for cognitive dissonance must be off the scale.

Eighty years ago the poet C. Louis Leipoldt decried quackery and superstition in South Africa. Yet those I know from that era, including my parents (father, 85 and mother, 79) who had no training in science, have a great appreciation of science and a fair amount of general knowledge about the ideas of the Curie's, Einstein, Darwin and Bohr. They grew up in a time when people were excited by science and new discoveries. They seem less gullible than most younger people I have contact with. Evidence? No, I have no specific evidence - just observation. Yes, that is subject to confirmation bias and may well be inaccurate, but I don't think it is.

The older people I know trust mainstream medicine (OK, they have a weakness for homeopathy), consider Chopra's quantum quackery to be bullshit, find The Secret hilarious and consider John Edwards to be a charlatan. They experienced the tragedy of terrible illnesses such as polio and diptheria. They had the good sense to see that their children (us) were immunized when vaccines became available, as we did for ours. They did not look to celebrities for advice in matters of science and medicine.

I repeat this graphic I used earlier - are we on our way down?