Define to confuse

I have often wondered whether definitions of complex issues don't just serve to confuse the issue. We sometimes know what something is until we try to define it.

Bob Sutton over at Work Matters calls this the "... folly of crafting precise definitions." He quotes a physicist friend, Larry Ford, who frustrates behavioural scientists with statements such as, "... there is a negative relationship between precision and accuracy."

This creates a dilemma for persons like me, who prefer concepts to precisely defined and carefully measured; and who like solutions to be evidence based. An approach that seems well able to manage the ambiguities of complexity can be found at Dave Snowden's Cognitive Edge. Their South African 'agent' is Sonja Blignaut at The Narrative Lab.

More complex than we can imagine

My Phd back in the 1980's dealt with the possible role of inefficient interhemispheric transfer in specific learning disabilities. The models from which I worked were the effects of commissurotomies and agenesis of the corpus callosum and other commissures. In neuropsychology much was made of the localization of function and double dissociation was the gold standard. Norman Geschwind's disconnection theories were very influential in both neurology and neuropsychology.

Image from Wikipedia Commons file authored by Thomas Schultz.

It was also the time that simplistic pop-psychology ideas about whole brain stimulation proliferated. Neuroscientists tried to stop the flow of whole brain half-wittery to no avail. The trainers, the teachers, the mystics, the quacks and the charlatans latched on to the left-brain right-brain whole-brain idea like leeches and never let go again. The fact that neuroscience soon proved these simplistic ideas wrong was merely a mild inconvenience.

Two quotes from a recent post "Connectomics" by Steven Novella over at Neurologica shows just how ridiculously oversimplified the left-brain right-brain concept is:

"There are approximately 100 billion neurons in the adult human brain. Each neuron makes thousands of connections to other neurons, resulting in an approximate 150 trillion connections in the human brain. The pattern of those connections is largely responsible for the functionality of the brain – everything we sense, feel, think, and do. Neuroscientists are attempting to map those connections – in an effort known as connectomics."

and

"... the connections among neurons in the brain are not the only feature that contributes to brain function. The astrocytes and other “support” cells also contribute to brain function. There is also a biochemical level to brain function – the availability of specific neurotransmitters, for example. So even if we could completely reproduce the neuronal connections in the brain, there are other layers of complexity superimposed upon this."

Darwin Awards for sky shooters

Celebratory gunfire is an idiotic practice that results in many innocent deaths. According to Wikipedia 38 people died from random falling bullets in Los Angeles between 1985 and 1992. Celebratory gunfire in Kuwait after the end of the Gulf War in 1991 caused 20 deaths.

We saw a lot of this stupid practice on television lately in Libyan war. I remember watching it and thinking that these idiots were not only wasting ammunition they may later need, but could also get innocent people killed.


Now a "dof" (dof - Afrikaans term for dumb) rebel "celebrated" by firing an anti-aircraft cannon into the sky near Brega in Libya while a NATO warplane was patrolling the area. As anyone with half a brain would have predicted, the pilot "retaliated" and bombed the terrain, killing 16 rebels. In a just world the shooter would have been one of them and would have earned himself a Darwin Award. The Darwin Award is a satirical award given to those who most stupidly get themselves killed and thus remove themselves from the human gene pool to the genetic advantage of the rest of humanity.

Tips for teachers from the neurobiology of learning

The term "brain based education" seems to be redundant, a no-brainer, what else could education be based on, the liver? Yet it is one of the the biggest sources of quackery in education, also in South Africa. I list the advice by Prof. Michael Friedlander with some trepidation therefore, lest some quack latch onto something he or she does not fully understand and build a new mythology on it.

Prof. Friedlander offered advice based on the neurobiology of learning for medical educators. I briefly list his ideas of factors important for learning below, summarised from Brain Scientists Offer Medical Educators Tips on the Neurobiology of Learning. Read the article itself for more information.

Repetition, appropriately spaced

Reward and reinforcement

Visualization

Active engagement

Stress (moderate)

Fatigue (the importance of sleep to consolidate learning)

Multitasking (provided tasks are relevant)

Individual learning styles

Here I would differ, there is ample evidence that teaching to individual learning styles is ineffective.

Active involvement: Doing is learning

Revisiting information and concepts using multimedia

Note that brain profiling, whole brain learning, the triune brain, brain blockages, etc., does not appear in the list!

Facilitated Communication, what's the harm?

"Facilitated communication (FC) is a process by which a facilitator supports the hand or arm of a communicatively impaired individual while using a keyboard or other devices with the aim of helping the individual to develop pointing skills and to communicate." (Wikipedia)

It is, to my knowledge, not commonly used in South Africa. It is very controversial, the main issue being just who is communicating, the communicatively impaired person or the facilitator? The danger of misrepresentation and even fraud (even if unconscious) by the facilitator is obvious. FC has in the main been rejected by professional organisations, including the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Psychiatric Association, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities.

So, what's the harm? There have been numerous cases of false accusations by facilitators of physical and sexual abuse by parents or other care-givers. Were they actually communicating the intent of the disabled person, or injecting their own (twisted) opinions? The role of therapists in the false recovered memory scams are analogous.

That is exactly what happened in a case in Michigan , USA, as reported by Kim Wombles and Dr. James Todd in Science2.0, Facilitated Communication: A price too high to pay. I highly recommend reading the full article and the comments for a terrifying account of the damage created by a (probably) mentally disturbed facilitator, assisted by the vicious abuse of authority and lack of critical thinking skills by school staff, prosecutors and even the judge.

I quote just the first paragraph of Dr. Todd's account:

"I was one of the defense experts in the original criminal case against the Wendrows, along with Howard Shane, both of us testifying and consulting. It is hardly possible to describe how bizarre,vicious, and unjust the prosecution of the family was. In a rational world, accusations arising from facilitated communication would never be used in court. Facilitated accusations would summarily dismissed, and those who advanced them would be the ones in trouble. After more than a quarter century, there remains not a single methodologically sound study showing that FC has worked for a single individual. Dozens of studies have shown it reliably fails to produce genuine communication. The output is the facilitator's. That is what the science has shown--over and over. That's the reality of FC."

This was not the only case of its kind.

How to complain about quack claims in South Africa

The excellent work of the Treatment Action Campaign in the fight against HIV-quackery is well-known. The TAC now sponsors a blog, Quackdown, run by Nathan Gethen.

Gethen recently posted a very useful Quick guide to lodging complaints with ASASA, the Advertising Standards Authority of South Africa. It covers when to complain, how to complain and explains the process. Individuals can lay complaints free of charge. If I only had this information when I took on BioStrath's claims on ADHD.

A hat tip to Dr. Harris Steinman from the excellent CAMcheck for alerting me to Quackdown. CAMcheck has many examples of complaints about quack advertisements and the outcomes.

The Edge's question for 2011

Every year The Edge asks prominent scientists and other thinkers to answer a specific thought provoking question. The answers are always diverse and make for stimulating (if humbling) reading. Profound thoughts in byte sized chunks that even non-scientists can take heed of. These were the questions posed over the years:

2005 - What do you believe is true, but cannot prove?

2006 - What is your dangerous idea?

2007 - What are you optimistic about?

2008 - What have you changed your mind about?

2009 - What will change everything?

2010 - Is the internet changing the way you think?

The question for 2011 is very topical in a time where anti-science attitudes and irrational thinking seem to be proliferating across the globe:

2011 - What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?

Now, if that could really happen, but don't hold your breath.

Brain Gym's disingenuous response to being caught out

Three years ago Brain Gym was comprehensively discredited and faced a perfect storm. What has happened to them since? My observation is (no specific evidence) that they had been lying low. Certainly in South Africa they seem to have been less visible, which may however, have been due to the rise of competing quackeries rather than the bad publicity.

Image from liveandlearn.net.au

During the storm faced by Brain Gym in 2008, I tried to find a comprehensive online response from them without success. In preparing for this post,I finally found a response by Paul and Gail Dennison, the founders of Brain Gym. They responded specifically to the excellent review by Sense about Science. I had hoped for an honest appraisal of Brain Gym, taking into consideration all the science based criticism they have previously ignored. As shown below, that was not to be and I can only describe their response as disingenuous.

The Dennisons' general reasoning was that Brain Gym worked, that they did not know and had never claimed to know why it worked. Further that they did not understand the neuroscience underlying the putative effects of Brain Gym and had never claimed to do so.

Brain Gym works?

Let's consider the Dennisons' first claim, Brain Gym works. They base this on "... more than a hundred anecdotal, qualitative, and quantitative studies and reports, ... available in the Research Chronology and published in Brain Gym Journal". Now that will only fool the Brain Gym faithful, whom of course the Dennisons' piece was written for. Anecdotes are not evidence. I've seen most of the studies they refer to. Mostly they were performed by Brain Gym practitioners (not independent), no control groups were used, or if there were control groups blinded designs were not used. Being published in the Brain Gym Journal obviously mean that the studies were not published in independent, peer reviewed journals. The Dennisons surely knew that the lack of credible evidence has been one of the main objections against Brain Gym, see for instance, Hyatt, K.J. 2007. Brain Gym: Building stronger brains or wishful thinking? Remedial and Special Education, Vol. 28, No. 2, 117-124. Who are they trying to fool?

The next line of "evidence" to support their claim that Brain Gym works is the self report of their subjects. Now keep in mind that Brain Gym is used primarily in primary schools (although you find the odd high school and even corporate that values the dignity of their students or staff so little as to subject them to such nonsense).

Here are two typical quotes from their article:

"Our students report that, after holding the Positive Points, they are better able to think clearly, make choices, consider consequences, and let go of emotional overlay from past experiences."

and

"Many students notice that their abilities to comprehend and think independently have improved upon increased spinal flexibility."

Keep in mind that one of Brain Gym's claims is that their techniques work almost instantaneously. I've known some pretty bright people, but that level of instant introspection and insight I've never experienced. It is well-known that people's self-assessments are inaccurate and that on average, people rate themselves above average in any skill (which makes no statistical sense). See for instance this article Flawed Self-Assessment: Implications for Health, Education, and Business, hat tip and more information in Barking up the wrong tree.

Look, however, at any Brain Gym manual and you see that the improvements their subjects (whether teachers or children) report are based on suggestion, acquiescence bias and confirmation bias. Children in particular are known to be suggestible and acquiescent to adults. What do you expect a child to report after reading in the Brain Gym manual for kids that:

"We hold (our Positive Points) ... whenever we feel nervous of afraid. We know we can achieve our goals when we stop worrying about things and start working on them. In less than a minute, we begin to feel peaceful about planning for the future."

That is the kind of evidence the Dennisons advance for their claims for the effectiveness of Brain Gym. It is sad to realise that many parents,teachers and even educational administrators will find that sufficient.

They were clueless about the neuroscience?

I've shown the Dennisons' claim that Brain Gym works to be without evidence. That makes the rest of their argument, i.e. they cannot be blamed for getting the neuroscience wrong as they never claimed to understand it in the first place, irrelevant. It is cynical and disingenuous, however.

I've read numerous Brain Gym documents and attended a number of Brain Gym presentations over the years. Never once did I hear any Brain Gym consultant, including the Brain Gym gurus in South Africa at the time, admit to not understanding the science behind it. Their modus operandi was always to dazzle the audience with pop neuroscience, including Paul Maclean's triune brain, Roger Sperry's split brain and neurophysiology claims purportedly by Paul Dennison himself and also by Brain Gym's Carla Hannaford. I had one Brain Gym consultant telling me that he knew very well that the neuroscience claims were nonsense, but that he could not say that to the university of technology students he was working with as would destroy the placebo effect (which he claimed was due to quantum mechanics and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle)!

I've looked again at Dennison's Switching On and Hannaford's Smart Moves. While much of what they wrote was scientifically questionable, nowhere did they admit to being clueless about the neuroscience. They were bullshitting then about the science behind Brain Gym and they're bullshitting now about never claiming a scientific basis for Brain Gym.

Gullibility bracelets, what's the harm?

I'm a Johny-come-lately to this story, just about every newspaper and skeptical blog has covered the Power Balance bracelet fad started by the brothers, Troy and Josh Rodarmel. My first reaction was to call the brothers scam artists and worse. But, just think about it, what a boon for skeptics and bullshit busters - the scientific illiterati exposing their gullibility on the wrist for all to see!


OK, that's a bit over the top. But still, it's quite amusing to observe and see just who is wearing the silly bracelets. As far as health scams go, the bracelets are fairly harmless. To my knowledge, no one is wearing the bracelets and as a result foregoing cancer treatment. What's the harm if some old folk wear them and due to the placebo effect believe that they're experiencing fewer aches and pains? No one will be bankrupted by buying them, especially with counterfeit bracelets costing less than candy bars flooding the market.

Well, I believe the harm comes when children are involved. I see more and more disabled children wearing these things, believing their balance and coordination have improved. For many children with cerebral palsy and their parents, improved balance and coordination are crucial for better functioning and even for better career prospects. Improved balance and coordination is the false promise of Power Balance bracelets. These children and parents have typically had many disappointments in their lives, these bracelets will be more.

Other areas of concern with children, are the false ideas they gain about science and how the body works. Parents (adults) may be satisfied with placebo induced illusions of improved power and coordination, but do they really want their children to believe that holograms can manipulate non-existing energy to produce mysterious improvements in the body?

I am not going into the scientific detail of why Power Balance bracelets are a scam, there are many other blogs doing that. One excellent post is by Brian Dunning in Skepticblog, entititled Power Balance: Magical energy bracelets or nonsense?

The only reward ... schadenfreude?

I've alluded in a previous post to the futility of exposing quackery and nonsense. I cannot recall a single instance of someone engaging in quackery or pseudoscientific activities recanting or apologizing for misleading his or her followers. Quacks and charlatans, accepting that they are honest and well-meaning (debatable), are subject to sunken costs and unlikely to recant.

Their faithful followers are subject to confirmation bias, the placebo effect, the sunken cost fallacy, gullibility, anti-science attitudes, being misled by celebrities and so forth. The net result is that one is often just preaching to the converted and hoping that some undecided people will be swayed. The only doubtful reward may be schadenfreude.

The post hoc fallacy, World Youth Fest and Egypt

When pushed into a corner about the 100 million rand wasted at the recent World Beer and Condom Fest, sorry, World Festival of Youth and Students, Andile Lungisa claimed that the Fest had been instrumental in freeing Tunisia, Egypt and South Sudan. From News24:

Lungisa said that Egyptian youth who had attended the festival in Pretoria in December, had recently been "at the forefront of the Egyptian revolt".

"I'm not saying we started the protests, but before the festival there were no protests in Egypt. After the festival, there were. Draw your own conclusions," Lungisa told the media.

That was of course a classic post hoc ergo propter hoc error. From Skeptic's Dictionary:

"The post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this therefore because of this) fallacy is based upon the mistaken notion that simply because one thing happens after another, the first event was a cause of the second event."

Lungisa'a remarkable assertion was implausible, but not totally impossible (very little is). He offered no evidence, however. He could not even indicate how many Tunisians, Egyptians or Sudanese youth, if any, attended. Two thousand Zimbabweans attended, following Lungisa's reasoning, why is Mugabe still in power?

Resurrecting Occam's Donkey

Occam's Donkey has been dormant for about eight months. Why? Futility?

Well, as the ex-pilot (Randy Quaid) yelled at the aliens in Independence Day before he destroyed their ship:

"Hello boys! I'm baaack!!!"

To the quacks and charlatans out there,

Hi guys, I'm baaack!

Not that they're likely to quake in their boots, they know as well as I do that gullibility reigns and that a fool is still born every minute.