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?

Occam's Donkey at the end of the decade

Well, Occam's Donkey survived its second year and is set to enter the new decade. I have achieved my aim of blogging about once a week, although it must said that a number posts reflected "blogging light", being digests, or just paraphrasing other views. Be that as it may, I do believe that Occam's Donkey succeeded in raising important issues, especially regarding neuroscience and education. It was again gratifying to find that many posts from Occam's Donkey featured on the first page of Google searches on appropriate key words.

Look forward to more of the same in 2010, but with attempts to spend more time on critical thinking.

May 2010 bring for readers whatever you want.

Shooting down the strawman

Orac from Respectful Insolence is one of my favourite bloggers, but this time he shot himself in the foot. He placed the picture below under the caption "All I want for Christmas is ..., heavy duty firearms."


The picture seems posed and is not representative of parents who are gun owners at all, except maybe a few loons in the mountains between somewhere and nowhere. It turns out that it is a deliberate fake from Motifake, a website that deals in "fake motivational posters", although I accept that Orac may not have known of its origin.

Orac continues with this cryptic comment: "Somehow, I don't think we're in Hammond, Indiana anymore." It turns out that Hammond, Indiana refers to a movie in which a boy desires above all else a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas.


While Orac is entitled to whatever his views on firearms may be, logical fallacies and suspect reasoning will not help his case. The picture is a typical strawman - it is a fake and misrepresents the views of mainstream gun owners. The link that Orac tries to draw between the supposed assault rifles in the picture and the Daisy Red Ryder from Hammond, Indiana is tenuous, a non-sequitur - the one idea just does not follow the other.

And why should we not still be in Hammond, Indiana? Why should a boy or girl, even in this day and age, not desire a Daisy Red Ryder for Christmas? I would not mind one myself. Why should a father or mother not give one, provided it is accompanied by responsible training and it is used only under adult supervision where the law allows? The values from Hammond, Indiana may be old-fashioned, but should they be?

This quote from Mike Venturino in the American Handgunner magazine says something about the gun culture I ascribe to:

"Also in my gun culture, people don't shoot up road signs, farmer's gates. rancher's cattle, or anything else that shouldn't be shot. People in my gun culture love to shoot, but they shoot at targets of paper or steel, or at legitimate game animals or varmints. Most people in my gun culture love competitions: not because they have to be top dog, but because competitions are their social events. People in my gun culture look forward to breaks in the games' action or the end of the days shooting so they can visit with others. Then they talk about such things as the width and depth of grease grooves in their bullets, or how many lands and grooves their barrels have or what's the best powder for such and such a caliber or gun."

OK, maybe that's a bit over the top, but you get the idea.

Full disclosure: I've been shooting for more than 40 years. I know the situation regarding firearms in South Africa, but based on my contact with American shooters, I surmise that the attitudes of mainstream gun owners are similar. My children have been introduced to responsible firearms use and safety from an early age.

Aide Memoire 7

From ScienceDaily: Dyslexia: Some very smart accomplished people cannot read well.

Jonah Lehrer from Frontal Cortex: ADHD and time.

Vaughan from Mind Hacks: Men are from Earth, Women are from Earth.

From ScienceDaily: Learning by imagining: How mental imagery training aids perceptual learning.

Steven Novella from Neurologica: Teaching how science works.

From ScienceDaily: CIMT may improve arm use in children with hemiplegic cerebral palsy, report shows.

Michael McKinney from Leader Blog: Managers can (and should) be leaders.

From ScienceDaily: Young adults who exercise get higher IQ scores.

From ScienceDaily: Early intervention for toddlers with autism highly effective, study finds.

Respectful Insolence and Neurologica on Deepak Chopra in Deepak Chopra and his Choprawoo translated: "Skeptics, take my ill-informed speculations seriously!" and Chopra Attacks Skeptics.

ScienceDaily: Young Adults Who Exercise Get Higher IQ Scores

ScienceDaily: Early Intervention for Toddlers With Autism Highly Effective, Study Finds.

Bob Sutton: Mintzberg in the WSJ: Get Rid of Executive Bonuses.

Bob Sutton: Jeff Pfeffer on the Misguided Lust for Outside CEOs as Saviors.

Parasites and free will

Robert Sapolski in The Edge:

"The parasite my lab is beginning to focus on is one in the world of mammals, where parasites are changing mammalian behavior. It's got to do with this parasite, this protozoan called Toxoplasma. ...

In the endless sort of struggle that neurobiologists have — in terms of free will, determinism — my feeling has always been that there's not a whole lot of free will out there ...

And it's got to do with this utterly bizarre world of parasites manipulating our behavior. It turns out that this is not all that surprising. There are all sorts of parasites out there that get into some organism, and what they need to do is parasitize the organism and increase the likelihood that they, the parasite, will be fruitful and multiply, and in some cases they can manipulate the behavior of the host."

Much has been written on the dangers of Toxoplasmosis for pregnant women and the fetus. As usual, Wikipedia has a good rundown. While not exactly new information, Sapolski does a good job of spelling out the potential (but speculative at this stage) behavioural effects of Toxoplasmosis infections in mammals, more specifically humans. It turns out that the parasite, through a common evolutionary ancestor billions of years ago, is able to manipulate very specific circuits in the mammalian amygdala that control stress responses to predators. In the case of rats, their natural avoidance and fear reaction to cat urine is replaced by attraction and mild sexual stimulation. Oops ...!

Thinking of a number of tourists the last few years who stupidly (fatally) approached lions in South African game reserves, one wonders whether they were infected by Toxoplasmosis and actually died in sexual euphoria?! OK, maybe that's taking it a bit too far. The important issue remains that this is another possible factor that may be affecting our behaviour and makes free will an ever more elusive phenomenon.

Now, where's that damn cat?

AGW, wouldst thou have false positive or false negative?

Anthropogenic global warming, let me add my bit of hot air to the problem, literally in this case because this is the first post in which I shall use DragonDictate dictation software.

There is little question that global warming is real, the real issue is whether it is caused by human actions, or is just part of the natural climatic cycle. Notwithstanding the University of East Anglia debacle, scientific consensus is that global warming is in fact anthropogenic, caused by humans. I suspect that most AGW deniers are motivated by greed and self-interest, but it can also not be denied that there are credible scientists who question whether humans are the cause of global warming.

A graph with an excellent summary of the different points of view can be found at Information is Beautiful. Hat tip to Sean from Cosmic Variance for alerting me to the chart, which he has checked and believes to be accurate.

In previous posts I explored views that false positives (believing something to be true when it is not) have survival value. In this case less harm will be done if we wrongly believe and act as if global warming is caused by humans, than if believing and acting that it's not. Some corporate AGW deniers would have us believe that economic disaster will befall us if we acted to limit human influence on the environment. They often point to job losses as a likely consequence, yet whenever there is an economic downturn they are the first to retrench staff, citing all kinds of spurious reasons, when all they are interested in are profits, executive bonuses and shareholder value. In the case of AGW I suspect that's all they're interested in as well.

Someone has also mentioned Pascal's Wager in this regard. I believe it has some relevance, if in doubt play safe. If it turns out we were wrong about the anthropogenic part, less harm would have been done than the other way around. The physicist, Robert Park, made the same point about the population explosion, safer to all be Malthusians now.

Aide Memoire 6

Granddad from Head Rambles on The Irish Holocaust.

Steven Novella from Neurologica on Answering Some Autism Questions.

Various posts on Rom Houben, the Belgian man who allegedly recovered from coma and is now communication via facilitated communication: Respectful Insolence 1, Neurologica 1, Respectful Insolence 2 and Neurologica 2.

Neuroskeptic on Deconstructing the Placebo.

Vaughan from Mindhacks on Autism, desperation and untested treatments.

Jonah Lehrer from Frontal Cortex on The Reading Brain.

Bob Sutton on: The Tension Between Getting it Done and Getting it Right

Deric Bownds from Mindblog on The sooner you can sleep, the better you learn.

From ScienceDaily: Cognitive dysfunction reversed in mouse model of Down syndrome.

Steven Novella from Neurologica on Evidence in Medicine: Correlation and Causation.

Jonah Lehrer from Frontal Cortex on The Tiger Woods effect.

Vaughan from Mind Hacks on the Forer effect: You are kind, strong willed, but can be self-critical.

From Bill Cohen on the Leader Blog: Drucker on The seven deadly sins of leadership.

From Neurophilosophy: Dyslexia and the Cocktail Party effect.

Occam's Donkey on Skeptics' Circle

My post on Brain Profiling as a mind myth has been taken up on Skeptics' Circle for 20 November.

Aide Memoire 5

More catching up to do. More ideas for future posts and for readers who may wish to follow up on.

Raymond Tallis on The Humanist: Neurotrash, on the abuse of neuroscience.

Steven Novella from Neurologica: Memory.

From Scientific Blogging: Telepathy and the quantum.

Bob Sutton: Intuitive vs. data-driven decision making.

From ScienceDaily: Poor Start Between A Class And Its Teacher Almost Impossible To Rectify.

From eSkeptic: Sagan and skepticism.

From ScienceDaily: Baby's language development starts in the womb.

Donald Clark from Donald Clark Plan B: Gardner's multiple intelligences seductive nonsense.

Donald Clark from Donald Clark Plan B: Gardner's multiple intelligences and scientific stupidity.

Jonah Lehrer from Frontal Cortex: The personality paradox, on the context dependency of personality and fundamental attribution error.

Jamie O'Leary from Flypaper: Teacher quality the most important (in-school) factor.

Jonah Lehrer from Frontal Cortex: Learning from mistakes.

Steven Novella from Neurologica: A culture of science-based practice, something sorely needed in education.

Donald Clark from Donald Clark Plan B: Future is free, about all the free educational opportunities out there.

Aide Memoire 4

More ideas that readers may want to look at and that I may blog about more extensively in future.

Tracey Allison Altman from Evidence Soup on Martin Gardner, the amazing author of Fads and fallacies in the name of science, as well as books and columns on recreational mathematics.

Bob Sutton on a meta-analysis of the most effective factors for predicting job performance.

Donald Clark from Donald Clark Plan B demolishes Piaget.

Vaughan from Mind Hacks on 40 years of brain research.

From Derick Bownds on Mindblog: Rational irrationality.

From ScienceDaily: Copper bracelets and magnetic wrist straps are ineffective in relieving arthritis pain.

From PsyBlog: How Rewards Can Backfire and Reduce Motivation.

Scientific Blogging on supernatural coincidences.

From Vaughan at Mind Hacks: Changes in illiterate adults' brains when they learn to read.

From Jonah Lehrer at Frontal Cortex: The reversal of neurodevelopmental cognitive deficits in animal experiments, specifically with mice.

From Vaughan at Mind Hacks: The significance of blinking.

From Derick Bownds on Mindblog: The role of dopamine in seeking stimulation.

Brilliant article by Paul Krugman in the New York Times: How did economists get it so wrong?

Krugman's article commented on from physics points of view by Sean and Daniel at Cosmic Variance.