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.

Bio-Strath is at it again

It's examination time in South Africa and the purveyors of products that are supposed to help children improve their results are targeting parents with aggressive marketing campaigns. One of these is Bio-Strath. Their advertising budget must be enormous. We've seen half-page colour advertisements in a number of Sunday newspapers and heard sponsored talks on a dozen radio stations. Their incredible claims are backed by anecdotes and vague references to research. I won't waste time on the anecdotes, but let's look at the claims and the presented evidence.

Bio-Strath generally claims improvement in the cognitive performance of young and old. In this case, they base their claim on a so-called biometric analysis of a cohort of 390 children, Bio-Strath claims 85% improvement in concentration, 88% improvement in resistance (whatever that may be) and 90% improvement in study fatique. These are extraordinary claims and surely require extraordinary evidence (Carl Sagan). So what evidence does Bio-Strath offer? I have had to do some searching and eventually found the abstract, which I have re-produced below:

Is this extraordinary evidence? Hardly. It is a simple survey of feedback reports from parents of children who took Bio-Strath. There is no indication of just how the parents evaluated improvement in concentration, resistance and fatique. Surveys like this are subject to sampling and confirmation bias. As research they are of little value. To use the survey so prominently in an advertisement and to represent it as research is to put it mildly, questionable.

In my opinion Bio-Strath supplies very little evidence to support its extraordinary claims. It's been seventeen years since the survey in question. Had the product performed as claimed, there should have been solid evidence by now.

My previous post on Bio-Strath was entitled Bio-Strath for ADD/ADHD and critically evaluated another deficient Bio Strath study.

Has human evolution turned the corner?

A hat tip to Deric Bownds from Mindblog for this cartoon, which he in turn got from the New Yorker:
As a school principal and South African citizen, some experiences I've had, and observations I've made in the past few weeks, makes me believe that we're rapidly devolving.

In a post entitled The educational leader: what else than a social entrepreneur?, Walter Baets from UCT wrote as follows:

"In many aspects, the successful principal is a social entrepreneur. ... A few thoughts of interest of Charles Maisel on what a social entrepreneur is might explain my argument. A social entrepreneur needs to see things differently, start flipping things around. Entrepreneurship is about seeing, seeing the possibilities. In fact, it is all about learning to look at things differently. A social entrepreneur is not in for maximising profit, but for solving a pressing social problem on a population-wide scale. He or she creates."

In a society where common decency and common sense are increasingly rare and where the lowest common denominator has become the norm (bad punning intended), I'm not sure that I'm up to the task.

Fortunately Robert Frost has encouraging words for every discouraged educator:

"The woods are lovely and dark and deep, but I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep."

Aide Memoire 3

Time for an Aide Memoire again. Stuff that I want to note and maybe return to again some time in the future.

From Bob Sutton: On research that shows that people who complain get an unfair advantage, squeaky wheels get oiled.

From Think Differently: On the 10% rule in sport and other competitive environments.

From Scientific Blogging: A "laymen's" meta-analysis of the evidence for homeopathy, using Google Scholar.

From Mindblog: "Shrinking the shrinks", a call for higher scientific standards for training psychotherapists.

From Science Daily: About the lack of an evidence base for much of psychotherapy.

From Scientific Blogging: Another expose of Brain Gym.

From Tom Peters: Try Civility for success.

From BPS Research Digest: Nagging things that prominent psychologists don't understand about themselves.

From Bob Sutton: His Top Ten Flawed, Suspect, and Incomplete Assumptions about Managing People.

From Scientific Blogging: Sit up straight, as mom always told you to do, is good for self image too!

From Scientific Blogging: Smartness in a bottle, another post on the campus use of drugs for cognitive enhancement, in this case Nootropics.

From eSkeptic: Paranormal Wall Street on how failed Wall Street tycoons are turning to psychics for advice.

Are we hard wired to believe or to doubt?

Jeremy Dean from Psyblog poses the question whether the mind's default position if for us to be naturally critical or naturally gullible. He states:

"It's not just that some people do and some people don't; in fact all our minds are built with the same first instinct, the same first reaction to new information. But what is it: do we believe first or do we first understand, so that belief (or disbelief) comes later?"

Deane points out that philosophers Descartes and Spinoza represented opposing views on this. Descartes believed that we understand first, then believe or disbelieve. According to Spinoza, however, we initially believe and only later change our mind when more evidence comes to light.

Who was right? According to Dean, the consensus scientific view is that we believe first and ask questions later. This has an evolutionary survival advantage in that we can more efficiently avoid danger or grab opportunities that present themselves. This view ties in with a previous posting on Occam's Donkey in which I quoted Michael Shermer on the preference of the human mind for anecdotal evidence above scientific evidence. According to Shermer this is due to an evolutionary imperative to pay attention to perceived danger, with false positives (i.e. false alarms) being relatively harmless, but false negatives (perceiving there to be no danger when in fact there is) potentially fatal.

Critical thinking and being skeptical is thus hard work and goes against our natural instincts!

Shermer's original article in the Scientific American can be found here.

The leadership myth

Madeleine McGrath, writing as the guest blogger on Tom Peter's blog, points out the success of Angela Merkel in Germany, despite being lacking in charisma:

"There have been comments on her rather dour and austere demeanor. She is said to lack charisma, with her communication style described at best as calm and measured. She is not perceived as a visionary, and certainly does not have the public profile of the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy. She had an uneasy relationship with the Social Democrats, her previous coalition partners. Some commentators say that the caution she learned growing up in Eastern Europe has led to a reluctance to take risks as a leader. All in all, she's scoring pretty low on leadership characteristics by my reckoning.

And yet her leadership of the German people through this troubled economic period has built for her an enviable reputation as a statesperson who is reliable and trustworthy."

McGrath suggests that in the current world crisis the era of the superstar leader in both politics and business may be over. In her opinion substance is now preferred over style. I agree, but may I suggest that that should always be the case?

Tu Quoque by the Vatigan

The Guardian recently reported as follows on a statement by the Vatigan:

"The Vatican has lashed out at criticism over its handling of its paedophilia crisis by saying the Catholic church was "busy cleaning its own house" and that the problems with clerical sex abuse in other churches were as big, if not bigger.

In a defiant and provocative statement, issued following a meeting of the UN human rights council in Geneva, the Holy See said the majority of Catholic clergy who committed such acts were not paedophiles but homosexuals attracted to sex with adolescent males."

I expect to hear the Tu Quoque ("you too") fallacy from school children, not from an esteemed organization like the Catholic church. How much more damage and misery will it allow a minority of priests to cause before it acts decisively? As the father of an adolescent son, I find the excuse that priests were not paedophiles because their victims were adolescents, offensive.

Quacks, eat your heart out!

To misquote Crocodile Dundee: "That's not a quack, this is a quack!" Your common, garden variety quack can only watch this guy in envy:


The advert, which is typical of many similar ones seen in South Africa, was handed to me at a robot (South Africanism for a traffic light).

Nandos, a South African fast food franchise known for its excellent satirical advertising campaigns, currently has an advert that takes the micky out of quack adverts. I captured it on my cell phone camera:


Don't call me, I'm on my way to Nandos!

Higher incidence of dementia in former rugby players?

The New York times recently reported on a study that suggested a much higher incidence of dementia among former NFL players (similar to Rugby Union) than among the general population - up to 19 times more than the normal rate for males aged 30 to 49. I have not yet seen the actual research and this should obviously be interpreted with caution. I know of no similar statistics for Rugby Union, as played in South Africa. Given, however, the high incidence of concussion in the local game and the cavalier attitude sometimes towards incidents of concussion, it is certainly something that bears looking into.