If you haven’t seen them already, you really need to check out these amazing, amazing photos of kids’ science fair projects. For so many of them I can’t even imagine what the null hypothesis could be. It’s like science from a semi-parallel universe.
I can’t really make fun of how the kids look, though, because check out this pic of my two best friends (since 6th grade), Ken and Glen:
And see how they turned out:
Reminds me of the tale of another computer hacker’s transformation:
Considering how lazy many e-daters are, and how clever many other e-daters are, it should come as no surprise that plagiarism runs rampant in the online dating world. On Friday the Wall Street Journal reported on copycat personal profiles, mentioning that in one survey 9% of respondents admitted to lifting material from someone else, and that lines from some sources appear on dozens of people’s profile pages. In some cases people cop to lack of imagination, but I suspect in others people subconsciously appropriate the sentiments behind the words so as to justify their claims of authorship.
It’s funny to me that Dan Ariely & co. are using HOTorNOT for research purposes. First, because I didn’t realize that site was still around. Second, because a few years ago, when I was a HoN profile moderator (responsible for viewing people’s submitted pics and personal statements and approving or rejecting them), I emailed a friend, "After painfully reading over 1000 profiles I think I could write a sociology dissertation on it." Also: "I have gained a tragic glimpse into the heart of human nature."
We’ve started a network of blogs at work, so I am now also blogging for Psychology Today. It’s not yet clear whether this will add to or detract from SilverJacket (though it’s already pretty clear what it’s doing to my nights and weekends…) As for competing with myself, there’s a PT-SJ Venn diagram with a lot of overlap. I’ve decided that I will be making my psych-heavy posts over there and linking to a few of them from here so you can keep up. I will save my dick jokes exclusively for SJ.
•Check out all of the PT blogs here.
•Check out Brainstorm, the blog written by me and the five other PT editors, here.
•Check out only my posts on Brainstorm here.
Experimental psychologists frequently ask people to rate things on a scale: How difficult is this task (1=super easy, 5=way hard); Are you a big drinker (1=no, 2=not sure, 3=yes); Is this task difficult because you are currently drunk (1=no, 7=what’s the question again?). Etc.
The concept of a ratings scale is pretty simple and widely applicable. Yet somehow, just because some guy named Rensis Likert wrote a paper about using these scales back in 1932, whenever researchers mention a ratings scale in a study, they call it a Likert scale. Here’s an example from a paper I covered for an upcoming issue of Psychology Today: "Participants made these ratings on a 9-point Likert scale (1 = not at all physically attractive/sexually promiscuous, 9 = very physically attractive/sexually promiscuous)."
Under US law, obtaining a patent requires that your invention is nonobvious. Here is a concept that is both obvious, and not even this guy’s invention, and it’s now named after him. It makes me wonder what it would take to get the checkbox named after me. Or for researchers to have to write stuff like "Subjects then answered a Hutson yes-or-no question about whether they liked cake."
(On your way out, please rate this post on a 1-point Likert scale in the comments section. (1=nerdy but kinda rad). I’ll be running stats shortly.)
Focus on Hallucinogens: This is a little gem I've held onto since my friends Ken and Glen mailed it to me as part of a care package when I was working in Alaska after high school. It's from 1991 and out of print but still in near-perfect condition. I wrote children's science books for two years but never wrote one as fun or useful as this. It explains to 9-year-olds everything from neurons to shamans. Rad!
A couple years ago on this blog I mentioned Finnish scientist Antti Revonsuo's Threat Simulation Theory, which proposes that the purpose of dreaming is to rehearse one's reactions to real-world dangers so that we're better prepared when we meet them in waking life. It's like those training programs in the Matrix after which Neo unplugs and gasps, "I know kung fu."
The TST has definite surface appeal, but it's taken quite a beating itself over the years (with researchers noting, for example, that nightmares actually get in the way of daytime functioning, and that most dreams are not even nightmares), and there's now a paper in press in Consciousness and Cognition that puts a few more dings in the theory.
According to TST, the more threats you face, the more they'll show up in your dreams. So the researchers peaked inside the nightscapes of subjects in both South Africa and North Wales. (Guess where they're counting real sheep.) Turns out African dreams contained no more physical threats than Welch. And perhaps more telling, only about 1% of dreams in each group contained "realistic escapes from realistic physical threats." (Yes but what of flying away from killer electric sheep?) Without that crucial element, it's like the Matrix except with Neo sputtering "I know how to get the crap beat out of me."
P.S.
My colleague Jay Dixit also does a kicking of the TST tires in the December issue of Psychology Today. He concludes with the words of Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett: "Yes, dreams are worrying about disasters. But they're also planning for nice things and they're fantasizing and they're problem solving. [The purpose of dreaming is] as broad as all waking thought. That's why I say dreams are really just thinking in a different biochemical state." Check it out.
If a thought happens in a forest of neural dendrites, and no one is there to measure it, did you really think it? That's the premise of neurorealism—the bias towards believing that psychological phenomena aren't really real unless we have neuroscientific data to prove it. Further, the data can be used to make false claims appear real too—especially using the most seductive kind of brain data, neuroimages.
You can read more about it here in my story for the New York Times Magazine's 2007 Year in Ideas issue, published today.
The timing couldn't have been better. As I was writing it, a group of scientists published an op-ed in the Times titled "This Is Your Brain on Politics" that drew a scathing letter to the editor three days later co-signed by 17 eminent researchers in the field (including Anthony Wagner, in whose neuroimaging lab I worked from 2000-2002), as well as plenty of other bad press.
And last week, the neuropsychologist Daniel Amen, who makes commercial use of SPECT, published an op-ed in the LA Times arguing that we should scan the brains of all potential presidents so we can spot the types of "brain pathology" that would make one forget like Reagan, philander like Clinton, or flub words like Bush. He advocates the technique (and practically demands that the People employ his clinics) essentially as a form of Lite-Brite phrenology. His hyping of a reductionistic approach and of its political application embodies three related terms that Racine articulates in his paper: neurorealim (see above), combined with neuroessentialism* (the belief that your brain defines you as a person), deployed together to push policy changes (neuropolicy.)
On a lighter note, I considered titling the piece Crockusology, after the elusive Dr. Alfred Crockus. The tale, in brief: Since 2003, a man named Dan Hodgins has been claiming in lectures to educators and parents that a part of the brain called the crockus is four times larger in boys, supposedly explaining why "Girls see the details of experiences… Boys see the whole but not the details." In response to some questioning by prominent linguist and blogger Mark Liberman in September after one incredulous woman brought the apocryphal lump of grey matter to Liberman's attention, Hodgins further explained that "The Crockus was actually just recently named by Dr. Alfred Crockus. It is the detailed section of the brain [sic], a part of the frontal lope [sic]." The doctor and the brain area are all a big crock, but Hodgins has responded to various email inquiries with laughably vague and incorrect elaborations. This presenter's use of PowerPoint slides with pretty pictures to pilot pedagogy perhaps profiles all of Racine's terms even more prominently that the president-pestering psychologist in the newspaper piece. You can follow the gripping case history in full at Language Log.
Of course adding schematics and jargon can make any type of scientific explanation appear more valid, but they may be most potent in studies of the mind, as people have more confidence in tangible reality than in subjective accounts of experience.
Sources for the NYTM article:
–Dave McCabe et al.'s in press Cognition paper "Seeing is believing: The effect of brain images on judgments of scientific reasoning" (pdf)
–Deena Weisberg et al.'s 2008 Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience paper "The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations" (pdf)
–Eric Racine et al.'s 2005 Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper "fMRI in the public eye" (html, pdf)
–Joe Dumit (whose course "Brains and Culture" I took at MIT) was cut from the piece for space reasons, but he has a book titled Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity and participated in a 2005 AAAS meeting session titled "Brain Imaging and the 'Cognitive Paparazzi': Viewing Snapshots of Mental Life Out of Context."
*Adina Roskies may have been the first to use the term "neuroessentialism," in a 2002 Neuron paper, "Neuroethics for the New Millenium." (pdf). At least a third independent coining popped up last year on Mind Hacks.
This week I spotted the above image on newsweek.com. For a couple of terrifying seconds I thought the fuzzy bulbous thing on the left was the back of a baby’s head with a fleshy antenna growing out of the top. Yikes. New DNA indeed.
Last week I received a press advisory from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that began:
"A hamster-size dose of sildenafil, known as Viagra, helps the rodent recover more quickly from a six-hour advance in its daily cycle, researchers report."
A hamster-size dose of Viagra? Yikes, that better not be a suppository.
Contexts, a publication of the American Sociological Association, was more careful with their representation of appropriate dosage when they captioned the following image last year (volume 5, number 2, page 41):
Actual size
The academic periodical played a bit more fast and loose in captioning the image of Bob Dole on the following page:
But who can blame them? That’s totally my favorite kind of joke: one that combines Viagra, invalids, and bestiality.