Tag: science

What’s all this about a clam? Oh no…

After today’s phrenology session I had an interesting talk with Brain Lady. I found myself explaining to her why she sounded like a postscientific wacko at first, before I learned more about her. Most of the problem is her language. She speaks Science and has been working at very technical jobs in the mental health field for 20 years, but when she’s explaining things to a client she uses analogies and metaphors that have been totally ruined by New Age bubbleheads.

For example, she will say “I’m doing this site to push the energy back over to the other side of your brain”. On further questioning, she explains that this is a thumbnail description for a poorly understood phenomenon in which treating one site causes the voltages to go down there and up in another part of the brain. She doesn’t literally believe that she is pushing the energy around. She refers to treating multiple injuries as “like peeling off layers of an onion”. This sounds like she believes in concentric spheres of some intangible substance, but again it’s a simile. Her observations show her that multiple injuries often require multiple stages of treatment, but there isn’t any proven one-to-one correspondence between the injuries and the stages of treatment. And when she’s talking about electrical activity and mental acuity increasing after treatment, she calls it “waking up the brain”; another analogy. All of these things sound like something the local Crystal Anus Delver at the Metaphysical Bookhonk would say. In Brain Lady’s case, she’s working off many years of academic study and clinical experience in developmental disability, head injuries, special education, substance abuse treatment, and psychotherapy.

The other bad news I had for her is that her stuff sounds like Scientology. Wires on your head, healing old injuries, increased states of awareness, oh dear. You’re expecting Tom Cruise to appear stage left and congratulate you for choosing the right path. Here’s the hilarious part: she knows nothing about Scientology. As I was explaining how many parallels there are, her eyes got wider and wider. “Oh no, do people think this is like Scientology? That’s just a dumb cult!” Poor thing, she’s spent 20 years in the Science Hole and working with actual patients, and hasn’t noticed some weird cultural trends.

She pointed out that she doesn’t speak in Science much to clients because communicating the statistical links between voltage differentials and affective disorders to people with head injuries can be frustrating to both parties. I think I did manage to get across that she was using language and analogies that had been poisoned, though.

For my own part, I told her I had only really started trusting her judgment the day she went off on a rant about attribution errors and the importance of knowing your independent variables and not trusting your subjective observations, with several anecdotes of failed studies that hadn’t taken these precautions.

Review and thoughts: A Symphony in the Brain

What do I do when something new falls into my life? I read a book about it. It’s just how things are done in my family. Since I’ve started neurofeedback therapy I went on the search for books on the subject. There aren’t many, and most of them are $150 tomes for practitioners. I found the one pop science book on the subject and ordered it: Jim Robbins’ A Symphony in the Brain.

The first hurdle to surmount is the writing. Robbins is a magazine journalist, and the book reads like every other pop psych book written by a magazine journalist. It’s heavy on the personal stories and light on science. Way too much of the material is from interviews. There’s about 50 pages of filler, mostly history. And, in the tradition of books about medical breakthroughs, it’s packed with case histories of success.

More seriously, Robbins doesn’t reveal a fact I know from other sources: he was commissioned by one of the players in the story. More about this below.

The history of neurofeedback begins with a UCLA researcher named Barry Sterman and his graduate student, Margaret Ayers. They developed a method for using biofeedback with EEG to help patients control their own brain waves. The technique showed promise and Ayers left to take it into clinical practice, causing the first of many wars in this field. She took with her the technician who had built the original machine, and started a company called Neuropathways. She did therapy and also sold hardware and software.

As usual there was a lot of resistance from medical and psychological experts to this new treatment. There weren’t any good large-scale studies of its efficacy, so clinicians wouldn’t touch it, and no grant money could be scared up to do such studies. Marginalized as she was, Ayers took on the defensive, messianic role of the radical truth-bringer oppressed by closed-minded conservatives. Robbins tells this story pretty well. You can see that there was merit in the therapy and that new ideas were treated unfairly, and you can also see that everyone involved was prickly enough to make things worse. However, Ayers had a lot of success helping patients who were in coma states, where no other treatment even seemed possible, and began to take clients with severely unhappy children who were violent or otherwise uncontrollable and had failed attempts at other help.

The narrative then moves on to a couple named Siegfried and Sue Othmer, and stays with them for the rest of the book. They brought their son to Ayers after the usual series of failures in other treatments for his severe neurological and psychiatric problems. The neurofeedback worked so well that they became enthusiastic converts to this new idea. In fact, they became so enamored of it that they bought equipment and trained themselves in its use. They and Ayers and Ayers’ computer programmer planned a joint venture to spread the good news and get more trained practitioners and equipment distributed.

This relationship also broke down in a mess of broken verbal agreements, patents, lawsuits, and accusations of bad faith. The Othmers started their own venture, EEG Spectrum, and began training and selling equipment themselves.

The rest of the book is taken up with examples of neurofeedback’s uses in epilepsy, ADD, injury, drug dependence, and personality disorders. Some of the case histories are fascinating. Unfortunately the practitioners and clients have a breathless enthusiasm for neurofeedback that breeds skepticism. In a chapter on ADD treatment, for example, Robbins and his interview subjects come perilously close to saying that drug therapy for psychiatric problems is the same thing as drug abuse, and that the “medical establishment” are drug dealers who don’t want to lose their hapless victim-patients. There is about a 20 page attack on the idea of treating ADD patients with drugs, and many of the arguments are essentially religious. This is unnecessary and brings down the tone of the whole narrative, and should have been eliminated.

This points to the real problem with the book, which is that Robbins has given us a pop psych cheerleading exercise about the wonders of neurofeedback that lacks critical bite. He does take trouble to interview some opponents of the technique but they’re straw men he sets up to knock down. And as above with the drug rant, there are a number of places where the tired old idea that “they” don’t want you to know about the real thing that will cure you pops up. There’s a bestselling book with a title like “The natural cures they won’t tell you about” that plays on this unreasonable idea that physicians and psychologists want their patients to be sick and take expensive drugs and treatments. It’s very unhelpful and also untrue, as you’ll find out if you spend a little time around “them”.

The problem with new treatments like this, and with their proponents like Ayers and the Othmers, is that they’re crusaders and not scientists. At a certain point in her career Ayers walked away from research because she saw so much potential for immediate clinical use. Her patients benefited but medical science did not. And the Othmers are neither clinical professionals nor scientists; they’re boosters. The fact that both of these parties make their living selling training and equipment for neurofeedback does not help things at all. Psychological therapies in the world of “alternative medicine” turn into cults too easily, and more so when charismatic leaders with a lot at stake take charge of them.

The really damning thing about A Symphony in the Brain is that it was commissioned by the Othmers and Robbins doesn’t reveal this. I only know it because people closer to the story than I revealed it. He makes a pretense of having stumbled upon this and decided on his own to write the book, so I’m not sure how exactly it happened. In any case he’s far too closely tied to them and their story. He does give Ayers a fair shake rather than taking their side, which is a good sign.

After finishing this book I thought about my own practitioner and the nature of this treatment. Like the Othmers and Ayers and Robbins, she’s a true believer. Neurofeedback approaches the Solution to Everything, kook-style, for true believers. Considering the history of “cures” for ADD and personality disorders over the years (sugar-free diets, weird psychotherapies, cult-like schooling) I can’t help feeling very skeptical. In my own case I have nothing to lose but $95 a session unless it turns me into a werewolf or a catatonic, so I’m going ahead with it. I really wish someone would do a proper study with a large patient population on neurofeedback, though. The war between conservatives and radicals is harmful to patients.

The face of evil

There’s a new vaccine for cervical cancer caused by human papilloma virus (HPV). In its latest trials, it is 100% effective in preventing precancers and noninvasive cancers. Since 70% of cervical cancers result from high-risk strains of HPV, this is incredibly good news. Currently there are about 10,000 cases of cervical cancer in the U.S. alone each year, and roughly 3700 deaths. The amount of death and suffering that could be saved if this vaccine was universally available is amazing. One estimate is that a quarter of a million lives could be saved a year worldwide if this was widely distributed.

Does anyone think this is a bad idea?

Yes, someone does. Organizations like the Family Research Council, the Abstinence & Marriage Education Partnership, and other sexual conservatives think that vaccinating minors against a sexually transmitted disease will encourage promiscuous sex. From their point of view, HPV infection only affects sexually active women with multiple partners and gay men. HPV is also their great example of why condoms “don’t work”, because it can be spread by skin contact other than the penis itself. So, no HPV problem means that condoms are 100% effective; can’t have that.

Some pretty rich quotes from the FRC are in this article from New Scientist.

So, here we have a disease that kills thousands upon thousands of people a year, and causes incredible amounts of fear and pain even when it doesn’t kill. It’s spread by a virus. We have a vaccine that wipes it out. And these people don’t like it because it might encourage extramarital sex among teenagers. Because to their mind their sky god has told them that sex outside of marriage is worse than death.

This why I am no longer a Christian. And why I am not the agnostic I was before Christianity, but a thoroughgoing atheist. This kind of behavior outweighs any good that may result from spirituality. Look, you can do what you want for your religion: wear 17th century clothing, refuse military service, eat a restricted diet, carry a little knife everywhere, wear magic underwear. But if you tell me that a quarter of a million people a year need to die for your abstraction you are my mortal enemy. I’m really uninterested in your arguments.

Let the blogging begin!

It’s “Murray Week” here at the substitute Building. Next up is Charles. You remember, the Bell Curve guy? He’s back with an editorial in the WSJ. He doesn’t say much more than “I was too right” with a lot of excess verbiage.

The veneer of “science” over political polemic is pretty thin here. In the original ruckus neither the Bell Curve boys nor their outraged opponents did anything I’d call science. The “scientific debate” was about the political significance of race in the United States, and more particularly about the policy of affirmative action. The book and much of its associated research was paid for by political organizations, and the opposition to the book and its ideas was rooted in political ideas as well. There was no such thing as a disinterested third party evaluation of The Bell Curve‘s claims.

Once you step out of the little historical box of late 20th century U.S. race politics, the whole thing looks like a Laputan debate out of Gulliver’s Travels. People were assigning the word “science” to discussions of concepts like race and intelligence that couldn’t even be defined properly. IQ was treated as a fact like the speed of life, race was assumed to be innate and obvious and eternal, and asses were made of many.

It should be clear to anyone capable of critical thought that we don’t understand the brain well at all. Concepts like IQ or g are almost medieval compared to our understanding of body processes like vision or digestion. Personally I think it will be a decade or more before we have a clear idea of the brain’s real structure and function instead of just a list of what goes wrong when you whack certain parts of it. So forget about defining “intelligence” for now.

And the idea of defining race brings to mind a Spanish official trying to figure out if someone is a mestizo or an octaroon, or the South African government’s detailed tests for negritude (hair kinkiness, skin albedo, etc.). Trying to describe “races” without making people laugh openly requires a tremendous amount of obfuscation.

Which brings me to the point I wanted to make all along. The social sciences just aren’t. I just can’t swallow this shit, and I never have. I look at “political scientists” like Murray or any number of other racist, Marxist, fascist, religious, or other -ist social theoreticians and I can detect little more than layers of unnecessary verbiage over prejudice. Some of these people I agree with, some I don’t, and some I can’t even penetrate, but it sure as hell isn’t science. That’s a method, not a form of magic invoked by excesses of vocabulary.

Dogma from me: The social sciences are a failed attempt to legitimize sociopolitical warfare with jargon.

Happy, uh, Porn Sunday?

Pharyngula invites all of us to celebrate xxxchurch.com‘s bizarre post-everything Christian Porn Crusader event National Porn Sunday with some FISH SEX. (All links SFW unless you work for uptight fish.) I seriously cannot tell if Porn Sunday is a gigantic prank on the evangelical world or if they’re for real. I mean, look at their 30 second ad starring Pete the Puppet or their customized van for spreading the word. And the T Shirt?

Tell me, folks. Has evangelical culture gotten this bizarre, or are all these pastors being taken for a gigantic ride? OR BOTH?

Disinheriting the wind

From The American Scientist, here’s a concise and powerful statement of the reasons “Intelligent Design” is not science and why its presence in public schools should be opposed.

Allowing students to “opt out” of learning the basic facts and theories of biology is about as wise as allowing them to “opt out” of algebra or English: It constitutes malfeasance. […] The ID movement is more than an attack on biology because evolutionary theory unifies the life and earth sciences with physics and chemistry. If ID is accepted as a credible science, then the most basic definition of a scientific theory and the fundamental principles of the scientific method are not being taught. […] ID is an insidious attempt by a religious caucus to impose its views on the whole country. The avowed aim of ID advocates—to undermine science and replace it with their personal religious convictions—amounts to a form of prejudice that is both poisonous and horribly frightening.

rumors on the internets: neurofeedback

I decided to do some armchair research on this thing I’m trying. First stop was wikipedia, where a neurofeedback article had been flagged as both “neutrality disputed” and “needs to be cleaned up since May 2005”. Uh oh. Sure enough, there are links to Scientology everywhere, and the tone of the article is not only dismissive but actively disparaging. Not very wikipedia. A link is provided to the talk page which is the usual ridiculous holy war involving pro- and anti-neurofeedback parties and of course Scientology.

It was depressing in that “Oh man, there goes that Internet Guy again” way. That guy in this case being njyoder, a talented and energetic troll who baits feminists and particularly rape awareness organizations.

The actual professional association seems to be pretty sane and know their limits.

New cures bring enthusiasm, messianic prose, The Solution To Everything, cranks, and naysayers. Looking around the web in a first-click way I see all of those in about ten minutes. From my point of view it’s worth a try, since it doesn’t seem likely to break my brain. At the worst I’ll lose $200 a week for a while and then get disgusted. Since I’m already disgusted, here we go.