Investigating Belief on NPR's To the Best of Our Knowledge (TTBOOK)

This week's episode of To the Best of Our Knowledge on NPR focused on investigating how and why we believe, the psychology and brain chemistry behind our beliefs.

Investigating Belief

To the Best of Our Knowledge | 06.01.2014

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You know the earth is round, the sky is up, and your dog loves you. But HOW do you know those things? This week, how we form opinions – the psychology and brain chemistry behind our beliefs.


You & Your Brain - Julian Keenan

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It turns out that even the most basic things we believe about ourselves are often wrong. Neuroscientist Julian Keenan says it has to do with how the brain works. He’s the author of the “Face in the Mirror: How We Know Who We Are.”

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Sonic Sidebar: The Political Divide

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Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt says despite what we believe, our political beliefs aren't always as well reasoned as we think.

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Irrational Beliefs - Will Storr

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Ever wonder how we form beliefs in the first place? Journalist Will Storr tried to find out in his book, “The Unpersuadables.” In it, he follows Holocaust deniers, climate change skeptics, and conspiracy theorists to find out how seemingly intelligent people can hold unconventional, even irrational beliefs.

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Charting Religious Traditions - Karen Armstrong

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Karen Armstrong is the author of nearly 20 books on religion. She tells Steve Paulson that traditions from Confucianism to Judaism emerged as responses to the rampant violence of their time. And she says our own time has a lot in common with that age.

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Dangerous Idea: American Exceptionalism

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Harvey Kaye's Dangerous Idea? Re-discovering the true meaning of American Exceptionalism.

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On Our Minds: Tiananmen Square

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June 4 marks the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. To find out how Chinese dissidents have fared since then, we’re revisiting an interview with historian Ian Buruma. He’s the author of "Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing."

 Related Books:

The Face in the Mirror: How We Know Who We Are
(Julian Keenan, Gordon G. Gallup, Dean Falk)


The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
(Jonathan Haidt)


The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science
(Will Storr)


The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions
(Karen Armstrong)


The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great
(Harvey J. Kaye)


Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing
(Ian Buruma)

Incidental Music:

• Drift Along - Takenobu 
• A Hero's Welcome - Takenobu 
• Morning - Beck 
• Avril 14 - Aphex Twin 
• A Tender History in Rust - Do Make Say Think

Rick Hanson - Brain Science and Psychotherapy: The Next Step

This talk from Rick Hanson is a little over an hour long, and it was given at the Psychotherapy Networker Symposium in Washington DC in March, 2014. Here is part of the brochure copy for his Keynote Address:

Rick Hanson—author, neuropsychologist, and therapist—will examine the practical tools that brain science has already given us and look ahead to the next stage of how to use neuroscience to enhance our clinical craft.

In this keynote, he’ll explore both sides of psychotherapy’s love affair with the brain, examining the clinical benefits and potential pitfalls of using neuroscientific concepts in the consulting room. He’ll survey the tools that brain science has already given us and look ahead to the next stage of how we might use it to enhance our clinical craft.

He was addressing a huge crowd of therapists, so his talk is aimed at professionals more than lay people, but he is so down-to-earth in his talks that any listener will benefit from his wisdom.

Brain Science and Psychotherapy: The Next Step

May 2nd, 2014 | Rick Hanson, PhD.

Last month at the Psychotherapy Networker Symposium in Washington DC, I gave a talk to ~ 3500 people: scary but wonderful! Brain Science and Psychotherapy: The Next Step – looked at the benefits and pitfalls of brain science, plus focused on a key point: if we don’t take the time to install our useful experiences, they’re wasted on the brain; they’re momentarily pleasant but lead to no learning, no healing, no growth. Then I summarized HOW to turn passing experiences into lasting value.

Listen here:

  Brain Science and Psychotherapy: The Next Step

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Forbes, of all places, posted a nice summary of their ten picks for the top brain science and psychology studies for 2013 - most of these I had seen, a few I hadn't, so it's a good read (with lots of links for further exploration). David DiSalvo also posted a list of 10 issues neuroscience needs to deal with in the next year (or ten), which I will post tomorrow.

The Top Ten Brain Science And Psychology Studies Of 2013

David DiSalvo, Contributor

fMRI scanner at a neuroscience lab (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Putting it mildly, 2013 was an eventful year for brain science. This Top 10 list isn’t meant to be exhaustive (given how many studies are published each year, it never could be), but it’s a sturdy sampling of incredible work being conducted around the world, moving us closer to solving some extremely vexing puzzles about brains and behavior.

1. How the Brain Takes Out Its Trash While We Sleep

In 2013, layers were peeled back from two interrelated mysteries: the function of sleep, and how the brain removes its waste byproducts.

While it’s been known for some time that the brain doesn’t directly use the body’s lymphatic system (our body-wide filtering and waste removal system) to dump its toxic waste, the mechanism that it does use wasn’t identified until 2012. The research team that made this discovery was led by University of Rochester neurosurgeon, Maiken Nedergaard, who dubbed the brain’s waste-removal mechanism the “glymphatic system.”

The glymphatic system relies on cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) to flush out neurotoxins via pathways separate from the lymphatic system. Among the toxins that are flushed is beta amyloid, a protein that’s found in clumps in the brains of Alzheimer’s sufferers.

In 2013, Nedergaard’s research team followed up on this discovery by identifying “hidden caves” that open in the brain while we sleep, allowing cerebrospinal fluid to flush out neurotoxins through the spinal column.

The implications of this research can’t be overstated: failing to get enough sleep isn’t just a bad idea for all of the reasons we already know, but over time it could also lead to neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s. If the study’s findings are accurate, our brains need sleep to remove waste byproducts like amyloid beta that eventually become brain killers.

The study was published in the journal, Science.

2. To Your Brain, Me is We

A 2013 study from University of Virginia researchers supports a finding that’s been gaining science-fueled momentum in recent years: the human brain is wired to connect with others so strongly that it experiences what they experience as if it’s happening to us.

The researchers had participants undergo fMRI brain scans while threatening to give them electrical shocks, or to give shocks to a stranger or a friend. Results showed that regions of the brain responsible for threat response – the anterior insula, putamen and supramarginal gyrus – became active under threat of shock to the self; that much was expected.

When researchers threatened to shock a stranger, those same brain regions showed virtually no activity. But when they threatened to shock a friend, the brain regions showed activity nearly identical to that displayed when the participant was threatened.

“The correlation between self and friend was remarkably similar,” said James Coan, a psychology professor in U.Va.’s College of Arts & Sciences who co-authored the study. “The finding shows the brain’s remarkable capacity to model self to others; that people close to us become a part of ourselves, and that is not just metaphor or poetry, it’s very real.”

The study was published in the journal, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.

3. Your Brain Sees Even When You Don’t

A 2013 study published in The Journal of Neuroscience suggests that the brain can “see” someone else’s actions even when the ability to visually see has been destroyed.

Cortical blindness refers to the loss of vision that occurs when the primary visual cortex no longer functions, generally as the result of injury. There’s no longer an ability to visually perceive the world in the sense with which we’re most familiar (even though the eyes still technically work), but that doesn’t necessarily mean the brain no longer sees.

In this study a patient with full cortical blindness could still react to another person’s gaze. While in an fMRI machine, the patient was exposed to gazes directed at him and gazes directed away from him. On the face of it, neither should matter — his visual cortex couldn’t perceive any sort of gaze. But the brain scan indicated that another part of his brain definitely could.

The patient’s amygdala, the brain area associated with figuring out whether external stimuli is a threat, showed a distinctly different activation pattern when the gaze was directed at the patient than when directed away from him.

In other words, it didn’t matter that his visual cortex couldn’t catch the gaze—another part of his brain did regardless, and that’s quite incredible.

4. Yes, Stress Really Does Feed Cancer

For years we’ve heard that there’s a mind-body connection between stress and cancer. The claim is anecdotal, but has a certain horse sense that appeals to reason – stress is hard on the body, causing hormonal reactions that can potentially influence the development of cancerous cells.

A 2013 study didn’t quite prove the claim, but did indicate that once cancer has taken hold, stress biochemically feeds its growth. The study, by researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, focused on the effects of stress on prostate cancer, and found that stress can both reduce the effectiveness of prostate cancer drugs and accelerate the development of the cancer.

The study team, headed by George Kulik, D.V.M., Ph.D., associate professor of cancer biology, tested the effects of behavioral stress in two different mouse models of prostate cancer.

One model used mice that were implanted with human prostate cancer cells and treated with a drug that is currently in clinical trial for prostate cancer treatment. When the mice were kept calm and free of stress, the drug destroyed prostate cancer cells and inhibited tumor growth. However, when the mice were stressed, the cancer cells didn’t die and the drug did not inhibit tumor growth.

In the second model, mice genetically modified to develop prostate cancer were used. When these mice were repeatedly stressed, the size of prostate tumors increased. When the mice were treated with bicalutamide, a drug currently used to treat prostate cancer, their prostate tumors decreased in size. However, if mice were subjected to repeated stress, the prostate tumors didn’t respond as well to the drug.

After analyzing the data, researchers identified the cell signaling pathway by which epinephrine, a hormone also known as adrenaline–triggered at high levels during times of stress–sets off the cellular chain reaction that controls cell death.

“Considering that prostate cancer diagnosis increases stress and anxiety levels, stress-induced activation of the signaling pathway that turns off the cell death process may lead to a vicious cycle of stress and cancer progression,” Kulik said.

The findings were published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

5. Move Over Extroverts and Introverts, Here Come the Ambiverts

In the psychology of personality category, a 2013 study overturned yet another personality stereotype that’s gone virtually unquestioned for decades: that extroverts are inherently better sellers than everyone else.

The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, indicates that not only is that stereotype wrong, but there’s an entirely different personality type that stands well above the others in sales prowess.

The study was conducted by researcher Adam Grant of The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, also author of the book Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success. Grant predicted that extroverts, contrary to popular lore, would not bury other personality types when it came to closing sales — but rather, ambiverts, people who are more or less equal parts extroverted and introverted, would perform best.

Grant conducted a personality survey and collected three-months of sales records for more than 300 salespeople, both men and women. As he predicted, people whose scores put them in between extreme extroversion and introversion turned out to be the best salespeople. In a three-month period, they made 24% more in sales revenue than introverts, and 32% more in revenue than extroverts.

Perhaps even more surprising, Grant found that the two extreme personality types pulled in roughly the same percentage of sales. Being highly extroverted wasn’t even a plus when compared against the personality type we generally think of as the worst candidate for high-performance sales.

Because ambiverts embody traits from both sides of the personality spectrum—in a sense, they have a built in ‘governor’ that regulates their exuberance–they don’t trip over the obstacles that handicap their more extroverted counterparts.

“The ambivert advantage stems from the tendency to be assertive and enthusiastic enough to persuade and close, but at the same time, listening carefully to customers and avoiding the appearance of being overly confident or excited,” Grant said.

6. Mini Brains Created With Stem Cells

This past year also saw some groundbreaking news in the stem-cell category of neuroscience: for the first time, scientists grew miniature human brains from stem cells, reported Reuters Health. The implications of this development are massive, not the least of which is eventually understanding the inner workings of severe neurological disorders and how to defeat them.

The researchers started with human stem cells—the often-controversial, undifferentiated (or “blank”) human cells that are capable of giving rise to a host of differentiated cells—and cultured them into “cerebral organoids” (more simply, “mini brains”). Stem cells have been used to grow a variety of organ tissue—including a liver and a trachea—but never before has brain tissue with multiple, distinct parts been created in a lab.

According to the Reuters report, Juergen Knoblish and Madeline Lancaster at Austria’s Institute of Molecular Biotechnology and fellow researchers at Britain’s Edinburgh University of Human Genetics cultured the stem cells with a cocktail of nutrients, and grew tissue called neuroectoderm – a layer of cells in the embryo from which all parts of the brain and nervous system develop.

This tissue was then placed into a spinning bioreactor that circulates oxygen and nutrients, catalyzing the eventual growth of cerebral organoids. After one month, the tissue had organized itself into basic developing brain regions, including the retina and cerebral cortex. At two months, the tiny organoids—about 4 millimeters long—contained firing neurons and identifiably different types of neural tissue. The scientists had created tiny, primitive human brains.

To demonstrate the usefulness of their discovery, the researchers used the organoids to model the development of a rare neurological condition called microcephaly—in which patients develop an abnormally small head. By modeling the condition in a lab, researchers can reverse engineer it and find out why it develops.

The research team acknowledged that they had not created a full-scale, fully functioning human brain, and that doing so is a long way off, but they said they had accomplished their initial goal—to “analyze the development of human brain tissue and generate a model system…to transfer knowledge from animal models to a human setting.”

Source: Scientists Grow “Mini Human Brains” From Stem Cells; Reuters.

7. How Exercise Makes Your Brain Grow

Research into “neurogenesis”—the ability of certain brain areas to grow new brain cells—took an exciting turn in 2013. A study published in the journal Cell Metabolism suggests that not only can we foster new brain cell growth through exercise, but it may eventually be possible to “bottle” that benefit in prescription medication.

The hippocampus, a brain area closely linked to learning and memory, is especially receptive to new neuron growth in response to endurance exercise. Exactly how and why this happens wasn’t well understood until recently. Research has discovered that exercise stimulates the production of a protein called FNDC5 that is released into the bloodstream while we’re breaking a sweat. Over time, FNDC5 stimulates the production of another protein in the brain called Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF), which in turns stimulates the growth of new nerves and synapses – the connection points between nerves – and also preserves the survival of existing brain cells.

What this boils down to in practice is that regular endurance exercise, like jogging, strengthens and grows your brain. In particular, your memory and ability to learn get a boost from hitting the pavement. Along with the other well-established benefits of endurance exercise, such as improved heart health, this is a pretty good reason to get moving. If jogging isn’t your thing, there’s a multitude of other ways to trigger the endurance effect – even brisk walking on a regular basis yields brain benefits.

Researchers from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard Medical School (HMS) have also discovered that it may be possible to capture these benefits in a pill. The same protein that stimulates brain growth via exercise could potentially be bottled and given to patients experiencing cognitive decline, including those in the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

“What is exciting is that a natural substance can be given in the bloodstream that can mimic some of the effects of endurance exercise on the brain,” said Bruce Spiegelman, PhD, of Dana-Farber and HMS and co-senior author of the research report with Michael E. Greenberg, PhD, chair of neurobiology at HMS.

8. Electrical Stimulation Helps the Brain Put On the Brakes

In the “exciting but frightening” category, research published in the The Journal of Neuroscience showed that harmless electrical stimulation can boost self-control by amplifying the human brain’s “brakes.”

Researchers from The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) and the University of California, San Diego asked study participants to perform simple tasks in which they had to exert self-control to slow down their behavior. While doing so, the team used brain imaging to identify the areas of the participants’ prefrontal cortex (sometimes called the brain’s “command and control center”) associated with the behavior—allowing them to pinpoint the specific brain area that would need a boost to make each participant’s “braking” ability more effective.

They then placed electrodes on the surface of the participants’ brains associated with the prefrontal cortex areas linked with the behavior. With an imperceptible, computer-controlled electrical charge, researchers were able to enhance self-control at the exact time the participants needed it.

“There is a circuit in the brain for inhibiting or braking responses,” said Nitin Tandon, M.D., the study’s senior author and associate professor in The Vivian L. Smith Department of Neurosurgery at the UTHealth Medical School. “We believe we are the first to show that we can enhance this braking system with brain stimulation.”

Though this research conjures a few frightening visions, you can relax knowing that we’re a long way from externally controlling peoples’ behavior. The true value of this study is to demonstrate that the brain’s self-control circuit can be amplified, at least under certain conditions–and eventually that could be good news for sufferers of behavioral disorders like OCD and Tourette Syndrome.

9. Tool That Seeks Consciousness in the Brain

An experimental tool designed in 2013 to “peek” into a patient’s brain and find signs of consciousness could eventually give doctors a way to more accurately judge chances of recovery from serious brain trauma – and in the process change the nature of end-of-life decisions.

Until now, doctors don’t have many methods available to gauge the consciousness of a patient unable to respond verbally or in other subtle ways in response to simple questions–such as blinking an eye, squeezing a hand, or raising a finger. In these cases, typically when a patient has suffered a severe brain injury, there’s ample guesswork that goes into determining whether consciousness is still lingering under the surface.

The best clinical method available to get closer to an answer involves placing the patient in an MRI machine and scanning the brain while telling the patient to envision an action like throwing a ball or running through a field. By tracking activity patterns in the patient’s brain, it’s theoretically possible to tell if the person is able to unconsciously acknowledge and process the request. If it appears that the patient’s brain can respond even though the patient can’t verbalize the response, the person is said to suffer from “locked-in syndrome”.

The problem with this method is that it’s far from clear what the brain activity is actually revealing about consciousness. Significant brain activity is possible even in a vegetative state, and isn’t necessarily a clue that recovery is possible.

Since consciousness is spread across multiple brain regions, it’s possible for one part of the brain to respond while others are entirely unresponsive. One way to think about this is the starter on a damaged car engine still working even though gas can’t reach the engine; a minimal “signal” from the starter is produced by turning the key, even though the engine can’t run.

The new tool, developed by researchers from Italy’s University of Milan, could provide doctors with a more objective method that gauges the complexity of a patient’s consciousness. The tool combines three steps: first a magnetic pulse is sent through a coil into the brain designed to “wake it up,” and then an EEG machine measures brain wave activity produced by neurons firing in response to the pulse. Finally, the activity is measured via a formula that puts a finer point on the nature of the patient’s consciousness.

That final step is the secret ingredient that makes this tool different: instead of simply trying to identify brain activity (something MRI machines can already do) it produces a measure of the complexity of consciousness–what the researchers call the perturbational complexity index (PCI). “Consciousness can grow and shrink,” said Dr. Marcello Massimini, a neurophysiologist who led the research, in an AP report about the experimental tool. By figuring out the level of “growing” or “shrinking”, doctors can more objectively gauge whether a patient is exhibiting an adequate level of consciousness to recover.

The researchers emphasized that the tool is far from becoming a bedside medical option, but the research opens the door to measuring levels of consciousness that correlate with recovery from serious brain injury. This knowledge could potentially change the way end-of-life decisions are made by providing doctors and loved ones with a firmer means to evaluate whether a patient has the capacity to recover.

The study was published in the journal, Science Translational Medicine.

10. The Antidepressant Sweet Spot for Coffee Drinkers

Coffee research is a crap shoot at best – every year new studies come out suggesting benefits and drawbacks of our favorite morning companion. But in 2013, researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health made an especially significant contribution to coffee research that found a correlation between drinking 2-4 cups of caffeinated coffee each day and lower suicide risk among adults.

The study, published in The World Journal of Biological Psychiatry, was a meta-review of three extensive U.S. health studies that included a total of 43,599 men and 164,825 women. Consumption of caffeine (from tea, soda and chocolate), coffee and decaffeinated coffee was evaluated among study participants every four years via questionnaire. Across all three studies, coffee accounted for the majority of caffeine consumed at 71% of the total.

Causes of death were tracked during the study period by reviewing death certificates; 277 deaths were the result of suicide.

The analysis showed that the risk of suicide among adults drinking 2-4 cups of coffee (the equivalent of about 400 mg of caffeine) a day was 50% less than the risk for adults who drank decaffeinated coffee or one cup or less of caffeinated coffee. Drinking more than 4 cups of coffee wasn’t associated with lower suicide risk.

The neurochemistry behind the finding makes sense. As discussed in a previous article, caffeine acts as an expert mimic of a chemical called adenosine in the brain and other parts of the body. Adenosine is a sort of checks-and-balances chemical produced by neurons as they fire throughout the day; the more adenosine is produced, the more the nervous system ratchets down activity, until we eventually fall asleep and reboot the process.

By mimicking adenosine, caffeine blocks receptors in the nervous system from receiving the signals to decrease energy expenditure. When that happens, levels of the brain’s homegrown neuro-stimulants—dopamine and glutamate—increase, and we experience the brain stimulating effects associated with drinking a big cup of java. Those effects may be a potent counterbalance to depression for a segment of the coffee-drinking population.

Have more studies you’d like to add to this list or comments on any of those above? Please put them in the comments section for all to see. Thanks!

You can find David DiSalvo on Twitter @neuronarrative and at his website, The Daily Brain. His latest book is Brain Changer: How Harnessing Your Brain’s Power To Adapt Can Change Your Life.

Your At-a-Glance Guide to Psychology in 2013 - BPS Research Digest

From the British Psychological Society's Research Digest, this is their 2013 year in review for psychology - you can also check out their most popular Research Digest posts for the year, as well.

Your at-a-glance guide to psychology in 2013 - Part 1

JAN The year began with fall-out from the final report into the fraud of social psychologist Diederik Stapel. The scale was shocking - 55 journal papers published over 15 years are tainted. The Levelt investigating committee pointed the finger at the research culture in social psychology, but the British Psychological Society's own Social Psychology Section rejected this. So too did the European Association of Social Psychology, who argued that the discipline has actually suffered fewer frauds than other branches of science. In other news, a team of researchers in Canada attracted criticism when they spun their research to suggest that the concept of IQ is a myth. "There are many mysteries about intelligence and the general factor," Professor Richard Haier told The Psychologist. "Now there is a new one – how did this paper get published?"

FEB The first rumours of Obama's richly funded BRAIN initiative began to emerge. A new spin on a modern psychology classic: researchers showed that inattentional blindness can lead experienced radiographers to fail to notice a "gorilla on the lung". A less welcome classic also made an appearance - the left/brain right/brain myth in a report from the RSA that claimed the woes of the Western world are due to our over-dependence on the left-brain hemisphere (some astute criticism here). It was also announced this month that MPs would have access to mental health treatment in Westminster for the first time. Jonah Lehrer apologised for plagiarising the Research Digest. Contradicting all established neuranatomical fact, the Daily Mail described how evil lurks in the brain's "central lobe"!

MARCH Neuroscientists and psychologists began to react to the news of Obama's BRAIN initiative and the similarly ambitious EU Human Brain Project. Psychologists started a campaign against the publication of US psychiatry's re-worked diagnostic code DSM-5. Debate about and reaction to the crisis in social psychology continued - The Center for Open Science was launched by US psychologist Brian Nosek, and The Association for Psychological Science announced a new article format Registered Replication Reports for one its key journals. An important new study found that many mental disorders share the same genetic risk factors.
APRIL After all the questions raised about social psychology, it was the turn of neuroscience as an important analysis suggested that the majority of neuroscience studies are statistically underpowered, likely leading to unreliable findings. Meanwhile a provocative paper claimed that brain scans could predict those offenders likely to return to prison. The Neurocritic took a sceptical look at the results. After all the speculation, the BRAIN Initiative finally launched. Perfectly capturing the zeitgeist, Ferris Jabr for Scientific American wrote a wonderful article about the psychology of reading paper books vs. e-books.
MAY Days before the publication of the new DSM-5 psychiatric diagnostic code, the document received a barrage of criticism from opposite directions. The BPS Division of Clinical Psychology published their concerns, including that the code is too biologically based, while Thomas Insel of the NIMH argued that the code is already out of date because it's not grounded in biological findings. In other news, the UK government's Behavioural Insight Team went part-private; a study about the effects of fist-clenching on memory attracted severe criticism; more controversy bubbled up after the failure to replicate another social priming result; Diederik Stapel was interviewed; two psychologists were voted among the world's top 10 thinker; and Paul Bloom explained how too much empathy can actually lead us to do the wrong thing.
JUNE Many psychologists were among more than 70 signatories to an open letter to the Guardian calling for a new approach to publishing across the life sciences - pre-registered reports in which a study is accepted for publication based on the proposed methodology, prior to the collection of any actual results. The Psychologist reported on the neuroscientist Russell Poldrack who is scanning his own brain three times a week for a year. This is what happened when students and neuroscientists were asked to draw a neuron. A study used fall out from atomic bomb testing to settle the debate over whether adult humans can grow new neurons. Scientists from Germany and Canada created the most detailed map of the brain ever. The Big Brain Atlas is part of the EU's €1-billion Human Brain Project.  Mark Stokes argued there's a lot more to neuroscience than media "neuromania".

Your at-a-glance guide to psychology in 2013 - Part 2

Part 1 Jan to June is here. 

JULY UCL cognitive neuroscientist Sophie Scott was among the scholars unhappy about the call for the introduction of pre-registered reports in psychology (see June). Walter Boot and colleagues published an important paper highlighting how many control conditions in psychology are inadequate. Another paper claimed that the real-world impact of psychological and social interventions is being squandered by poor practices in the reporting of randomised trials. Doubts were raised about Milgram's classic studies into obedience. Matt Wall debunked neuromarketing. Bethany Brookshire worried that neuroskepticism was becoming excessive and called for neuronuance. Oliver Sacks turned 80 and felt happy about it. "Psychology's most original thinker" Dan Wegner passed away.

AUG A study found that people's sleep is disturbed at full moon, and not because of the light. Harvard psychologist Steve Pinker wrote a magisterial essay on why science, including psychology and neuroscience, is not the enemy of the humanities. The Guardian launched a new psychology blog "Head Quarters" featuring the dream team of Pete Etchells, Molly Crockett, Nathalia Gjersoe and Chris Chambers. UCL cognitive neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore was this year's recipient of the prestigious Rosalind Franklin Award from the Royal Society. The RSA's Social Brain Centre launched a new project into spirituality and the brain. New data showed that dementia rates had fallen in the UK. Prisoners' performance on the classic prisoners' dilemma game was measured for the first time. "Super-recognisers" were recruited to spot known criminals at the Notting Hill carnival.

SEPT Scientists created mini brains from stem cells. Hype surrounded a study that purported to show a driving game reversed age-related mental decline. New data showed that England's Improving Access to Psychotherapies programme had failed to stall the county's rising anti-depressant prescription rates. Obama's administration announced plans to create its own "Nudge Unit" modelled on the British government's Behavioural Insight Team. The British Psychological Society's Research Digest marked its tenth anniversary with a series of research-backed self-help posts. Barbara Fredrickson, one of the world’s leading positive psychologists, admitted that a highly influential paper she co-authored in 2005 is fundamentally flawed. David Dobbs wrote a wonderfully inspiring article on the social life of your genes.

OCT Reading fiction boosts your empathy skills, but only if it's literary fiction, a study claimed. Not everyone was impressed. The purpose of Obama's BRAIN initiative became clearer thanks to publication of an interim report. Meanwhile the Guardian interviewed Henry Markram - head of the EU's Human Brain Project. The Society for Personality and Social Psychology published an important remedial report (pdf) for the discipline: "Improving the Dependability of Research in Personality and Social Psychology ..." The Research Digest hosted a Super Week in which we met individuals with psychological super powers. A charity in Wales was criticised for using NLP to treat traumatised soldiers. The science of using brain imaging to decode people's thoughts, minus the hype - a welcome overview from Kerri Smith was published this month.

NOV The World Medical Association announced important changes to its Declaration of Helsinki - an influential ethics code for conducting research with human participants that is followed by many psychology departments and journals. New data suggested that after years of increase, the diagnosis rates for autism in the UK had plateaued. Concerns were raised again about the lack of educational psychologists in Scotland and there were cuts to funding for ed psych services in England, even as demand was on the increase. A new study found that eye contact does not in fact increase persuasion. BBC Radio 4's All in the Mind celebrated its 25th anniversary (the same year that The Psychologist magazine reached the same milestone). A neuroscience journal for kids was launched. A team of over 50 international researchers published an ambitious attempt to replicate 13 existing findings in psychology. Psychology mourned the loss of two stars: cognitive neuroscientist Andy Calder and social psychologist Nalini Ambady.

DEC A twin study attracted controversy after it appeared to show that genes trump schooling and parenting when it comes to children's exam success. The Science Museum opened a new psychology-themed exhibition supported by the British Psychological Society. Mind Maps: Stories from Psychology "explores how mental health conditions have been diagnosed and treated over the past 250 years." A brain imaging study purported to show that men's and women's brains are wired up differently and that this supports gender stereotypes. Not everyone was impressed. Another new study found that stimulating part of the anterior cingulate cortex triggers a kind of "Eye of the Tiger" effect. Finally, this month a US court may have been the first to see brain imaging evidence save a killer from the death penalty. Intriguingly, one of the neuroscientist witnesses for the defence - Ruben Gur - was a co-author on that sex-differences brain wiring study … it's a small world, as they say.

An Overview of Critical Neuroscience

Via Somatosphere, these two videos offer a useful introduction to "Critical Neuroscience," an emergent field that seeks to examine (with a critical eye) the ways in which the new brain technologies influence our lives, from the personal, social, ethical, clinical, commercial, and policy debates to the methods and tools used to acquire new findings.

Critical Neuroscience probes the extent to which discussion of neuroscience—in ethical debates, policy texts, commercial, and clinical projects—matches the achievements and potential of neuroscience itself. It examines the ways in which the new sciences and technologies of the brain lead to classifying people in new ways, and the effects this can have on social and personal life. It studies both the methods used to gain new knowledge, and the ways in which the knowledge is interpreted and used. The project aims at finding or creating a shared vocabulary for neuroscientists and social scientists in which they can talk about the potential of the tools, the analytical methods, the interpretations of the data. We also need a shared way in which to think about the barrage of media reports of all this work. Critical Neuroscience aims, more over, at drawing attention to any social or political imperatives that make certain research programs in neuroscience more attractive and better funded than others. We hope to introduce our observations into brain research itself, and to integrate them into new experimental and interpretive directions.

The incredibly overpriced handbook to this field is Critical Neuroscience: A Handbook of the Social and Cultural Contexts of Neuroscience (2011), but two of the articles/chapters are available at Suparna Choudhury's Academia.edu page.

This is an interesting new field and these videos offer a nice introduction.

Videos from “Critical Neuroscience” Course

By Eugene Raikhel

I’ve written in the past (here and here) about the Critical Neuroscience project – an effort led by a group of social and biological scientists and philosophers to develop “a reflexive scientific practice that responds to the social, cultural and political challenges posed by the advances in the behavioural and brain sciences,” (Choudhury, Nagel and Slaby 2009). Suparna Choudhury, Jan Slaby and others have been very active in developing this project through a series of workshops, conferences, publications and ultimately, research projects. A short course on Critical Neuroscience has now been included in McGill’s Summer Program in Social and Cultural Psychiatry and you can view videos of two lectures from the course online. I’ve embedded them below.

If you’re interested in learning more about Critical Neuroscience, a good place to start is the Introduction and “Proposal for a Critical Neuroscience” from Choudhury and Slaby’s edited volume Critical Neuroscience. I was very excited to also have a chapter included in that volume; the only problem has been that the book has only been released in hardcover at a prohibitive price. Luckily Suparna has been kind enough to post both of these chapters on her Academia.edu site.

1: Critical Neuroscience and the Cultural Brain: An Outlook

How do we make sense of what is going on in the field of neuroscience? How can we make sense of the many discourses about neuroscience? Lecture given by Suparna Choudhury of McGill University, Montreal and Jan Slaby of Freie Universitat, Berlin.

2: Critical Neuroscience: An Overview

Critical Neuroscience and the Cultural Brain: an outlook. How do we make sense of what is going on in the field of neuroscience? How can we make sense of the many discourses about neuroscience? Lecture given by Suparna Choudhury of McGill University, Montreal and Jan Slaby of Freie Universitat, Berlin. 

In part two, Laurence Kirmayer gives an overview on the field of Critical Neuroscience, covering varieties of critical neuroscience, cultural constructions of the brain, the social brain, cultural neuroscience and neurodiversity.