40,000 fMRI Studies: Trashed

Due to a bad assumption used in the statistical analysis of fMRI data, it has been determined that there is a 70% false positive rate for the automatic determination of the value of a "voxel" (smallest unit of granularity). This apparently is because of the assumption of a Gaussian distribution for all the clusters of data, which is not the case in real life. This fully invalidates a huge swath of fMRI studies:

The Future of fMRI.

It is not feasible to redo 40,000 fMRI studies, and lamentable archiving and data-sharing practices mean most could not be reanalyzed either. Considering that it is now possible to evaluate common statistical methods using real fMRI data, the fMRI community should, in our opinion, focus on validation of existing methods. The main drawback of a permutation test is the increase in computational complexity, as the group analysis needs to be repeated 1,000–10,000 times. However, this increased processing time is not a problem in practice, as for typical sample sizes a desktop computer can run a permutation test for neuroimaging data in less than a minute (27, 43). Although we note that metaanalysis can play an important role in teasing apart false-positive findings from consistent results, that does not mitigate the need for accurate inferential tools that give valid results for each and every study.

Finally, we point out the key role that data sharing played in this work and its impact in the future. Although our massive empirical study depended on shared data, it is disappointing that almost none of the published studies have shared their data, neither the original data nor even the 3D statistical maps. As no analysis method is perfect, and new problems and limitations will be certainly found in the future, we commend all authors to at least share their statistical results [e.g., via NeuroVault.org (44)] and ideally the full data [e.g., via OpenfMRI.org (7)]. Such shared data provide enormous opportunities for methodologists, but also the ability to revisit results when methods improve years later.

Beliefs Could Be "Cured" as Mental Illness

Is this a promise, or a warning?

Religious fundamentalism could soon be treated as mental illness

Kathleen Taylor, a neurologist at Oxford University, said that recent developments suggest that we will soon be able to treat religious fundamentalism and other forms of ideological beliefs potentially harmful to society as a form of mental illness.

She made the assertion during a talk at the Hay Literary Festival in Wales on Wednesday. She said that radicalizing ideologies may soon be viewed not as being of personal choice or free will but as a category of mental disorder. She said new developments in neuroscience could make it possible to consider extremists as people with mental illness rather than criminals.

She told The Times of London: "One of the surprises may be to see people with certain beliefs as people who can be treated. Someone who has for example become radicalized to a cult ideology -- we might stop seeing that as a personal choice that they have chosen as a result of pure free will and may start treating it as some kind of mental disturbance."

Taylor admits that the scope of what could end up being labelled "fundamentalist" is expansive. She continued: "I am not just talking about the obvious candidates like radical Islam or some of the more extreme cults. I am talking about things like the belief that it is OK to beat your children. These beliefs are very harmful but are not normally categorized as mental illness. In many ways that could be a very positive thing because there are no doubt beliefs in our society that do a heck of a lot of damage, that really do a lot of harm."

The Huffington Post reports Taylor warns about the moral-ethical complications that could arise.

In her book "The Brain Supremacy," she writes of the need "to be careful when it comes to developing technologies which can slip through the skull to directly manipulate the brain. They cannot be morally neutral, these world-shaping tools; when the aspect of the world in question is a human being, morality inevitably rears its hydra heads. Technologies which profoundly change our relationship with the world around us cannot simply be tools, to be used for good or evil, if they alter our basic perception of what good and evil are."

The moral-ethical dimension arises from the predictable tendency when acting on the problem, armed with a new technology, to apply to the label "fundamentalist" only to our ideological opponents, while failing to perceive the "fundamentalism" in ourselves.

From the perspective of the Western mind, for instance, the tendency to equate "fundamentalism" exclusively with radical Islamism is too tempting. But how much less "fundamentalist" than an Osama bin Laden is a nation of capitalist ideologues carpet bombing civilian urban areas in Laos, Cambodia and North Korea?

The jihadist's obsession with defending his Islamic ideological world view which leads him to perpetrate and justify such barbaric acts as the Woolwich murder are of the same nature as the evangelical obsession with spreading the pseudo-religious ideology of capitalism which led to such horrendous crimes as the murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians in four years of carpet bombing operations by the Nixon administration caught in a vice grip of anti-communist paranoia.

The power to control the mind will tend too readily to be used as weapon against our jihadist enemies while justifying the equally irrational and murderously harmful actions we term innocously "foreign policy."

Some analysts are thus convinced that neuroscientists will be adopting a parochial and therefore ultimately counterproductive approach if they insist on identifying particular belief systems characteristic of ideological opponents as the primary subject for therapeutic manipulation.

On a much larger and potentially more fruitful scale is the recognition that the entire domain of religious beliefs, political convictions, patriotic nationalist fervor are in themselves powerful platforms for nurturing "Us vs Them" paranoid delusional fantasies which work out destructively in a 9/11 attack or a Hiroshima/Nagasaki orgy of mass destruction.

What we perceive from our perspective as our legitimate self-defensive reaction to the psychosis of the enemy, is from the perspective of the same enemy our equally malignant psychotic self-obsession.

The Huffington Post reports that this is not the first time Taylor has written a book about extremism and fundamentalism. In 2006, she wrote a book about mind control titled "Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control," in which she examined the techniques that cultic groups use to influence victims.

She said: "We all change our beliefs of course. We all persuade each other to do things; we all watch advertising; we all get educated and experience [religions.] Brainwashing, if you like, is the extreme end of that; it's the coercive, forceful, psychological torture type."

She notes correctly that "brainwashing" which embraces all the subtle and not-so-subtle ways "we make people think things that might not be good for them, that they might not otherwise have chosen to think," is a much more pervasive social phenomenon than we are willing to recognize. As social animals we are all victims of culturally induced brainwashing whose effectiveness correlates with our inability to think outside the box of our given acculturation.

Brainwashing is just the opinion of the beholder, viewing opposing views. Whether the beliefs pass tests of rationality should be the metric... but won't be.

This article stolen in full from HERE; kindly give them a click to make up for it.

The Uniqueness Problem; Why Neuroscience Chokes on Comprehending the Mind

Another reason why the analogy of the brain as a computer fails:

The empty brain
Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer

"Think how difficult this problem is. To understand even the basics of how the brain maintains the human intellect, we might need to know not just the current state of all 86 billion neurons and their 100 trillion interconnections, not just the varying strengths with which they are connected, and not just the states of more than 1,000 proteins that exist at each connection point, but how the moment-to-moment activity of the brain contributes to the integrity of the system. Add to this the uniqueness of each brain, brought about in part because of the uniqueness of each person’s life history, and Kandel’s prediction starts to sound overly optimistic. (In a recent op-ed in The New York Times, the neuroscientist Kenneth Miller suggested it will take ‘centuries’ just to figure out basic neuronal connectivity.)

Meanwhile, vast sums of money are being raised for brain research, based in some cases on faulty ideas and promises that cannot be kept. The most blatant instance of neuroscience gone awry, documented recently in a report in Scientific American, concerns the $1.3 billion Human Brain Project launched by the European Union in 2013. Convinced by the charismatic Henry Markram that he could create a simulation of the entire human brain on a supercomputer by the year 2023, and that such a model would revolutionise the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and other disorders, EU officials funded his project with virtually no restrictions. Less than two years into it, the project turned into a ‘brain wreck’, and Markram was asked to step down.

We are organisms, not computers. Get over it. Let’s get on with the business of trying to understand ourselves, but without being encumbered by unnecessary intellectual baggage. The IP metaphor has had a half-century run, producing few, if any, insights along the way. The time has come to hit the DELETE key."

While I agree with most of this, it is hard to reconcile the idea that I have no visual memories with what seem to be actual visual memories to me. For instance, last week we had to euthanize our beloved 16 year old dog, who had suffered paralysis after his second severe seizure. I have a very vivid narrow beam visual memory of that event - not the surrounding environment, not the veterinarian and assistant who are blurs, but of my canine friend. There have been cases of people with total recall, down to the ability to count the number of pickets in a fence seen once, years ago. Which merely shows that much about the mind is inexplicable, and no map of the neuronal connections will tell us anything, especially if the map changes with each new experience.

Forty years ago it was commonly held that both the liver and the brain did not regenerate after damage (anti-liquor propaganda, I guess). It is now known that both do regenerate. Much more will be known in another 40 years. But I doubt that the mind will have been found as a physical lump anywhere in the cranium.

Mathematics and Gestation: The Incomprehensibility of Embryonic Creation and Development

A Doctor Finds Minds Without Brain Activity.

The idea that the mind is merely an activity of the brain, and that the entire cranial smorgasborg is material is an essential part of Materialism. And Materialism is an essential part of Atheism which ridicules dualists with pink unicorns and flying spaghetti machine Red Herrings. But there is actual evidence tending toward dualism to be considered. Here is some now:

From wired.com:

"Sam Parnia practices resuscitation medine. In other words, he helps bring people back from the dead — and some return with stories. Their tales could help save lives, and even challenge traditional scientific ideas about the nature of consciousness.

“The evidence we have so far is that human consciousness does not become annihilated,” said Parnia, a doctor at Stony Brook University Hospital and director of the school’s resuscitation research program. “It continues for a few hours after death, albeit in a hibernated state we cannot see from the outside.”

And:

"Parnia: I decided that we should study what people have experienced when they’ve gone beyond cardiac arrest. I found that 10 percent of patients who survived cardiac arrests report these incredible accounts of seeing things.

When I looked at the cardiac arrest literature, it became clear that it’s after the heart stops and blood flow into the brain ceases. There’s no blood flow into the brain, no activity, about 10 seconds after the heart stops. When doctors start to do CPR, they still can’t get enough blood into the brain. It remains flatlined. That’s the physiology of people who’ve died or are receiving CPR.

Not just my study, but four others, all demonstrated the same thing: People have memories and recollections. Combined with anecdotal reports from all over the world, from people who see things accurately and remember them, it suggests this needs to be studied in more detail."

And,

"Wired: Couldn’t the experiences just reflect some extremely subtle type of brain activity?
Parnia: When you die, there’s no blood flow going into your brain. If it goes below a certain level, you can’t have electrical activity. It takes a lot of imagination to think there’s somehow a hidden area of your brain that comes into action when everything else isn’t working.

These observations raise a question about our current concept of how brain and mind interact. The historical idea is that electrochemical processes in the brain lead to consciousness. That may no longer be correct, because we can demonstrate that those processes don’t go on after death.

There may be something in the brain we haven’t discovered that accounts for consciousness, or it may be that consciousness is a separate entity from the brain.

Wired: This seems to verge on supernatural explanations of consciousness.

Parnia: Throughout history, we try to explain things the best we can with the tools of science. But most open-minded and objective scientists recognize that we have limitations. Just because something is inexplicable with our current science doesn’t make it superstitious or wrong. When people discovered electromagnetism, forces that couldn’t then be seen or measured, a lot of scientists made fun of it.

Scientists have come to believe that the self is brain cell processes, but there’s never been an experiment to show how cells in the brain could possibly lead to human thought. If you look at a brain cell under a microscope, and I tell you, “this brain cell thinks I’m hungry,” that’s impossible.

It could be that, like electromagnetism, the human psyche and consciousness are a very subtle type of force that interacts with the brain, but are not necessarily produced by the brain. The jury is still out.

Wired: But what about all the fMRI brain imaging studies of thoughts and feelings? Or experiments in which scientists can tell what someone is seeing, or what they’re dreaming, by looking at brain activity?

Parnia: All the evidence we have shows an association between certain parts of the brain and certain mental processes. But it’s a chicken and egg question: Does cellular activity produce the mind, or does the mind produce cellular activity?

Some people have tried to conclude that what we observe indicates that cells produce thought: here’s a picture of depression, here’s a picture of happiness. But this is simply an association, not a causation. If you accept that theory, there should be no reports of people hearing or seeing things after activity in their brain has stopped. If people can have consciousness, maybe that raises the possibility that our theories are premature."

Parnia should be prepared to be called all sorts of things, probably including but not limited to "fraud", "incompetent", and other attacks on his person by those who cannot attack his data. That's what happened last year to the professor from Texas A&M who had the bad judgment to study the effect of having homosexual parents on children (he was exonerated after an investigation of his techniques and conclusions by the university showed the actual integrity of his work).

Neuroscience and Dogmatic Reductionism

The term “neuroscience” is possibly one of the most abused terms in the lexicon of the Atheist philosophic community. The term might well refer to the discovery of new capabilities of individual neurons, or to the constant rewiring of the ever plastic brain. But it does not. The term neuroscience, as used in virtually all of the literature produced by Atheists, Naturalists, Philosophical Materialists and such, refers to the practice of using an MRI to track blood flow in the brain under cognitive stimulation.

This practice of tracking blood flow in the brain is used to declare that certain cerebral functions are located in certain areas of the brain. Then other things which are NOT known are inferred and extrapolated, and come be part of a false knowledge base, one that is perpetuated by worldviews that require such. Some of the false knowledge is based on the idea that the blood flow increase is the only activity in the brain that is involved in the processing of that particular input function, and another is that a certain area of the brain does only one function – that which is being investigated. Another is that all brains are materially the same, wired alike and ready for fully caused, predetermined responses based on their history of causation.

None of this is proven or even suggested by the blood flow in the brain under cognitive stimulation. Every stitch of the determinist conclusion is extrapolation beyond existing facts, extending toward dogmatic conclusions.

There is an article in the NewHumanist of the UK site by a neuroscientist, Raymond Tallis [1], who attacks this practice of iconifying neuroscience with false extrapolations into dogmatic philosophy.

”There is a huge gap between the community of minds and animal quasi-societies. The vast landscape that is the human world has been shaped by the activity of explicit individuals who do things deliberately. Uniquely, the denizens of that world entertain theories about their own nature and about the world; systematically inquire into the order of things and the patterns of causation and physical laws that seem to underpin that order; create cities, laws, institutions; frame their individual lives within a shared history that is recorded and debated over; narrate their individual and shared lives; and guide, justify and excuse their behaviour according to general and abstract principles. Neuro-evolutionary theorists try to ignore all this evidence of difference and have even requisitioned the pseudo-scientific notion of the meme, the unit of cultural transmission, analogous to the gene that ensures its own survival by passing from brain to brain, to capture human society for quasi-Darwinian thought. Just how desperate is this endeavour to conceal the Great Ditch separating humans from other animals is evident from the kind of items that are listed as memes: “the SALT agreement”, “styles of cathedral architecture”, “faith”, “tolerance for free speech” and so on.”

If we were not at a great distance from the kind of activity revealed in our brains and, indeed, from the kinds of aggregations seen in the natural world, then the voluntary adoption of social policies, influenced or not by the latest whizz-bang neuroscience, would be impossible; for there would be no outside from which policies could be dreamed up, judged and tested. Indeed, there would be no outside of the organic world. This is illustrated by the pseudo-science of neuro-law. Supposing, for example, we really could assimilate jurisprudence into brain science, on the grounds that it is our brains that make us criminals or law-abiding, then, since our brains are causally wired into the remainder of the material universe, we would have to look beyond the brain for the ultimate source of our actions. They are objects, not subjects. The plea “My brain made me do it” would essentially be that of “the Big Bang made me do it”.

There are attempts by the Atheist/Philosophical Materialist community to present free will as somehow bimodal, that all brain activity is fully caused by our genetics coupled with our environments on the one hand, yet that we still do obviously have the apparent capability of decision making even though it has to be an illusion. (Never mind that the illusion has created complex societies with complex accoutrements which do not seem to be illusions or delusions.)

Yet the arguments against free will, even when claimed to be against “contracausal” free will, devolve into arguments against free will of any type. If the mind is a physical thing, if physical things are subject to cause and effect, then every action of the (physical) mind has prior causes, going back to the Big Bang, just as Tallis demonstrates above. This premise, the physical, fully caused mind, requires this. There is no room in the “physical mind” concept for the mind to do something that is not caused by prior chains of causation. If it does something like that, then it must be an illusion. (What, we might ask, causes such illusions, especially those that are held by everyone at the same time? Are we fully caused to entertain common delusions? If so, why think at all?)

This leads us to understand that every contra-natural artifact which we think has been thought up by human minds, is also an illusion. Under such a series of premises, then, every physical improvement from the beginnings of agriculture to computers – every bit of culture, from the invention of clothing and language to the internet – it is all an illusion, created by the illusion of mental free will and the illusion of the freedom to invent something new. In fact, there can be no contra-natural existence, when viewed through the glass of Naturalism / Philosophical Materialism / Atheism. Every automobile, skyscraper, computer, newspaper, book, gun, everything is part of a natural progression of cause and effect, starting with the Big Bang. Thinking is an illusion, and so is consciousness and self; in fact, is there any reason to think that reality is not an illusion? We wind up at the brain-in-a-vat sort of denial of absolutely everything, despite our experience (empirical) to the contrary.

This requires an entire revamping of the concept of cause and effect. The old principle of cause and effect included the idea that the cause must be necessary and sufficient to produce the effect, meaning among other things that the cause must be more inclusive than the effect: in producing the effect there will be a loss, an entropic effect which moves toward disorder. So the cause is always bigger, more powerful, more of anything than is the effect; the effect is always less than the cause.

This idea, universal entropy, must be dumped or at least circumvented somehow, if full causation of mental activity is to be believed. It generally is ignored; the philosophers of "neuroscience" don't seem to be inclined toward science that contradicts the dogma.

The self-appellated “Skeptics” who cluster into skeptical societies are in no way skeptical of any of the extrapolations of “neuroscience”; these non-skeptical skeptics are all devout believers in the dogma of Atheism / Naturalism / Philosophical Materialism. So, are we non-believers in those dogmas entitled to be skeptical of Neuroscience, as presented under these dogmas?

Tallis concludes his essay,

”If you come across a new discipline with the prefix “neuro” and it is not to do with the nervous system itself, switch on your bullshit detector. If it has society in its sights, reach for your gun. Bring on the neurosceptics.

Notes:
[1] Tallis’ research was mainly in the area of geriatric and rehabilitative neurology. He is listed as an author, philosopher, and “polymath”, as well as a retired MD and researcher.

Addendum:
For another wonderful article by Tallis on this subject, go here. Would that I could write like that...