Author: dj

Scientists and journalists convene to discuss blogs and whatnot

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A couple of nights back, I attended a panel discussion at Rockefeller University in NYC, organized by SONYC and sponsored by Nature. Entitled Courting Controversy : how to successfully engage an online audience with complex or controversial topics, The meeting consisted of a three person panel, a climate scientist, a pediatric clinician and a former science journalist, addressing a crowd full of journalists and scientists. I won’t give a full review but just a couple of quick points.

One question that emerged from the meeting was whether or not the role of scientist bloggers and/or science journalists should be to educate their readers. The consensus that emerged from the panel seemed to be that education should not be a goal. One panelist, Gavin Schmidt, a climate researcher at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a driving force behind the RealClimate blog, made mention of how scientists live in the space between the known and the unknown, and that in order to really understand discoveries that emerge from this space in a given field, one would need an extensive background education, e.g. the kind of background that one receives when doing a PhD. This kind of education, Schmidt said takes many thousands of hours and can’t very well be accomplished through reading blogs or articles in mainstream media.

While this is certainly true, I’m not sure that science writers are not educating their readers. It’s perhaps a question of how you define “educate”. It might be defined as an act by which one is, “qualified or trained for a particular calling, practice, or trade.” By that definition, any given piece of science writing would certainly not qualify. But, education can also be defined, more simply, as the act of providing something of informational value. Science writers certainly do that. And to the extent that a person’s opinion is influenced by information they’ve consumed, whatever the format, then I think we can say some educating has taken place.

One other point that stuck with me was made by David Ropeik, a former journalist who runs the blog, On Risk. He made the point that negative messages carry much more weight than positive messages. Not a new observation, to be sure, but it’s good to be reminded that to participate in the news/information space is to be in competition for reader’s eyeballs. How one frames their message is probably as important as the message itself. The “competition” probably has less scruples than you. Negative sells. One ignores this maxim at their own peril.

There was some good vigorous discussion in the latter part of the event and the whole thing should be online soon.

The case of the man who couldn’t find the beat

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This post was chosen as an Editor's Selection for ResearchBlogging.org

The ability to dance to music comes naturally to most members of the human species, and even exists in some species of bird, most famously a cockatoo and YouTube celebrity named Snowball.

But it doesn’t come naturally to everyone.

Researchers from McGill University and the University of Montreal (Phillips-Silver, 2011) have recently published a case study of a student named Matthieu, who not only can’t dance to the beat, but also can’t tell when someone else is dancing asyncronously, although he can dance in time if he is able to watch someone else doing it.

“Mathieu was discovered through a recruitment of subjects
who felt they could not keep the beat in music, such as in clapping
in time at a concert or dancing in a club. Mathieu was the
only clear-cut case among volunteers who reported these problems.
Despite a lifelong love of music and dancing, and musical
training including lessons over several years in various instruments,
voice, dance and choreography, Mathieu complained that
he was unable to find the beat in music. Participation in music
and dance activities, while pleasurable, had been difficult for
him.”

Experimenters put Matthieu and a group of control subjects through a series of tests in which they danced to various types of music. Measurements were gathered by way of a Wii controller (which contains a accelerometer) that was strapped to the trunk of each subject’s body and was able to track and quantify their movements. They also had participants tap their hands to the beat, while not dancing. Finally, they watched videos of someone else dancing (increasingly out of sync) to some Merengue music, and were to asked to identify if the person dancing in the videos was in sync with the music or not.

See the videos here.

Matthieu couldn’t tap a beat in time and the style of music didn’t seem to matter; across numerous styles of music, he couldn’t dance in sync with the groove.*

*He was able to sync himself somewhat to a techno beat, which is basically a glorified metronome but nonetheless slightly more complex.

However, he had no problem locking his movements to the beat of a metronome and could bounce with a consistent tempo without music, while showing normal levels of pitch and tonal perception. He demonstrated normal intelligence, presented no history of neurological or psychiatric disorders and showed so signs of obvious cognitive deficits. It seems Matthieu’s deficit is specific to perceiving the underlying pulse in a piece of music and moving his body to it. In other words, he’s got beat (rhythm) deafness.

Scientists have been aware of the condition for quite a while.

In an Australian Medical Journal from 1890, a surgeon from the Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital in Melbourne described a case of rhythm deafness in a 27-yr. old farmer named W.M.:

(Unlike Matthieu, the farmer’s deficit was much less selective; he also suffered from tone deafness and had severely reduced pain sensitivity)

More recently, Oliver Sacks touched upon rhythm blindness in his book Musiciophilia:

Google and PubMed searches find numerous casual references to “rhythm deafness”, but this does seem to be the first well documented case in the scientific literature. So, if its been talked about for so long but documented so infrequently, how rare is it?

Lead author Jessica Phillips-Silver suggested that it might be as rare as tone deafness, which affects about 4 to 5% of the population. If that’s the case, it could be a real challenge locating enough participants to conduct an fMRI study, which would help reveal the neural regions implicated in the condition. But the research team is confident, in part due to ample press coverage of the paper, that they’ll find more subjects.

So, what might an fMRI study reveal about the condition?

A 2005 study (Brown) examining the neural substrates of dance points to one possibility. In this study, subjects lay in a PET scanner and danced a tango with their legs only, both accompanied by music and free form (without music).



Participants in the dancing-to-music condition showed BOLD activation suggesting that audio-motor entrainment might be mediated through a connection between subcortical auditory areas and the cerebellum. This would make sense give that one of the primary functions of the cerebellum is to coordinate motor actions, particularly precision and accurate timing, by receiving input from the sensory system and integrating those incoming signals to execute fine tuned motor activity.

The authors suggest that the deficit might be primarily perceptual and point to the fact that he failed on a task which did not require body movement, nor does not have any basic motor impairments They also suggest that basal ganglia connections between auditory and motor cortices could play a role, particularly the dorsal auditory pathway leading to the dorsal premotor cortex. Silver and colleagues already have some neuroimaging work underway with Matthieu.

As for future directions, Silver-Phillips said that her group will be looking at exactly what level of musical complexity is required for Matthieu’s beat deafness to emerge. They’re also interested in exploring whether there is any sign of entrainment occurring on a neuronal level, even in the face of the behavioral deficit. In other words, maybe his neurons are dancing to the beat even if he’s not.

References
Phillips-Silver J, Toiviainen P, Gosselin N, Piché O, Nozaradan S, Palmer C, & Peretz I (2011). Born to dance but beat deaf: A new form of congenital amusia. Neuropsychologia, 49 (5), 961-9 PMID: 21316375

Brown, S. (2005). The Neural Basis of Human Dance Cerebral Cortex, 16 (8), 1157-1167 DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhj057

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Smoking makes impulsive teen rats even more impulsive

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It’s one of the truisms of human life that teenagers often do silly, stupid and/or dangerous things. We certainly don’t need science to tell us that. One reason this seems to be the case is that, on average, teens have trouble optimally weighing risk vs. reward. I’m not excluding myself from this characterization. In fact, I sometimes marvel that I survived my teen years intact, if at all.

One stupid thing I and many of my friends did as teenagers was to try smoking.

There are no rational arguments in favor of smoking. Yet, according to one study, most adult smokers start before age 19 and 70% of all adolescents report trying a cigarette at least once. Messages directed to adolescents and teens against smoking often fall on deaf ears. In addition to subpar decision making skills, many teens hold the advice of their elders in low regard and are apt to pick up a cigarette as an act of defiance or as a show of their burgeoning adulthood. Hollywood films certainly contribute to the smoking mythology through their noble portrayals of troubled, rebellious or misunderstood teens reaching for smokes when the chips are down.

Although the health risks associated with smoking are widely known, a recent Nature Neuroscience study has provided even more reasons for teens to avoid smoking. Researchers from the Netherlands found that in adolescent rats, exposure to smoking led to increased and long lasting impulsiveness and impaired measures of attention in adulthood. In contrast, adult animals exposed to similar levels of nicotine did not show these long term effects. So, the impulsiveness that might lead a teen to try smoking could be increased by the very product of that impulsiveness, creating a vicious feedback cycle. Nasty business.

What’s the molecular mechanism? A proteomic analysis of 297 different mPFC proteins in adolescent rats who had exposure to smoking showed that levels of mGLuR2 was downregulated. mGluR2 is a metabotropic glutamatergic receptor that sits on the presynaptic side of synapses in the mPFC, a brain region important for cognitive control and attention. Adolescent nicotine exposure resulted in decreased mGLuR2 signaling and reduced plasticity in the mPFC. This was shown to be directly related to attentional deficits by a rescue experiment in which a glutamate agonist was injected into the mPFC in vivo. The agonist restored attentional performance to normal levels but didn’t affect impulsiveness.

In sum, the adolescent brain is more susceptible to the consequences of smoking via alteration of synaptic mGluR2 protein levels. It’s known that nicotine exerts its initial effects on the brain through nicotinic acetylcholine receptor activation and this study suggests that adolescents are uniquely vulnerable to increased activation of these receptors.

The researchers acknowledge that the sequence of molecular events is unknown, but speculate that “…mGluR2 levels following nicotine exposure at the end of adolescence compensate for nicotine’s actions and inhibit neurotransmitter release.” One caveat to keep in mind is that it’s unknown the extent to which this effect would be replicated in humans. Another important point is that in this experiment, nicotine was dissolved in solution and administered subcutaneously. Cigarettes contain many other carcinogens and toxins to which adolescents could be particularly vulnerable, so the long-term cognitive effects of cigarette smoking could extend far beyond those uncovered in this study, which looked just at nicotine.

The takeaway message is definitely clear: Parents, do everything you can to keep your kids from smoking!*

*I’m an advocate for making the sale of tobacco and tobacco related products illegal. Tobacco offers no clear benefits to society, with the exception of a few thousand jobs and the enrichment of a couple handfuls of business executives, while incurring great economic costs to the nation as a whole. Although nicotine has shown some cognitive benefits to individuals in certain disease states, all in all its mostly detrimental. (I’m a member of that most annoyingly vociferous group of anti-smoking activists: ex-smokers. Maybe we’re so adamant because we know how hard it is to quit!) That long-term cognitive deficits are now being shown to accrue in cigarette smoking teens is hopefully another nail in the coffin of the tobacco industry and smoking culture in general, which will perhaps be looked back upon as a sign of the special ignorance of our times.

References

Counotte DS, Goriounova NA, Li KW, Loos M, van der Schors RC, Schetters D, Schoffelmeer AN, Smit AB, Mansvelder HD, Pattij T, & Spijker S (2011). Lasting synaptic changes underlie attention deficits caused by nicotine exposure during adolescence. Nature neuroscience, 14 (4), 417-9 PMID: 21336271

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Regard thyself and put down the smoke stick

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As many a former smoker will probably attest, quitting cigarettes ranks high in the hard-to-kick category. I made several unsuccessful attempts before finally kicking the habit after a 10 year pack-a-day run. Ultimately what worked for me was to go cold turkey, but there were perhaps other alternatives which I might have tried. In a paper from Nature Neuroscience, researchers from University of Michigan provided participants with interventions involving individually tailored messages* designed to encourage quitting and found that participants’ brain activity while listening to the messages predicted how likely they would be to successfully quit smoking.

*Tailored messages are statements about an individuals’ issues and thoughts about quitting smoking, derived from pre-screen interviews with them. e.g., “You are worried that when angry or frustrated, you may light up”.

Here’s the premise: Anti-smoking messages custom made for an individual can be more effective than generic ones, but only if said individual processes those messages in a self directed manner. Past research has shown a specific set of neural regions – primarily the mPFC and precuneus/posterior cingulate – to be associated with self referential thinking. Therefore, researchers hypothesized, activity in these brain regions while processing tailored anti-smoking messages might predict the likelihood of quitting.

The Study
The experiment was carried out over three days with a follow-up visit four months later.

Day 1: 91 participants completed a health assessment, demographic questionnaire and a psychosocial characteristics scale related to quitting smoking. Responses were then used to create smoking cessation messages tailored to each individual.
Day 2: Participants went into scanner and performed 2 fMRI tasks: The first task had participants listen to anti-smoking messages of three different types: personally tailored anti-smoking, non-tailored anti-smoking and neutral.

Here are some examples of what they heard:

Tailored messages
A concern you have is being tempted to smoke when around other smokers.
Something else that you feel will tempt you after you quit is because of a craving.
You are worried that when angry or frustrated, you may light up.
Untailored messages
Some people are tempted to smoke to control their weight or hunger.
Smokers also light up when they need to concentrate.
Certain moods or feelings, places, and things you do can make you want to smoke.
Neutral messages
Oil was formed from the remains of animals and plants that lived millions of years ago.
Sighted in the Pacific Ocean, the world’s tallest sea wave was 112 feet.
Wind is simple air in motion. It is caused by the uneven heating of the earth’s surface by the sun.

Then, participants completed a self appraisal task to identify brain regions active during self relevant thought processes. In this task, participants saw adjectives appear on the screen and had to either rate how much the adjective described them or whether the adjective was positive or negative.

Day 3: Participants completed a web-based smoking cessation program and were instructed to quit smoking. (They were given a supply of nicotine patches to get themselves started)

Results
Behavioral
Experimenters checked in with subjects four months later to see if they were abstaining from smoking. Out of 87 who participated in the smoking cessation program, 45 were not smoking, while 42 were still (or had quit briefly and restarted) smoking.

Subjects were given a surprise memory test for the anti-smoking messages they’d received four months prior and remembered self relevant, tailored messages most well. However, their memory performance was not related to whether they successfully quit smoking.

fMRI
As for the fMRI data, experimenters used a mask of tailored vs. untailored message conditions AND self-appraisal to identify the region common to both processes. This seems like a mild case of double dipping, no? That is, finding a brain region that responds to the condition of interest (in this case, voxels more active in tailored vs. untailored conditions) and then using the same data to test the hypothesis. Ideally, the ROI would be obtained independently of the main task.

A blow by blow on the different contrasts of interest:

1. Researchers looked at brain regions more active during tailored vs. untailored messages and found differential activation in the regions below.

There are, I think, some problems here; mainly, that the task differences for processing tailored vs non-tailored statements may extend beyond self relevant thinking to (1) memory processes employed in processing either category of stimuli; that is, episodic (tailored) vs. semantic (non-tailored), (2) cognitive effort, (3) elicitation of visual vs. non-visual memory, (4) processing fluency and (5) affect or reward responses. Thus, the difference in brain activation found in this task might reflect something other than just self referential processing.

2. The localizer task (used to isolate neural areas involved in self appraisal) had participants process adjectives either by relating them to self or by judging their affective value. This suggests an alternative explanation for the categorical contrast in that it isn’t specific to self per se, but really more specific to people vs. non-people. A more widely used version of this task has participants process adjectives with regards to self or an other. As a further control, a third condition is often included in which participants identify whether words are in upper case or lower case. The contrast applied is (self – control) – (other – control). It’s not clear why the researchers chose the task they did, which seems significantly noisier.

Here’s the contrast from the present study:

And here’s a contrast from another study (Jenkins 2010) that looked at three different types of self-referential processing.

Although roughly similar, the current study shows cortical midline activation seems to be much more dorsal than that found in Jenkins (2010). Using an ROI derived from this localizer task to correlate neural activity in tailored vs. untailored statements with quitting led to a non-significant result (from supplementary materials). This could explain why the researchers used the composite mask to define the ROI.

3. Again, the primary ROI was defined as a composite of overlapping regions between the self reference task AND the tailored vs. untailored statements task, which was used to compare neural activity with quitting behavior. They found that activity in these regions – which included dmPFC, precuneus and angular gyrus – during tailored smoking cessation messages predicted the likelihood of successfully abstaining from smoking. dmPFC and precuneus activation also individually predicted smoking cessation success, although angular gyrus did not.

This study provides clear evidence that participants processed tailored vs. non-tailored messages about smoking differently, and that this difference corresponded to their ability to stop smoking. However,
(1) neither task effectively isolates self referential processing,
(2) the region of activation was much more dorsal than that usually found in this literature (Northoff & Bermpohl, 2004; Schneider et al.,2008; Uddin, Iacoboni, Lange, & Keenan, 2007; Gillihan & Farah, 2005),
(3) an independently obtained ROI yielded insignificant results and
(4) mPFC and precuneus subserve an untold number of cognitive processes beyond self reflection.

Therefore, it seems a bit of a stretch to claim the neural activation found in this study is indicative of self referential processing.

References
Chua HF, Ho SS, Jasinska AJ, Polk TA, Welsh RC, Liberzon I, & Strecher VJ (2011). Self-related neural response to tailored smoking-cessation messages predicts quitting. Nature neuroscience, 14 (4), 426-7 PMID: 21358641

Jenkins AC, & Mitchell JP (2010). Medial prefrontal cortex subserves diverse forms of self-reflection. Social neuroscience, 1-8 PMID: 20711940

Northoff, G. (2005). Emotional-cognitive integration, the self, and cortical midline structures Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28 (02) DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X05400047

Gillihan, S., & Farah, M. (2005). Is Self Special? A Critical Review of Evidence From Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience. Psychological Bulletin, 131 (1), 76-97 DOI: 10.1037/0033-2909.131.1.76

SCHNEIDER, F., BERMPOHL, F., HEINZEL, A., ROTTE, M., WALTER, M., TEMPELMANN, C., WIEBKING, C., DOBROWOLNY, H., HEINZE, H., & NORTHOFF, G. (2008). The resting brain and our self: Self-relatedness modulates resting state neural activity in cortical midline structures Neuroscience, 157 (1), 120-131 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroscience.2008.08.014

UDDIN, L., IACOBONI, M., LANGE, C., & KEENAN, J. (2007). The self and social cognition: the role of cortical midline structures and mirror neurons Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11 (4), 153-157 DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2007.01.001

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Revisiting a classic finding: the fallacy of the hot hand

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(*In honor of the upcoming NBA playoffs, a brief post on, for my money, the big paradox of professional basketball: the myth of the hot hand.)

Despite a long and fruitful career full of notable findings, Cornell psychologist Thomas Gilovich is perhaps most well known for a study he conducted with psychologists Amos Tversky and Robert Vallone 25 years ago when he presented a devastating debunking of the sports phenomena known as the “hot hand.”

The hot hand refers to the belief that success in basketball (and elsewhere) is self perpetuating. That is, a player can “get into a groove” after making a couple of shots such that making a shot leads to the higher likelihood of making the next shot. String together a bunch of these and you’ve got yourself a hot hand. Tune into any basketball game and you’ll inevitably hear an announcer say, “he’s in the zone” or “he can’t miss right now” about a player with a hot hand.

If this is true, one should look at a set of all made shots and all missed shots for some entity, such as one team for an entire year, and see that players made more shots after hits than they did after misses. Gilovich and his colleagues did just that, and that’s not what they found. They found that a player was just as likely to miss as make a shot after a previous make. But what about the possibility that opposing defense becomes tougher after a guy has made a few? Or what if he starts taking more difficult shots?

To control for these possibilties, they looked at free throws, which control for both of those factors in that there is no defensive pressure and shots are always taken from the same distance. A look at two seasons worth of free throws from the Boston Celtics showed second shots were completely independent of first shots. That is, if a player made the first free throw, he was no more likely to make the second one than if he missed the first one.

As a sports fan, I’ve always had a difficult time accepting this. (I’m not alone: the famed coach Bobby Knight responded to the study by saying, ” … there are so many variables involved in shooting the basketball that a paper like this really doesn’t mean anything.” Red Auerbach was even more blunt: “Who is this guy? So he makes a study? I couldn’t care less.” ) It just seems so counterintuitive that success or failure wouldn’t have some systematic effect on subsequent performance.

It’s a seeming truism that professional athletes (and performing artists, for that matter) perform best when they’re not thinking about how they’re playing. And it’s widely known by sports psychologists that thinking too much about one’s form in any given sport, whether it be shooting the basketball or attempting to sink a putt, can have deleterious effects on performance. So it seems plausible to imagine that success (or lack thereof) on the basketball court could alter one’s mental state in a way that could systematically alter performance. But, that’s not what the data says.

In the two decades plus since Gilovich, Vallone and Tversky’s seminal paper, the hot hand fallacy has been subject to a great deal of scrutiny and doubt, but the original finding has generally held up. One study controlled for time between shots but still found no evidence for the hot hand (Adams, 1992). Others have suggested that statistics are insufficient to handle the complexity of the game (Larkey, 1989). In 2009, John Huizinga from the Chicago Booth School of Business and Sandy Weil analyzed almost a million shots from 49 star players (unpublished; here for more details) and found, contrary to the existence of the hot hand, that NBA stars were more likely to miss after a made shot than after a miss. According to their analysis, this was more likely to happen after jump shots than non-jump shots (layups or dunks).

The implications of all this are that teams shouldn’t be looking to feed the ball to a guy just because he’s made a few in a row. But despite the ample support that hot hands don’t exist, you won’t have any easy time convincing many players or coaches of this.

A post game synopsis from an LA Lakers game last fall:

Jackson’s rationale for leaving Vujacic out entails the fact that Shannon Brown scored 16 points on six of nine shooting in 21 minutes. That led Jackson to “ride the hot hand,” as he called it, even if he had planned for Vujacic to defend against Houston guard Kevin Martin…

Even Phil Jackon, probably the most successful NBA coach in modern times, cites “the hot hand” as basis for his personnel decisions.

In Gilovich’s book summarizing the work, How We Know What Isn’t So, he talks to former NBA star World B. Free about the hot hand. “If I’m on, I find that confidence just builds . . . you feel nobody can stop you. It’s important to hit that first one, especially if it’s a swish. Then you hit another, and . . . you feel like you can do anything.”

This line of thinking, that success breeds success, is certainly feasible in many aspects of one’s life. Financial success can lead to further success, as profit can lead to more profit through increased capital. In one’s professional life, success can have a powerful effect on how one is perceived by others and promote increased success through an enhanced reputation. But, on the basketball court, the implications are quite clear. There are many factors that go into deciding – say, during crunch time of a close game – who should get the ball. A simple heuristic might be to give the ball to the guy with the highest shooting percentage. But what if he’s having an off night due to injury? Or being consistently double teamed? Perhaps your second best shooter gets the call. Many factors might inform the decision. But, according to everything the data is telling us, the “hot hand” should not be one of them.

References
GILOVICH, T. (1985). The hot hand in basketball: On the misperception of random sequences Cognitive Psychology, 17 (3), 295-314 DOI: 10.1016/0010-0285(85)90010-6

Adams, R. (1992). The “Hot Hand” Revisited: Successful Basketball Shooting as a function of intershot interval.Perceptual and Motor Skills, 74 (3) DOI: 10.2466/PMS.74.3.934-934

Larkey, P. D., Smith, R. A., & Kadane, J. B. (1989). It’s okay to believe in the ‘‘hot hand’’.
Chance: New Directions for Statistics and Computing, 2, 22 – 30.

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