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Comments on neurobiology, neuroimaging, and psychiatry from a skeptical neuroscientist.
Neuroskeptic
270 posts
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- August 1, 2016
- 03:53 PM
- 103 views
Some Surprising Authors of Psychology Papers
by Neuroskeptic in Neuroskeptic_Discover
In a fascinating new paper, Scott O. Lilienfeld and Steven Jay Lynn discuss 78 Surprising Authors of Psychological Publications. The paper is a list of celebrities and other notable figures who, at one time or another, have published an academic paper in psychology.
Did you know that Lisa Kudrow, aka Phoebe from Friends, was co-author on a 1994 paper about 'Handedness and Headache' published in the journal Cephalalgia? Well, thanks to Lilienfeld and Lynn, now you do. Other actors who have a... Read more »
Lilienfeld SO, & Lynn SJ. (2016) You'll Never Guess Who Wrote That: 78 Surprising Authors of Psychological Publications. Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 11(4), 419-41. PMID: 27474131
- July 31, 2016
- 06:39 AM
- 126 views
The End of Ego-Depletion Theory?
by Neuroskeptic in Neuroskeptic_Discover
It's not been a good month for the theory of ego-depletion - the idea that self-control is a limited resource that can be depleted by overuse. Two weeks ago, researchers reported evidence of bias in the published literature examinig the question of whether glucose can reverse ego-depletion.
Now, the very existence of the ego-depletion phenomenon has been questioned by an international collaboration of psychologists who conducted a preregistered replication attempt (RRR). The results have just... Read more »
Hagger, M., & Chatzisarantis, N. (2016) A Multilab Preregistered Replication of the Ego-Depletion Effect. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(4), 546-573. DOI: 10.1177/1745691616652873
- July 27, 2016
- 09:49 AM
- 159 views
The Myth of Human Adult Neurogenesis?
by Neuroskeptic in Neuroskeptic_Discover
In a new paper that could prove explosive, Australian neuropathologists C. V. Dennis and colleagues report that they found very little evidence for adult neurogenesis in humans.
In recent years, the idea that neurogenesis - the production of new neurons - occurs in specific regions of the adult brain has become widely accepted, and much discussed. Disruptions to neurogenesis have been proposed to play a role in stress, depression, and other disorders.
However, Dennis et al. say that ne... Read more »
Dennis CV, Suh LS, Rodriguez ML, Kril JJ, & Sutherland GT. (2016) Human adult neurogenesis across the ages: An immunohistochemical study. Neuropathology and applied neurobiology. PMID: 27424496
- July 23, 2016
- 09:41 AM
- 162 views
A New Map of the Brain: What Does It Mean?
by Neuroskeptic in Neuroskeptic_Discover
A new Nature paper has earned a lot of media attention, unusually given that it's a fairly technical and 'basic' piece of neuroscience. In the paper, researchers Matthew F. Glasser and colleagues present a new parcellation (or map) of the human cerebral cortex, breaking the cortex down into 180 areas per hemisphere - many more than conventional maps.
But is this, as Nature dubbed it, "the ultimate brain map"?
To generate their map, Glasser et al. first downloaded 210 people's data from... Read more »
Glasser MF, Coalson TS, Robinson EC, Hacker CD, Harwell J, Yacoub E, Ugurbil K, Andersson J, Beckmann CF, Jenkinson M.... (2016) A multi-modal parcellation of human cerebral cortex. Nature. PMID: 27437579
- July 19, 2016
- 03:17 PM
- 83 views
Can Ultrasound Diagnose Autism?
by Neuroskeptic in Neuroskeptic_Discover
A paper makes the remarkable claim that autism could be detected through the use of ultrasound to peer beneath the skull. This paper is from 2014, but it just came to my attention.
The authors of the piece, James Jeffrey Bradstreet, Stefania Pacini and Marco Ruggiero, studied 23 children with autism and 15 control children, who were unaffected siblings of the autistic group. Using ultrasound, the authors looked under the skull overlaying the brain's temporal cortex. The ultrasound reveale... Read more »
Bradstreet JJ, Pacini S, & Ruggiero M. (2014) A New Methodology of Viewing Extra-Axial Fluid and Cortical Abnormalities in Children with Autism via Transcranial Ultrasonography. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 934. PMID: 24459462
- July 16, 2016
- 04:06 PM
- 75 views
Blogs, Papers, Plagiarism and Bitcoin
by Neuroskeptic in Neuroskeptic_Discover
Retraction Watch reports on a strange case of alleged plagiarism.
In February 2016, F1000Research published a paper called How blockchain-timestamped protocols could improve the trustworthiness of medical science. The authors, Greg Irving and John Holden, demonstrated the use of the bitcoin blockchain as a way of publicly verifying the existence of a certain document at a certain point in time. This approach, they say, could be used to make preregistered research protocols more secure. A prob... Read more »
Irving G, & Holden J. (2016) How blockchain-timestamped protocols could improve the trustworthiness of medical science. F1000Research, 222. PMID: 27239273
- July 14, 2016
- 11:15 AM
- 208 views
Does Sugar Really Fuel Willpower?
by Neuroskeptic in Neuroskeptic_Discover
Another prominent psychology theory has come under scrutiny by researchers who say the published results look unrealistic.
In a new paper, Miguel A. Vadillo et al. take aim at the idea that the body's reserves of willpower rely on glucose.
The background here is the 'ego depletion' model, a psychological theory which holds that self-control is effortful and draws on a limited resource, which can eventually be depleted if it's overused. Many researchers have proposed that glucose is thi... Read more »
Vadillo, M., Gold, N., & Osman, M. (2016) The Bitter Truth About Sugar and Willpower: The Limited Evidential Value of the Glucose Model of Ego Depletion. Psychological Science. DOI: 10.1177/0956797616654911
- July 10, 2016
- 09:25 AM
- 104 views
Can Psychologists Learn More by Studying Fewer People?
by Neuroskeptic in Neuroskeptic_Discover
In a brief new Frontiers in Psychology paper, Matthew P. Normand argues that Less Is More: Psychologists Can Learn More by Studying Fewer People.
Normand writes that the conventional wisdom - that a bigger sample size is better - is wrong. Repeated measurements of a few subjects, or even just one individual, can be more informative than casting the net widely, he says
Psychologists tend to view the population of interest to be people, with the number of individuals studied taking pre... Read more »
Normand, M. (2016) Less Is More: Psychologists Can Learn More by Studying Fewer People. Frontiers in Psychology. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00934
- July 7, 2016
- 11:37 AM
- 260 views
False-Positive fMRI Hits The Mainstream
by Neuroskeptic in Neuroskeptic_Discover
A new paper in PNAS has made waves. The article, called Cluster failure: Why fMRI inferences for spatial extent have inflated false-positive rates, comes from neuroscientists Swedish neuroscientists Anders Eklund, Tom Nichols, and Hans Knutsson.
According to many of the headlines that greeted "Cluster failure", the paper is a devastating bombshell that could demolish the whole field of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI):
Bug in fMRI software calls 15 years of research into ques... Read more »
Eklund A, Nichols TE, & Knutsson H. (2016) Cluster failure: Why fMRI inferences for spatial extent have inflated false-positive rates. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. PMID: 27357684
- June 21, 2016
- 05:42 AM
- 169 views
Anonymity Doesn't Always Promote Online Aggression
by Neuroskeptic in Neuroskeptic_Discover
It's widely said that anonymity on the internet helps to promote aggressive, low quality or trolling comments. On this view, the anonymous commenter, knowing they cannot be held accountable, is free to do things that they would be ashamed to do under their real name.
But now German researchers Katja Rost and colleagues challenge this view, in a new study published in PLOS ONE. Rost et al. say that real names can actually be associated with more aggression than anonymous posts, based o... Read more »
Rost K, Stahel L, & Frey BS. (2016) Digital Social Norm Enforcement: Online Firestorms in Social Media. PloS one, 11(6). PMID: 27315071
- June 16, 2016
- 11:01 AM
- 135 views
Reflections On Voodoo Neuroscience
by Neuroskeptic in Neuroskeptic_Discover
Seven years ago, neuroscientists Ed Vul and colleagues made waves with their paper on 'voodoo correlations' in social neuroscience. Now, in a new paper, historian of medicine Cornelius Borck looks back on the voodoo correlations debate and asks whether neuroscience might be likened to voodoo in another sense.
Borck argues that neuroscience has something in common with animism, the religious belief that spirits inhabit various objects. In particular, he says, fMRI studies can be likened to... Read more »
Borck, C. (2016) Animating Brains. Medical History, 60(03), 308-324. DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2016.25
- June 11, 2016
- 05:29 AM
- 280 views
The Four-Dimensional Brain?
by Neuroskeptic in Neuroskeptic_Discover
"The brain is a three dimensional object." It would seem that this is one of the least controversial facts about the brain, something we can all agree on. But now, in a curious new paper, researchers Arturo Tozzi and James F. Peters suggest that the brain might have an extra dimension: Towards a fourth spatial dimension of brain activity
From topology, a strong concept comes into play in understanding brain functions, namely, the 4D space of a ‘‘hypersphere’s torus’’, undetectable by........ Read more »
Tozzi A, & Peters JF. (2016) Towards a fourth spatial dimension of brain activity. Cognitive neurodynamics, 10(3), 189-99. PMID: 27275375
- June 10, 2016
- 08:31 AM
- 252 views
Decoding Faces from the Brain
by Neuroskeptic in Neuroskeptic_Discover
In a fascinating new paper, researchers Hongmi Lee and Brice A. Kuhl report that they can decode faces from neural activity. Armed with a brain scanner, they can reconstruct which face a participant has in mind. It's a cool technique that really seems to fit the description of 'mind reading' - although the method's accuracy is only modest.
Here's how they did it. Lee and Kuhl started out with a set of over 1000 color photos of different faces. During an fMRI scan, these images were shown to... Read more »
Lee H, & Kuhl BA. (2016) Reconstructing Perceived and Retrieved Faces from Activity Patterns in Lateral Parietal Cortex. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 36(22), 6069-82. PMID: 27251627
- June 3, 2016
- 01:42 PM
- 174 views
The Myth of the Optimism Bias?
by Neuroskeptic in Neuroskeptic_Discover
Are humans natural, irrational optimists? According to many psychologists, humans show a fundamental optimism bias, a tendency to underestimate our chances of suffering negative events. It's said that when thinking about harmful events, such as contracting cancer, most people believe that their risk is lower than that of 'the average person'. So, on average, people rate themselves as safer than the average. Moreover, people are also said to show biased belief updating. Faced with evidence that t........ Read more »
Punit Shah, Adam J. L. Harris, Geoffrey Bird, Caroline Catmur, & Ulrike Hahn. (2016) A Pessimistic View of Optimistic Belief Updating. Cognitive Psychology. info:/
- May 30, 2016
- 06:30 AM
- 193 views
Foreign language syndrome: the Italian who became "French"
by Neuroskeptic in Neuroskeptic_Discover
A curious case report from Italian neuropsychologists Nicoletta Beschin and colleagues: Compulsive foreign language syndrome: a clinical observation not a mystery
The authors describe a 50 year old Italian man, JC, who turned into a 'caricature' of a Frenchman after a brain injury caused by a vascular anomaly. JC insisted in speaking French at all times, even though his knowledge of the language was rather poor (he had learned it at school, but not practiced it for decades.) What's more, ... Read more »
Beschin, N., de Bruin, A., & Della Sala, S. (2016) Compulsive foreign language syndrome: A clinical observation not a mystery. Cortex. DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2016.04.020
- May 28, 2016
- 09:34 AM
- 324 views
A Recurring Sickness: Pathological Déjà Vu
by Neuroskeptic in Neuroskeptic_Discover
Have you read this sentence before? Perhaps it feels strangely familiar? The experience of déjà vu is a common one, but in rare cases, it can become a disorder. In a fascinating new Cortex paper, French psychologists Julie Bertrand and colleagues discuss the phenomenon of pathological déjà vu.
Bertrand et al. present an English translation of what is probably the first description of the condition, published in 1896 in French by the psychiatrist Francois-Léon Arnaud (1858-1927).
Ar... Read more »
Bertrand JM, Martinon LM, Souchay C, & Moulin CJ. (2016) History repeating itself: Arnaud's case of pathological déjà vu. Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior. PMID: 27188828
- May 22, 2016
- 05:51 AM
- 298 views
Pinpointing the Origins of Migraine in the Brain
by Neuroskeptic in Neuroskeptic_Discover
Migraines are a very unpleasant variety of headaches, often associated with other symptoms such as nausea, vomiting, photophobia (aversion to light) and visual disturbances. Hundreds of millions of people around the world suffer regular migraines, but their brain basis remains largely unclear.
Now a new paper reports that the origin of migraines may have been pinpointed - in the brain of one sufferer, at least. German neuroscientists Laura H. Schulte and Arne May used fMRI to record brain... Read more »
Schulte LH, & May A. (2016) The migraine generator revisited: continuous scanning of the migraine cycle over 30 days and three spontaneous attacks. Brain : a journal of neurology. PMID: 27190019
- May 19, 2016
- 07:29 AM
- 306 views
Does Memory Reconsolidation Exist?
by Neuroskeptic in Neuroskeptic_Discover
A new PNAS paper casts doubt on an influential theory of memory.
The reconsolidation hypothesis holds that when a memory is recalled, its molecular trace in the brain becomes plastic, meaning that the memory has to be consolidated or ‘saved’ all over again in order for it to persist. In other words, remembering makes a memory vulnerable to being modified or erased. Reconsolidation has generated lots of research interest and even speculation that blocking reconsolidation could be used as a t........ Read more »
Hardwicke TE, Taqi M, & Shanks DR. (2016) Postretrieval new learning does not reliably induce human memory updating via reconsolidation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 113(19), 5206-11. PMID: 27114514
- May 15, 2016
- 08:07 AM
- 323 views
Hyperthermia as an Antidepressant?
by Neuroskeptic in Neuroskeptic_Discover
Getting warm has a dramatic antidepressant effect, according to a new report published in the prestigious journal JAMA Psychiatry. But is it hot science or a hot mess?
The researchers, led by Clemens Janssen of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studied 29 people with depression who were not receiving any other treatments. Half were randomized to receive whole-body hyperthermia (WBH), using a setup which raised their core body temperature to 38.5 degrees (37 degrees is normal).
The o... Read more »
Janssen CW, Lowry CA, Mehl MR, Allen JJ, Kelly KL, Gartner DE, Medrano A, Begay TK, Rentscher K, White JJ.... (2016) Whole-Body Hyperthermia for the Treatment of Major Depressive Disorder: A Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA psychiatry. PMID: 27172277
- May 14, 2016
- 09:28 AM
- 381 views
The Neural Basis of Seeing God?
by Neuroskeptic in Neuroskeptic_Discover
A remarkable case report describes the brain activity in a man at the moment that he underwent a revelatory experience.
According to the authors, Israeli researchers Arzy and Schurr, the man was 46 years old. He was Jewish, but he had never been especially religious. His supernatural experience occured in hospital where he was undergoing tests to help treat his right temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), a condition which he had suffered from for forty years. As part of the testing procedure, the pat... Read more »
Arzy S, & Schurr R. (2016) "God has sent me to you": Right temporal epilepsy, left prefrontal psychosis. Epilepsy , 7-10. PMID: 27176877
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