Fact-resistant humans are threatening the ability of Earth to sustain life

Andy Borowitz reports that "Scientists have discovered a powerful new strain of fact-resistant humans who are threatening the ability of Earth to sustain life."

Brilliant.

Actually, we DO understand the psychology of this phenomenon.  We know that human cognition which includes storytelling and logical thinking did not evolve to discern TRUTH but simply to enhance the probability of survival and reproductive success.  Right?  We are exquisitely tuned to detect inauthentic or flawed STORIES, not whether or not the stories are based on or contradict hard evidence.  On the contrary, to conserve energy under severe cognitive load, we basically delegate reasoning from evidence and first principles — which is HARD — to much more subconscious heuristics that are predisposed to select those stories framed to confirm existing beliefs and to filter out those stories which contradict them.  It’s called ‘confirmation bias.'

Borowitz is right:  shocks required to break through confirmation bias could include hunger, thirst or even respiration.

Reason, Truth, Lies, Empiricism and Belief in the Age of the Internet

In the March issue of The New Yorker Jill Lepore posted an amusing rant on reason, truth, lies, empiricism and belief in the "Age of the Internet."

She asks a good question:  How do we know?  And what is the role of evidence?  Reason?

Lepore observes in this season dominated by the Republican debates and largely negative advertising based almost exclusively on unsubstantiated opinion and belief:

1. "Tump doesn’t reason... He wants combat." 
2. "Cruz’s appeal is to the judgment of God. 'Father God, please . . . awaken the body of Christ, that we might pull back from the abyss,' he preached on the campaign trail."
3. "Rubio’s appeal is to Google."

Memory: The Relationship Between Brain and the Experience of 'Self'

Interesting article in Time Magazine about a woman named Lonni Sue Johnson who was a very successful artist, violinist and pilot until she suffered an attack of encephalitis in 2007 at the age of 57.  Studying patients like Johnson, scientists are learning about the relationship between the physical brain and experiences and even the nature of 'self'.

With the help of the hardware and Johnson's willingness to sit still for so much study, science may be able to answer one other, more abstract question: What is it like to have lost so many memories about your life and the world? If who you are is an amalgamation, at least in part, of the things you've experienced--the people you've loved, the places you've lived, the tragedies you've endured--are you actually you at all when those things are wiped away? The self is ineffable, but it's also material, the product of neurochemicals sparking their way through living tissue. How we draw the line between those two dimensions--the biological and the experiential, the brain and the far less knowable mind--has kept philosophers awake for millennia.

The Challenge of Science and Civic Engagement

Many of the most complex and serious issues facing society today have significant technical and scientific dimensions: how to manage climate change, public health, loss of biodiversity, and dwindling natural resources, to name a few. These are not just technical or scientific issues, however. These are fundamentally social, political and economic problems with substantial ethical, moral and cultural dimensions.  Answers to these challenges require judgment, values and priorities in addition to empirical observation, experimental evidence, quantitative models and methods.

But no matter how you look at it, despite their utility in policy-making, the "hard sciences" are not always applied.  But why?  Although this is complicated and, for sure, there are many other factors, it's pretty safe to simply observe that, at the moment, scientists and their work are somewhat isolated from popular culture and the domain of policy decision-making.

Cockburn Publishes Attack on Greenhouse Warming Theory

Alexander Cockburn published a story on Counterpunch today called "Is Global Warming a Sin?" attacking the theory of global warming. Initially the argument seemed somewhat personal and political but also cogent and founded on legitimate data and observations. However, after rereading it and looking for criticism -- especially of the arguments he raised that seemed original and missing from the mainstream debate -- cracks in his argument started to appear. And the closer I looked the more I realized that it's pretty sophisticated politically but really inadequate with respect to what I am beginning to expect of science journalism.

Despite the weaknesses of article, however, it is a great opportunity to understand the anatomy of a cultural and political attack on science itself.

Einstein on the Difference Between Science and Art

Apparently, Einstein wrote:

"Where the world ceases to be the stage for personal hopes and desires, where we, as free beings, behold it in wonder, to question and to contemplate, there we enter the realm of art and science. If we trace out what we behold and experience through the language of logic, we are doing science; if we show it in forms whose interrelationships are not accessible to our conscious thought but are intuitively recognized as meaningful, we are doing art. Common to both is the devotion to something beyond the personal, removed from the arbitrary."

Brain Physiology of Love and Sex

Elizabeth Cohen posted this story on CNN about what cognitive scientists are learning about love.We exchanged a few emails on the subject so I figured I'd take one of them and post this blog entry.

Cohen wrote, “In a group of experiments, Dr. Lucy Brown, a professor in the department of neurology and neuroscience at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, and her colleagues did MRI brain scans on college students who were in the throes of new love.  While being scanned, the students looked at a photo of their beloved. The scientists found that the caudate area of the brain -- which is involved in cravings -- became very active. Another area that lit up: the ventral tegmental, which produces dopamine, a powerful neurotransmitter that affects pleasure and motivation."

Brain Physiology of Love and Sex

Elizabeth Cohen posted this story on CNN about what cognitive scientists are learning about love.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/02/14/love.science/

We exchanged a few emails on the subject so I figured I'd take one of them and post this blog entry.

Cohen wrote, “In a group of experiments, Dr. Lucy Brown, a professor in the department of neurology and neuroscience at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, and her colleagues did MRI brain scans on college students who were in the throes of new love.  While being scanned, the students looked at a photo of their beloved. The scientists found that the caudate area of the brain -- which is involved in cravings -- became very active. Another area that lit up: the ventral tegmental, which produces dopamine, a powerful neurotransmitter that affects pleasure and motivation."

"Dr. Brown said scientists believe that when you fall in love, the ventral tegmental floods the caudate with dopamine. The caudate then sends signals for more dopamine....  The more dopamine you get, the more of a high you feel" similar to the effect of cocaine on the nervous system.

The physiology of sex, on the other hand, appears to be quite different.  Cohen explained, “In studies when researchers showed erotic photos to people as they underwent brain scans, they found activity in the hypothalamus and amygdala areas of the brain. The hypothalamus controls drives like hunger and thirst and the amygdala handles arousal, among other things.  In the studies of people in love, 'we didn't find activity in either,' according to Dr. Fisher, an anthropologist and author of Why We Love -- the Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love.

Let’s examine their findings in more detail and ask some questions.  First of all, how do we know the students they selected were actually in love?  And how do we know that looking at pictures of your beloved evokes the same response as love?  And finally, can we trust their conclusions?

This kind of questioning is a huge part of science.  Is the methodology valid?  Scientists are skeptical.  Unfortunately journalists are less so.  They rarely discuss questions on the methodology of the study or delve into the philosophical underpinnings of the conclusions and report on how scientists challenge one another.  Would that be boring?  Maybe.  But without that discussion, how do we know, really?  And I wonder if you could make it interesting....

In their search for a juicy story, science journalism is often guilty of exaggerating the claims or conclusions of the scientists themselves.  For example, in this case they might have concluded that brain region A was activated when the subject studied images of X while region B was activated when images Y were projected to the subject.  This deductive reasoning is solid:  if A then X and not Y.  If B then Y and not X.   It’s what makes reductionist science work.

But that’s not where it ends.  A good paper might cautiously extend limited conclusions like these beyond the scope of the experiment back to the considerably more complex “real world.”   The synthesis of these results with lots of other experiments on mind, brain AND body systems is actually inductive reasoning.  These results together with lots of other results might support (and do not contradict) a proposed model that accounts for the mechanisms of perception and other kinds of cognitive behavior.  We can’t say that the model is right.  We can only say that it has not been disproved yet.

Naturally, we would have to find and study the original paper to be sure of this.  But it does serve to illustrate this point:  reporters typically skip this intermediate step making it seem like the experiment is deductive reasoning about the real world.  It is not.

Implicit messages and omissions are another problem with scientific journalism.  Cohen wrote, “By studying MRI brain scans of people newly in love, scientists are learning a lot about the science of love: Why love is so powerful, and why being rejected is so horribly painful.”  To the romantic reader, lover of poetry, art or music perhaps, claims like this imply much more than is actually intended by the scientists themselves.  Knowledge of physiology tells us nothing about the subjective  experience of love at all and certainly can’t help us answer questions like “Why should we experience such feelings?”

Reasonable, well adjusted scientists are well aware that the model of the mechanism is interesting but totally distinct from the experience or the meaning of the phenomenon.  E. O. Wilson would suggest that’s exactly why science and literature and art and music are complimentary or even 'consilient' inductions insofar as they 'jump together' and reinforce one another.  It is assumed by scientists. Perhaps we should make it explicit for the rest of us as we ask, "but how do we know?"

Fallacies in the Science and Religion Debate

One of the things I would like to do with this blog is to watch the raging debate between Science and Religion carefully for erroneous characterizations or fallacious reasoning.

In particular, I am interested in ways that each misrepresent the "other" in the debate. It serves us well as observers in this dialog to repeatedly ask the question "how do we know?" Not all Scientists but certainly some of the most visible regularly succumb to the straw-man fallacy by trivializing religious institutions, beliefs and practices and then demolishing their stereotypes.