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BS claims by Chopra, nothing new, but I’m compelled to reply

Apr 27th, 2012 by tzramsoy

Deepak Chopra has moved into the domain of the brain… and it should come as no surprise that what he claims is not only laughably erroneous, but also deeply misleading and ignoring the vast amounts of data for the view he so eagerly wants to discard.

Why do I even bother? Because I care! I care that people are not misled by what I believe to be baloney!

I jotted a decent reply to Chopra’s recent text at Huff Post, but it was obviously too long for being a comment, so I’m posting it here, hoping that many of you will make it from my direct link at the HP site. Thanks for clicking.

Mr. Chopra,
The level of BS in this assertion is so high that I don’t even know where to start! We now have a whole century (actually, much more, but let’s leave it at that) of evidence providing a very close link between the mind and the brain. I am utterly puzzled at how one can even make such claims as you do, and feel compelled to do some debugging of your text:
  • The starter dish fallacy: The brain does not “light up” – what you see is a statistical representation of the change in signal intensity that (for fMRI scans) represent changes in oxygenated blood, which is an indirect measure of brain activation. Dark regions are still active, but not particularly for the task we have chosen to focus on (or rather, the tasks that researchers have decided to compare). This is a non-trivial distinction, because the link suggested by Chopra to a radio tuning in is simply erroneous. See more below.
  • The big leap of reason is the semantic trick of saying that neuroscientists (including myself) believe that the brain is in charge, and not you… I thought Chopra just agreed that neuroscientists believed that the brain IS you? Actually, most scientists I know believe that the brain and you are indeed the same! What happens in the brain is part of you as an organism, as a person, and often as a sentient being. The activation of hypothalamic nuclei can help control hunger, thermoregulation etc.; the response of the amygdala can help you become aware of specific events; the activation in the medial orbitofrontal cortex does indeed reflect quite closely how much you enjoy reading this paragraph, the taste of that chocolate you’re having (lucky you) or the music you have playing in the background.
  • The great news is: this takes NOTHING away from the wonderful richness of your conscious life! But we understand so much better now HOW it is that the mysterious wet matter of the brain can even produce such magic. And the best part is…no supernatural explanations are yet needed. No need to evoke additional dimensions, pseudoscientific explanations or altogether magical mental bypasses.
  • “Brain activity isn’t the same as thinking, feeling, or seeing”. True enough as a general statement BUT brain activation in regions such as the amygdala, striatum, orbitofrontal cortex and insula ARE equated to emotional responses. Thinking…well that’s too mongrel a concept to start with so our ability to “think twice”, i.e. control our impulses, is well known to be closely related to activation in other brain regions, such as the anterior cingulate cortex and other parts of the prefrontal cortex. And hey, if you suffer a lesion to any of those regions, you DO lose your ability to respond emotionally, control your actions etc. SO instead of infusing wannabe scientific explanations, why not start with the obvious? The brain is the organ of thought and emotions. Just because we have not understand all of it in minute detail, this explanation exceeds and outperforms any other alternative explanation by zillions of miles!
  • “No one has remotely shown how molecules acquire the qualities of the mind”… I don’t even know what that statement means. Obviously, nobody have ever proven the mind to exist outside the brain. Our best guess is…the mind and the brain is the same thing! I’ve seen far too many neurology patients (and psychiatric for that matter) to believe that the brain is not the culprit.
  • “It is impossible to construct a theory of the mind based on material objects that somehow became conscious.” I love the “impossible” statement here. See, this argument goes straight in the face of your own claim: if you believe that there is an immaterial mind and a material brain, and there is no interaction between them, you’re in BIG trouble. Why do we talk about the brain at all, then? Why does a lesion to the brain in any way lead to a change in the mind? How can I physically simulate your brain using electrodes and Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation and make your hand move, make you partially blind for a split second, or alter your social decision? Your claims must be backed up with facts. Claims are not facts!
  • Radio analogy: this is just a pretty darn good example that your choice of analogy is wrong, and not that there is anything wrong with how we view the brain!
So it is NOT a massive struggle to neuroscientists to “see those flaws”. Indeed, I do see the flaws, but as I’ve put out above, the flaws are on you, Mr. Chopra. Please consult a neuroscientist next time, I’d be happy to discuss this at any time!
Sincerely, and with my mindful brain intact
Thomas Zoëga Ramsøy, PhD & neuropsychologist

Posted in consciousness, emotions, free will, modularity, pseudoscience, religion, skepticism | No Comments »

Forgetting mind wandering…?

Mar 21st, 2012 by tzramsoy

A recent post at Neuroskeptic discusses whether neuroimaging studies may provide a misleading picture of the brain. The issue is made relevant due to recent studies that demonstrate that for simple tasks, the brains were more or less globally active:

Both studies found that pretty much the whole brain “lit up” when people are doing simple tasks. In one case it was seeing videos of people’s faces, in the other it was deciding whether stimuli on the screen were letters or numbers.

The big surprise – should we take their word for granted – is that the whole brain is active whenever people do these simple tasks, and that it most likely only can be found when looking at a lot of people (most studies use around 20 people in fMRI studies).

There are several problems with this “big problem”, and just to name a few:

  • Task unrelated images and thoughts (TUITs) and Mind wandering: since the 60s and 70s, psychology has studied what happens whenever people are relaxing, or doing very repetitive tasks. These studies uncovered that these states were highly active, not “passive” in any sense. This fact seems to have been forgotten in so many studies on the brain’s “default mode” and “resting state”, which surprisingly has uncovered increased activation in a number of widespread brain regions for “less” active tasks. Thus, having your subjects doing a highly repetitive – and even very boring – task is related to mind wandering. That such an active state would produce large-scale activation throughout the brain should come as no surprise.
  • The conscious brain: being conscious about something seems to be related to large-scale “global” activation in the brain, including the parietal, prefrontal, temporal cortices along with structures such as the thalamus. Should we be surprised that such regions are largely activated when 1.000+ subjects are scanned while conscious?
  • Individual differences: yes, even large individual differences between subjects may – when you are testing 1.000+ people – provide the false impression of a general large-scale activation of the brain “in all people”

So I don’t buy it: I think we can trust the fMRI data we have thus far. There are many challenges in using these measures, and many studies fall prey to a lot of the validity, reliability and sanity checks one can (and should) apply. But the purported problem by Neuroskeptic is, IMO, misfiring.

-Thomas

Posted in blog, consciousness, modularity, neuroimaging, pseudoscience | No Comments »

DIY mobile EEG – real-time tracking in the store

Mar 9th, 2012 by tzramsoy

OK here goes. A brief time ago we recorded real-time EEG while a person walked and shopped in a grocery store. An abbreviated version of the movie can be seen here.

As you can see, besides the large frame showing what the person is oriented towards (although there is no eye-tracking) the smaller right hand frame displays a flurry of brain activation. Basically, this shows alpha-band activation, and the source localization is done by algorithms on a Nokia N900 smartphone.

The aim of this movie was a proof-of-concept approach. We were able to demonstrate that we can use this approach, we have sufficient signal for appropriate analysis, and at  the same time we made some nice public appearance in the Danish national broadcast company.

Now, the time is ready for more scrutinizing research, and through coming blog posts, I will let you in on this approach. Basically, although we were able to make cool brain signals in the store, there are still many important issues to be resolved, including:

  • finding a suitable set-up – this is probably the smalles of problems; one could compare different conditions (picking an object and putting it down again vs picking an object and putting it in the basket), or even states (women’s level of alpha band activation while in the grocery store vs the shoe store…)
  • minimizing noise – although much can be done with noise reduction algorithms, there is still a need for starting off with a stationary set-up with a higher degree of control over signals, and then move out of the lab
  • identifying neural predictors of …. (purchase, attention, memory, … fill in the blanks) – also done best first in the lab, and then moved into the mobile settings
  • being creative – the tool can be used for so much more than in-store decisions. Imaging using it at the museum, at the casino, when driving a car, for patients studies, at the trading floor….!!!!

-Thomas

Posted in decision making, neuroaesthetics, neuroeconomics, neuroenhancement, neuroethics, neuroimaging, neuromarketing | No Comments »

DIY mobile EEG – a serialized blog approach

Mar 7th, 2012 by tzramsoy

For a long time, I have wanted to expand my lab facilities to be able to record not only behavioural data at millisecond resolution, but also to expand with neuroimaging such as EEG. Although I am already doing neuroimaging using functional and structural MRI at the DRCMR, I have had an interest in trying other modalities such as the EEG. The EEG, despite it’s well-known lack of spatial resolution and mainly cortical focus, other factors are notable, including

  • a less artificial environment compared to fMRI and PET imaging
  • no noise, less intrusions on the subject
  • fewer constraints on experiment design, such as the need for several iterations of typified situations as used in fMRI
  • high temporal resolution
  • better integration with other modalities such as eye-tracking
  • recent advances in mobility that allows for studies with better ecological validity

Now, I’m expanding my lab facilities to include both high resolution eye-tracking and stationary/mobile EEG, and it’s on the cheap! In this blog post series, I will present the work we’re doing to employ these methods in the lab, as well as outside in the “real world”.

For starters, I have chosen to go with the Emotiv 14-channel system, purchasing the SDK version for $799. As a stand-alone product this seems to work very nicely for obtaining electrical signals, and has both metrics for signal value and accelerometers for head movements. We have now made two solutions for use of this equipment: one for stationary testing, which also includes eye-tracking, and one for mobile settings:

The stationary set-up

In close collaboration with iMotions, we have developed a nice interface for obtaining the EEG signals, through their Attention Tool®, and been part of developing this and other features for their Sensor Sync module. Through this module we’re not only able to integrate EEG but also any other suitable module that provides an SDK, so there will be more to come.

In out stationary set-up, we’re running a Tobii eye tracker and running the Attention Tool, which now has a nice integration of the EEG signal, as can be seen in the picture below:

Screen shot of Attention Tool® Setup with the Emotiv EEG integration (bottom middle).

As can be seen from the colour of the electrodes, the signal for the current session was not optimal

The mobile setup

For the mobile setup, we have acquired a Nokia N900, which our collaborators have integrated with the Emotiv system (see my prior blog post on this):

Mobile Emotiv setup: the Nokia N900, the Emotiv system, saline water and the electrode containment box

And here is how it looks when one of my graduate students, Dalia Bagdziunaite, wears the system and watches her own brain activation – yes mobile biofeedback it is!

Alpha band activation is projected on to a 3D brain model, here showing increased bilateral prefrontal activation.

What is still needed is a better mode of determining what subjects are looking at. One intermediate solution for us has been to obtain a pair of HD video glasses from SpyTech, which we are currently waiting for, and which will be integrated and synched with the Nokia setup. All solutions still at low cost. Right now, we will use this to grossly know what a person is looking at, but of course, we want to expand this with more sophisticated tools, such as Tobii’s new glasses.

So, in coming blog posts, I will describe some of the work, challenges and solutions we have for working with this system, and in which contexts we will be using it, including in-store purchase, gambling, art exhibits, psychiatric disorders, and neurofeedback.

-Thomas

Posted in multi-modal imaging, neuroaesthetics, neuroeconomics, neuroenhancement, neuroimaging, neuromarketing | No Comments »

Branding the brain – JCP article with a critical view and review

Jan 31st, 2012 by tzramsoy

For those of you interested in neuromarketing, neuroeconomics, consumer neuroscience, decision neuroscience (…) look here. TOgether with Hilke Plassmann and Milos Milosavljevic, I have an article in press at the Journal of Consumer Psychology, on the brain bases of branding.

In this piece, we have focused on the different steps in which brands make their impact on consumers’ brains and behaviours. We demonstrate how brands impact on the levels of attention, reward expectation and experience, and memory. We also provide a critical take on the different aspects of more commercial uses of neuroscience tools in marketing, and we provide some guidelines and future directions for this agenda.

If you want a preprint version of the article, please download it from here (PDF file). By clicking this link you confirm that you have asked me for a preprint copy. For the full version, please download it from the journal website (remember, they also need subscriptions to keep the wheels turning)

-Thomas

Posted in Our latest work, neuroeconomics, neuromarketing | No Comments »

Neuroscience Boot Camp

Jan 26th, 2012 by tzramsoy

Here’s something to become aware of (and for me to start blogging again J)

Neuroscience is increasingly relevant to a number of professions and academic disciplines beyond its traditional medical applications. Lawyers, educators, economists and businesspeople, as well as scholars of sociology, philosophy, applied ethics and policy, are incorporating the concepts and methods of neuroscience into their work. Indeed, for any field in which it is important to understand, predict or influence human behavior, neuroscience will play an increasing role. The Penn Neuroscience Boot Camp is designed to give participants a basic foundation in cognitive and affective neuroscience and to equip them to be informed consumers of neuroscience research.

Through a combination of lectures, break-out groups, panel discussions and laboratory visits, participants will gain an understanding of the methods of neuroscience and key findings on the cognitive and social-emotional functions of the brain, lifespan development and disorders of brain function.

Each lecture will be followed by extensive Q&A. Break-out groups will allow participants to delve more deeply into topics of relevance to their fields. Laboratory visits will include trips to an MRI scanner, an EEG/ERP lab, and a transcranial magnetic stimulation lab. Participants will also have access to an extensive online library of copyrighted materials, including classic and review articles and textbook chapters in cognitive and affective neuroscience.

-Thomas

Posted in Neurology, conference, neuroethics, neuroscience | No Comments »

Dwindling brain specialization with increasing age

Nov 10th, 2011 by tzramsoy

What happens in our brains as we get older? We probably all know what happens at the behavioral level. Most notable is the changes in memory, and the ability to couple information together. Remembering a name, or mixing names on people is a frequent effect. Forgetting what happened when and who did what are well-known memory problems of aging.

But what causes these problems? And are they caused at the stage of learning or retention? Or may the changes even occur during preparation or rehearsal?

In a study now in press in Neurobiology of Aging (download PDF copy here), we studied the effects of healthy aging on how the brain processes different kinds of visual information. Based on prior work showing that visual attention towards objects predominantly recruited regions of the medial temporal lobe (MTL), compared to attention towards positions, we tested whether this specialization would wither with increasing age.

Basically, we tested the level of brain specialization by comparing the BOLD fMRI signal directly between object processing and position processing. We looked at each MTL structure individually by analyzing the results in each individual brain (native space) rather than relying on spatial normalization of brains, which is known to induce random and systematic distortions in MTL structures (see here and here for PDF of conference presentations I’ve had on this).

Running the test with functional MRI, we found that several regions showed a change in specialization. During encoding, the right amygdala and parahippocampal cortex, and tentatively other surrounding MTL regions, showed such decreases in specialization.

During preparation and rehearsal, no changes reached significance.

However, during the stage of recognition, more or less the entire MTL region demonstrated detrimental changes with age. That is, with increasing age, those regions that tend to show a strong response to object processing compared to spatial processing, now dwindle in this effect. At higher ages, such as 75+, the ability of the brain to differentiate between object and spatial content is gone in many crucial MTL structures.

This suggests that at least one important change with increasing age is its ability to differentiate between different kinds of content. If your brain is unable to selectively focus on one kind of information (and possibly inhibit processing of other aspects of the information), then neither learning or memory can operate successfully.

One important feature of this study is that it provides a new means to study age-related disorders such as Alzheimer’s Disease. It is well known that this disorder initiates in the MTL region, most likely the trans-entorhinal region, and it does so long before the clinical symptoms of Alzheimers or even its predecessor, Mild Cognitive Impairment. Hence, the search for ways to assess changes in this region has become a growing field of interest. One possibility could be to employ the methods developed in this project to assess early functional and morphological changes in the MTL region, and possibly improve early detection of Alzheimer’s and related disorders.

Another interesting option would be to explore to what extent healthy aging is related to changes in everyday functions, such as shopping behavior, learning and remembering movie contents and other complex kinds of information.

-Thomas

Posted in Ageing, Our latest work, dementia, memory, modularity, neuroimaging | No Comments »

Mind-reading from brain scanning info?

Sep 23rd, 2011 by tzramsoy

In the sci-fi movie “Strange days“, Ralph Fiennes plays a petty pusher dealing with (illegal) recorded memories. The secret technology of this movie was based on so-called SQUIDs, making it possible to record any sensory input and even feeling and mood a person is in.

Today, I was alerted about the success of the work of Jack Gallant in reconstructing visual perception from brain images. The movie below displays the results.

Of course, these images are crude, but they nevertheless are a tell-tale sign of the future being brought much closer.

Here is the abstract from the paper presented in Current Biology:

Quantitative modeling of human brain activity can provide crucial insights about cortical representations [1,2] and can form the basis for brain decoding devices [3,4,5]. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have modeled brain activity elicited by static visual patterns and have reconstructed these patterns from brain activity [6,7,8]. However, blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signals measured via fMRI are very slow [9], so it has been difficult to model brain activity elicited by dynamic stimuli such as natural movies. Here we present a new motion-energy [10,11] encoding model that largely overcomes this limitation. The model describes fast visual information and slow hemodynamics by separate components. We recorded BOLD signals in occipitotemporal visual cortex of human subjects who watched natural movies and fit the model separately to individual voxels. Visualization of the fit models reveals how early visual areas represent the information in movies. To demonstrate the power of our approach, we also constructed a Bayesian decoder [8] by combining estimated encoding models with a sampled natural movie prior. The decoder provides remarkable reconstructions of the viewed movies. These results demonstrate that dynamic brain activity measured under naturalistic conditions can be decoded using current fMRI technology.

So what is next? Translating these images to one’s own cerebrum?

-Thomas

Posted in cosmetic neurology, neuroenhancement, neuroethics, neuroimaging, neuromarketing, neuroscience | No Comments »

Using the portable brain scanner in a shopping mall

Sep 22nd, 2011 by tzramsoy

This is it! We’re beginning our trials using the ultra-cool new tool developed by the Danish Technological University people.

Yesterday we started testing a single person walking around a shopping mall and buying things. First, from a planned purchase list, and then random and unplanned decisions.

At the same time, the session was filmed by the Danish National Broadcast company (Danmarks Radio), for a program on consumer choice.

The really interesting thing here is, of course, the different uses one can have for this. Although the really neat feature is that the data can be recorded and used for subsequent analyses, the really neat thing is that the same data can be streamed directly to a more powerful computer, analyzed and sent back to the smartphone within a fraction of a second. This then can be used for display purposes, or for more sophisticated uses, including alerting about inattention, risky decisions, emotional state or maybe drowsiness during driving?

The video below is from the DTU’s own lab.

-Thomas

Posted in brain connectivity, decision making, media coverage, neuroenhancement, neuroethics, neuroimaging, neuromarketing, neuroscience | No Comments »

Gustatory map revealed, and that’s all?

Sep 3rd, 2011 by tzramsoy

A recent news item tells us about a report that the gustatory system in mammals has been shown to have a “gustatory map”. Just in the same way that we already know that our visual and sensory-motor systems show nice and almost 1:1 mapping between sense and it’s neural representation.

It is groundbreaking work, as attested by the Science publications itself. It demonstrates clearly that even our taste system has a clear and distinct representation of different tastes. It could just as well be opposite. Taste could have been represented as different network configurations within basically the same network.

What strikes me most is the claim stated by Nicholas Ryba of the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, who was coauthor on the new study. He states in an interview:

“What is a taste, really? It’s the firing of a set of neurons in the brain, and that’s what we want to understand.”

I guess many researchers in psychology will see the shortcoming of this statement. It is a simplified claim of brain-mind relationships, and a reductionism one should handle with care. One clear shortcoming of this study is that it focuses on studying the organism – rats – from a systems neuroscience approach, paying no heed to the role of experience.

As any researcher of the mind knows, there is an explanatory gap between knowing how the brain works and to what extent any of the processes uncovered relate to overt sensory experience. Put differently, although our early visual system is neatly organised according to the visual space, this is not reflected in our experience of the world. We do not experience the world as spatially distributed pixels on a sheet. Rather, we experience the world around us as objects, context, movement etc.

Similarly, taste experience still needs to be explained. I am not sure that Ryba’s claim should be taken literary, but it reflects a notion seen every so often in the interpretation of neurobiology.

One pertinent next question, and a low hanging fruit, is to couple this to studies of preference and liking. In several studies one finds that contextual information can lead to alteration in people’s experience of a product. This includes coca-cola, wine and even art. Recently, a study suggested that subjects’ taste experiences were directly influenced by information: if told  that a ber contained drops of lemon, subjects would often report sensing the whiff of lemon.

The obvious question is now: at what level can one detect this change in taste? Here, at least two possibilities are available. On the one hand, it is possible that attentional mechanisms increase the effect of one particular sensation, e.g. sourness. On the other hand, it might be that these changes only at a higher representational level. Nevertheless, the current results provide hints pf new ways to study such effects, and to increase the likelihood that we may learn more about sensation, our pleasure of this, and how contextual cues can affect our experiences.

Thus, the recent finding of a gustatory map provides wonderful clues to the basic mechanisms of taste, but we still need to explain why the coffee I’m now drinking has such a distinct taste to me.

-Thomas

Posted in brain connectivity, consciousness, modularity, neuroaesthetics, neuroscience | No Comments »

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