"You must realize," I said, "that we've found the main nerve."

At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South Wing of the White House and leaps 50 feet down to the lawn ... pauses briefly to strangle the chow watchdog, then races off into the darkness...toward the Watergate, snarling with lust, loping through the alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue and trying desperately to remember which one of those 400 iron balconies is the one outside Martha Mitchell's apartment.

Ah...nightmares, nightmares. But I was only kidding. The President of the United States would never act that weird. At least not during football season.

That’s Hunter S. Thompson on Nixon (He Was a Crook, 2005).

I’ve been getting into Hunter S. Thompson recently. His brand of writing is refreshing. My mind has 2 reactions, the first is of rejection: If you read the above, it’s clear that Thompson was just looking at Nixon’s physical features, combining it with a prejudicial bias, and letting his imagination take over. And in a sense anyone can do that.

But Thompson’s work stands out with a brutal honesty. He took rational concepts and warped them with a part of the brain that’s not used to tackling them. Consider the following on the American Dream:

"Nonsense," I said. "We came out here to find the American Dream, and now that we're right in the vortex you want to quit." I grabbed his bicep and squeezed. "You must realize," I said, "that we've found the main nerve."

"I know," he said. "That's what gives me the Fear."

The ether was wearing off, the acid was long gone, but the mescaline was running strong. We were sitting at a small round gold formica table, moving in orbit around the bartender.

"Look over there," I said. "Two women fucking a polar bear." (Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, 1971).

You might have a different opinion about the American Dream, but how are you supposed to respond to that?

The problem is that we’ve all become so used to arguing with the rational part of our brain that we rarely take the time to consider our first impressions. Of course first impressions rarely provide the answer, but overbearing rationality can have just as dire consequences.

A similar thing might occur in scientific paradigm-shifts. The ancient Greek astronomer Ptolemy, for instance, set up his model of the universe such that all the planets were rotating around the earth. For centuries, this was the prevailing system. Similar to any astronomer without advanced equipment, he built his system off of geometric proofs, resting on axioms, and accounting for what could readily be observed in the sky. His volumes of work, at the outset, are only mildly complicated, but as he accounted for more phenomena, things got uglier. He created epi-cycles - cycles of cycles - based off of certain stars and alignments; and then he brought in epi-epi-cycles; and then he brought in equalizers in order to represent the ratios of various epi-cycles to each other; and then the equalizers arbitrarily applied in some situations and not in others. The pages in his work go on and on to no end, as the proofs get longer and longer to tackle less important phenomena. You can get lost intellectualizing the world, but it didn’t take a genius (or maybe it did) to see that his system of the heavenly bodies was surprisingly complicated, tedious and ugly. The model was corrected, of course, after Copernicus suggested that the sun was in the middle of the universe, if only because it created a system about one-tenth as arduous as Ptolemy’s. Copernicus has since been credited with kick-starting the Renaissance by suggesting that natural phenomena, in more ways than one, don't revolve around the human mind.

But the point is that the rational parts of people’s minds can lead them just as far astray – if not further - as the irrational parts. Nietzsche attributed this to the artificial power of objectivity. When an argument is cloaked in rationality and objectivity, it’s given an air of superiority which is often undeserved.

Perhaps the largest blow to the purely “rational” approach came from Godel who proved the inherent fallibility in purely logical systems, and he achieved this nonetheless by building his own purely logical system as well. Although a few modern authors have capitalized on Godel’s message and updated it for modern times (particularly Douglas Hofstadter, in his book Godel Escher Bach) it has yet to fully be incorporated into much of empirical research – be it in medicine, economics, psychology, or social science – where theories live or die in accordance to how they align with purely mathematical models, particularly the generalized linear model. The concern, just as with Ptolemy, is that even if a model is comprehensive and internally consistent (or non-contradictory), it can still have no correspondence with reality whatsoever.



Sometimes rationality is achieved at the expense of reality. Economist Mark Skousen, for instance, claims that theoretical models of the marcoeconomy have likely done more harm than good for the national economy.

The problem with Nietzsche however was that he took his ideas too extreme and – as is common with the human mind – painted the world in black and white; it came to the point where he was almost building his own objective model based on his criticisms of the nature of such models. His criticisms of other systems seemed somehow to not apply to his own.

Hunter S. Thompson in contrast wrote with a humility that suggested that he didn’t have any of the answers, but instead was simply a crazed observer who couldn’t shut his eyes:

But what was the story? Nobody had bothered to say. So we would have to drum it up on our own. Free Enterprise. The American Dream. Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas. Do it now: pure Gonzo journalism. (Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, 1971).

Most of all Thompson saw that at the bottom of all of his subjectivity and irrationality taken to the nth degree wasn’t a new vision of the world, but simply chaos and self-destruction. He portrayed this rather well in his criticism of Timothy Leary and the whole hippie movement, all of whom were convinced that their new-found notions of free love and a world without boundaries somehow argued for a harmonious peaceful vision of the world.

Anyone who has experienced hallucinogenics I think can attest to the falseness of Leary’s vision: When you break down the barriers to reality you come across a dissonant chaos at the center of all things, equal parts innocent, joyful, revelatory, and frightening. You see just how fine-tuned the human mind - in its normal state - needs to be in order to make any sense of the world whatsoever. The hippie movement was as optimistic as Nietzsche was pessimistic, but broth broke down on the same accord. Wrote Thompson:

What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create...a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody-or at least some force-is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.

This is the same cruel and paradoxically benevolent bullshit that has kept the Catholic Church going for so many centuries. It is also the military ethic...a blind faith in some higher and wiser "authority." The Pope, The General, The Prime Minister...all the way up to "God."

One of the crucial moments of the Sixties came on that day when the Beatles cast their lot with the Maharishi. It was like Dylan going to the Vatican to kiss the Pope's ring. (Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, 1971)

What we can get from all this isn’t so much yet another model for how the world works, but it maybe just as important. It hints at a sense of humility and awe necessary to make any sense of the world – at just how disconnected our rational minds may be from it, and how we need to keep in mind that the further we depart down the path of abstract theory the more we have to ensure that our feet are planted just as firmly on the ground.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance):

Photo: (1) Nixon?, 01/19/2006, by Michelle Aquila; (2) Hunter S. Thompson, 05/13/2007, billypalooza; (3) Bat Country, 07/15/2006, by Aaron Booth; (4) Portrait of Ptolemy; (5) Ptolemy's cycles; (6) Buy the ticket. Take the ride., 04/25/2008, by Ratticus; (7) Timothy Leary; apathy's hunter s thompson, 12/21/2008, Zen Sutherland..

Video: (1) Music video, from afiendishthingy, of the song "A Day in the Life", by The BeatlesSgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band. from their 1967 album Sphere: Related Content

fMRI: The Argument of Authority

Science in America has replaced religion. Not in all aspects – science will never be held in people’s hearts like religion, but the two tread on the same ground, by some arguments they stab at the same questions. Both are paradigms for explanation, and they’re competing for space - science’s gains in status speak more to scientific progress than to religious decline. In a funny way though, science’s rise in power has inherited it some of religion’s warts. Science in America has adopted an air of superiority and objectivity, which for centuries was reserved for Christianity. The curious rise in the use of fMRI – functional magnetic resonance imaging, used to tap brain activity - is an interesting example of this. It’s a scientific technique that may have more objectivity and authority than substance.

The argument of authority is the weakest argument of all. This is a stance put forward by St. Thomas Aquinas (who, ironically, was rather authoritative himself). As the Church’s authority changed and grew with the times, this became a common criticism of doctrine. Nietzsche, though, first revealed authority - or at least, how authority was perceived by the masses - for what it really was: a power grab.

His line of thought was that people are going to declare whatever they want to declare and they’re going to use any means to do so. The largest historical example of this is the Church – who go so far as to claim backing by the word of God in order to hold captive the public.
But Nietzsche didn’t stop there. He damned objectivity as part of the same game. This is theology, this is bodies and bodies of literature using the bible to form public opinion. Authority and objectivity have a synergistic effect, and this is what kept the Church in place. In 397 AD St. Augustine wrote The Confessions and in 1227 St. Thomas Aquinas wrote The Summa Theologica. In the 800 years in between, there weren’t really any other intellectual breakthroughs in the Western world. This worked.

Democracy heralded a new age of decentralization in the West. People not only stopped trusting authority, they were smarter. Smarter in an academic sense. More intellectual, more opinionated, individualistic, they felt their voice should be heard because it deserved to be heard. The academic sphere – which used to center around religion and authority – now focuses more on objectivity. With an air of objectivity, it is earier to win over the modern mind. Modern day science holds a similar role - in power and policy - as religion used to, but it’s traded a bit of authority for some more objectivity: The latter is built on the pillars of the scientific method and peer review; while authority still persists in premier research institutions and "Ivory Towers", but overall the value of authority is still sinking. Here, though, Nietzsche still stands: Objectivity, yes, but objectivity for what?

Moving onto fMRI's, this post was largely sparked by a presentation I saw about neuroimmaging by Robert Poldrack. He’s documented his skepticism behind the widespread use of fMRI. On the surface, the technology, as used in most research, is simple enough: Participants do activities while their hemodynamic responses from different brain areas are measured. This gives us pretty images like this:The results are the changes in brain activity across tasks that have been carefully selected by scientests. The tasks involve turning on/off a certain thoughts or stimuli (e.g., viewing a shape versus a piece of art). Empirical results from fMRI studies are centered around very simplified and controlled changes in the lab and corresponding changes in brain activity. That’s it.

Poldrack raises the point that fMRI images are very sensitive and they’re very nonspecific. In other words, your brain lights up from almost any activity, and the areas that light up aren’t always specific to the activity you’re doing. You could be pondering the world or having sex, a lot of the same areas of your brain will light up. This becomes a problem when scientific studies pinpoint areas of the brain that are tied to some distinct activity and/or use fMRI to distinguish between two populations.

For the better or worst, these sorts of studies can't simply look at the whole brain. In the world of science, it’s preferred to keep studies limited in scope, and this particularly applies to brain imaging. Too much data is hard to interpret, and in technical terms it’s…a mess. Unfocused studies have a higher chance of finding spurious results. This has a statistical explanation, but really it’s just that if you look at tons of stuff, you’re bound to find stuff that appears interesting, on an empirical level, but is actually just occurring by chance. This gets worse though with fMRI’s, because they spit out millions of pixels, each of which is a data point that is analyzed. As technology makes fMRI’s more resolute, they give out even more data, increasing the chances of finding a mess on your hands.

As participants do the required experimental actions, researchers focus on distinctive parts of the brain. When that part of the brain lights up across their sample, the authors attribute whatever action they have the participant do to that part of the brain. It seems reasonable, and that's often why you always hear about the executive part of the brain, the emotional part, etc. But the issue of high sensitivity and low specificity calls most of that logic into question: Due to high sensitivity, those areas in the brain might have lighten up in response to any other task; and due to non-specificity, many other areas of the brain likely respond to that activity as well.
An example: Poldrack brought up an area of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex, often summarized as the decision making part of the brain. However, this area lights up from so many other tasks: reading fake words versus real ones, pushing your tongue against the roof of your mouth versus resting it, viewing certain patterns versus letters, and doing simple versus complex memory tasks, to name a few. Nonetheless, whenever researchers find that this area lights up, they'll specifically attribute it to their experimental task. This sort "reverse inference", as Poldrack calls it, runs rampant in the field.

Everything gets messier when comparing different people. (You might remember the recent news item that Democrats think with different parts of their brains than Republicans.) Inevitably, many fMRI studies do this, but things get tricky with the introduction of a new demographic or person-based variable.

For example, a study might compare responses to certain stimuli - say, threatening versus neutral stimuli - in anxious versus normal people. So they’re dealing with two versuses: The first – based on the task – produces those sensitive and non-specific responses in the brain; and the second – the person-centered comparison – brings into the equation differences between people, which is a complex area in its own right.

One pitfall (of many) in this common experimental design: Different clinical conditions are related to different amounts of baseline brain activity. Going back to our example, this is likely the case in anxiety, which is a state of hyper-vigilance. So the noise of the anxious person’s brain is already turned up. This leaves less room for their brain to respond to tasks (causing a ceiling effect). Studies in fact often conclude that clinical groups are less responsive to changes in stimuli, because a specific brain area lit up less in response to a certain activity in clinical populations than in normal ones. Again though, this might be due to differences in resting brain activity. Or it might be due to non-theoretical differences between the populations - for example, anxiety tends to be higher among women or in insomniacs. Or it might be due to non-theoretical differences in responses to the stimuli that the researchers used (e.g., the color of a certain card) which were picked up in the sensitive brain reading. In other words, it's easily possible that such a typical study isn't teaching us much about anxiety or the brain.

I apologize for the long and technical discussion of fMRI, but the resulting situation is rather interesting, albeit not because of what it teaches you about the brain. Imagine if every question you could ask about the brain were answered in the positive, regardless of the true answer. That’s much like this field.

Since every study finds what it wanted to, you get this mishmash of absurdly complicated theories about neural correlates, brain circuits, specific activities linked to specific areas of the brain. It reminds me of reading theology, where I'd have to step back and ask myself whether the sheer complexity of the subject matter ever matched its underlying content. Every research question is answered with a yes, and consequentially it's said to deserve further research, which means even more finely detailed study. You end up getting these very complicated theories about how specific activities affect very specific brain areas in different types of people. The word complex is used very often even within scientific circles to summarize these theories. (There’s even a blog called The Neurotic completely devoted to unveiling society’s brain-imaging-based misconceptions.)

Not that all of science is going to hell in a hand basket. There’s no mistaking true scientific advancement for anything but – and we’ve been a fortunate and smart enough society to have experienced much of it. Likewise, despite Nietzsche’s musing about the church and power, there’s a true underlying glow of religion which fits the human soul so perfectly and like a key. But inevitably there are ways to exploit any man-made system, and fMRI’s maybe a unique example of this exploitation in science. They provide a veil of objectivity necessary for academic clout, justification for future grants – in a word, power.


-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo (1) The Majesty of Law, statue on Independence Avenue Washington, DC, 09/19/2008, by Kimberly Faye; (2) Portrait of Fredrich Nietzsche (1844-1900); (3) Christianity, 08/29/2007, by OdedG; (4) Triumph of Christianity, by Tommaso Laureti (1530-1602), Sala di Costantino, Vatican Palace (5) Stained Glass Tower of Ivory, window in St. Ignatius Church, Chestnut Hill, MA, 05/17/2006, by John Workman; (6) fMRI, 03/08/2004, by Washington Irving; (7) Varian4T, fMRI scanner from Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at University of California Berkley; (8) Artistic Mess Cormacphelan; (9) Anterior Cingulate Cortex; (10) Activation of Brain Region Predicts Autism, Scott Huettel, Duke University Photography Jim Wallace; (11) Hawkan Lau by Dr. Pat, 07/18/2005; (12) Nietzsche's Will to Power - Bar, 05/01/2008, by Sharon Hagenbeek

Video (1) some of them were superstitious, AlGorey91's channel, music by the band Midlake, from the album Bamnan and Silvercork, released 07/06/2004 Sphere: Related Content