Brains!

 

Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results, 2010. 1(1):1-5

Unless you are a dualist who believes that consciousness exists apart from the body it will come as no shock that brains are a necessary part of human (and salmon) psychology.

However, there are some issues around what we ought to, and ought not to, say on the basis of techniques such as fMRI (Functional magnetic resonance imaging)

The first point is this is a graph, not a direct image of the brain.

The technique, as explained in the Wiki article, is to compare blood flow across time.

In the case of the graph above the dead salmon was exposed to pictures of human individuals in social situations with a specified emotional valence, either socially inclusive or socially exclusive. The salmon was asked to determine which emotion the individual  in the photo must have been experiencing.

The brain activation graph shows the difference in activation, as detected by fMRI when the dead salmon was exposed to the two types of picture.

Except of course the salmon was dead, the researchers bought it at a supermarket, and unless we have thoroughly misunderstood the difference between dead and alive there was no blood flow.

Which leads to the second point, the need for adjustment for multiple comparisons.

The anomalous graph is caused because there is no (or inadequate) adjustment made to the null hypothesis statistical tests used to 'detect' the difference given the (large) number of multiple comparisons being made.

This issue is so well documented at this point that any researcher who publishes research based on fMRI data who has failed to do appropriate adjustments for multiple comparisons ought to be seen as fraudulent. Although that may not have been as apparent in the early years of this century, and there is a technical argument about the correct way of doing these adjustments for multiple comparison.

So there we have the basics, however seductive it is to think we are looking at something akin to an X-ray of brain activation we are actually looking at a graph. Beware of any research which does not robustly adjust for multiple comparisons.

Just because it appears in brain imaging it doesn't mean it is just a biological phenomena

In the next post I will address some of the issues around the philosophy of what I am discussing, and thereafter will post something more concrete about the relationships between brains, bodies and the environment for human psychology. For right now hold on to the idea (unless you are a substance dualist) that anything that happens in the mind also happens in the brain.

So if I have learnt to fear dentistry, which I have, then that fear of dentists is materially represented in my body and brain. That is not the same as saying that my fear of dentistry is caused by my biology.

This blog post by Neurocritic illustrates the problems of inadequate reporting of research to make it sound like once a psychological issue can be 'brain scanned' it is biological and open to straightforward intervention with drug therapies. However, it is not only the reporting that is at fault here, it also appears to be a default position of at least some psychology and neuroscience authors that the 'brain scan' (graph of difference in blood flow) shows a biological reality for psychological phenomena.

Beware of the dichotomy that biological is real, not biological is false (or constructed).

This is a particular issue in sex and gender research, where if a graph of difference in blood flow can be   shown for men and women then that particular difference is seen as biological in origin. Despite the possibility that the differences between men and women, for a particular difference, can be at least as plausibly be explained by social process.

Just showing a graph of differences in blood flow in the brains of two categories of people does not equal an explanation of the differences between those categories of people.