When a loved one or a friend has been diagnosed with a brain
disorder, we want to learn more about what’s going on, and often the first
place checked for that information is the Web. But that’s not the necessarily
the best reference; in our new book, Treating the Brain: What the Best Doctors
Know, you’ll get direct access to Walter G. Bradley, the “doctor’s doctor.”
In the book, Bradley outlines in clear and accessible
language the diagnosis, prognosis and treatment options for all of the most
common neurological disorders. His expertise in these areas is well-known; not
only does he have more than 40 years of experience, but he is also the current
and founding editor of the leading neurology reference for medical
practitioners and students, Neurology in Clinical Practice.
Recently, Bradley was a guest speaker at the Miami Book Fair International, one of
the country’s leading literary events. In this engaging discussion, seen in the videos below, Bradley offers
advice to patients and their loved ones coping with neurological disease and
offers new information on conditions such as stroke, epilepsy, memory and
Alzheimer’s.
Synesthesia is a phenomenon in which people’s senses seem to be crossed. Some people with the condition can feel tastes or see sounds; others taste voices (think of the opposite of anesthesia, literally “no senses”). Neurologist Richard Cytowic has studied such people for more than three decades, starting with a man in the rare latter category.
“Some people are born with two or more senses hooked together,” Cytowic told an audience of around 120 people at the Library of Congress on Oct. 30. For example, for the first synesthete he studied, some flavors “were more than a mouthful.”
Synesthesia experts estimate that one in 23 people has some form of this involuntary sense-mixing. Some scientists working with infants theorize that all babies are born synesthetic but lose the trait at around three months, when their sense networks start to firm up.
In 1979, when he was a young researcher, Cytowic said, no one had heard of synesthesia, and if they had they thought it wasn’t real. But he was hooked—“it interested me to explain a subjective experience that seems impossible to prove.”
He and others eventually did prove it, through well-designed experiments and a mass of data from people who started calling and writing to describe their experiences. Now “a new generation in 15 countries” studies the trait, from its individualistic expression in behavior to its possible molecular and genetic components.
“Five groups around the world are working on analyzing for the synesthesia gene,” he said. Researchers currently think the trait is genetic (“hyperconnectivity between disparate brain systems”) but requires early exposure to over-learned groupings. For example, many synesthetes see colors or shapes related to such sequences as days of the week, calendars and other common number forms, including music. (Are you synesthetic? Take a computer-based test at http://www.synesthete.org/.)
Cytowic played two short films to help illustrate the ability. The first paired Chopin’s Valse Brillante with a moving pattern of dashes of color changing in time with the music. The second, a short film by Terri Timely seen below, cleverly captures the idea of living with many forms of synesthesia, Cytowic said. One difference, though, is that instead of the discrete objects such as cats seen in the video, synesthetes are more likely to see general shapes or colors.
Crossing sense pathways can run in families and seems to be more common in artistically creative people, Cytowic said. Examples include writers Douglas Coupland and Vladimir Nabokov (and his family); artists David Hockney and Wassily Kandinsky; musicians Olivier Messiaen, Itzak Perlman and Billy Joel; and performer Marilyn Monroe. Stevie Wonder also has a form of sound-color synesthesia. “Synesthesia is very common in blind people because you don’t need your eyes to see—you see with your brain,” Cytowic said.
Their experiences are not always positive, though. One audience member described herself as a mild sound-taste synesthete and her son a stronger one. One year at school, she said, her son found that his new teacher’s voice “brought a bad taste to his mouth” to such an extent that she had to arrange to move him to a new classroom, “and it was ridiculously difficult. Nobody believed it” when he kept saying “her voice makes me sick.”
Sometimes it’s a synesthete’s friends and family who need to close their eyes. Cytowic told of a taste-color synesthete who had to wait until his wife was out of town to eat a favorite, “very blue,” dish: baked chicken Alaska drenched in orange juice and topped with ice cream.
“Synesthetes have taught us that cross-talk is the rule, not the exception,” Cytowik said. “Minds that work differently are not that different at all, and we can learn from them.”
Ever since the Food and
Drug Administration approved deep brain stimulation (DBS) treatment for
Parkinson’s disease in 2002 and dystonia in 2003, the media have closely followed
the challenges and promise that this revolutionary technology has brought to
patients around the world.
DBS involves major brain
surgery, and as the article shows, it doesn’t always produce dramatic
improvements. But as a result of pioneering work by Dana Alliance members, among
others, DBS now offers hope to patients with movement disorders who have no
other treatment options—and has shown promise for several other devastating
brain disorders. The renowned work of Mahlon DeLong,
M.D., on the basal ganglia paved the way for
modern DBS therapy for Parkinson’s and other movement disorders. The research
of Helen
Mayberg, M.D., has made DBS an experimental therapy for patients with severe depression whose symptoms are not
alleviated by conventional therapies.
Even in this information age, people dealing with often-serious neurological problems face the daunting task of finding accurate, credible and understandable information—the essential medical fact. Using case histories as examples, Dr. Bradley, one of the world’s leading neurologists, explains the neurological examinations, tests, clinical features, causes and treatments available for Alzheimer’s disease, migraines, stroke, epilepsy, Parkinson’s and other frequently diagnosed neurological disorders.
Known by medical students and physicians across the globe as the editor of the leading neurology textbook, Neurology in Clinical Practice, Dr. Bradley now provides a definitive resource for patients, caregivers and other health practitioners. Treating the Brain is for anyone who has ever had a neurological symptom, from a headache to tingling hands, and for anyone with a personal interest in how the brain works in health and disease.
Requests for this book are due by July 24; we will mail an advance reading edition by July 29 and seek your reviews by August 21. Stay tuned as more books become available later this year.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a brain scan might well be worth far more, in terms of publicity, professional renown and even product sales. In particular, functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, whose output is often digitized into splashy, colorful brain-scan pictures, has captured the hearts of both researchers and the public, both sometimes seemingly without careful consideration. News stories (and the occasional research paper) now routinely announce the discovery of the brain region for X, where X can be pretty much anything from morality to lust to lapses in judgment.
No doubt, fMRI is a revolutionary technique. Though so far it has not been of much use in the clinic, it is one of few tools that allow real-time observation of how the brain changes in healthy people, making possible many studies previously relegated to wishful thinking.
But just because something lets us study the imagination doesn’t make it immune to our own flights of imagination. FMRI is useful but imperfect, its current results more suggestive than explanatory. Cataloging and detailing its flaws are vital, because fMRI is increasingly being recruited, sometimes with great recklessness, as a technological clairvoyant. At least two companies have formed to conduct fMRI-based lie detection; marketing companies use it to attempt to perceive consumer behavior—and some people are even considering a role for it in matchmaking and marriage counseling.
But these images are not real, they are representation; MRI machines spit out numbers, and the subsequent pictures are graphical estimations created after those data have been parsed, analyzed and cleaned up (the process has been the topic of a major recent controversy in neuroscience). The numbers themselves are also a proxy, since they measure blood flow as a sign of brain activity instead of measuring the activity itself. The blood response takes up to 15 seconds, far slower than many of the thought processes being studied. And for a research participant, being in an MRI machine is unpleasant; it’s small enough that it can induce claustrophobia, and moving your head even a bit can throw off the results. How genuine results from such an alien environment can be is debatable.
As Russell A. Poldrack points out in a new Cerebrum article, there are other limitations, too. These types of imaging studies usually use small numbers of test subjects, and results often have not been verified by other research groups. They measure group averages, leaving their usefulness for individuals in doubt.
Saying there is a brain region for something is inevitably an oversimplification, since much of the brain is always active and every brain process involves disparate regions. Some brain regions activate to shut down activity in other regions, making interpretation of the data trickier.
Yes, fMRI scans have potential, he says, especially for lending some much-needed quantitative rigor to our understanding and diagnosis of psychiatric disorders. But we’re not there yet, he adds, and understanding precisely why is vital to keeping expectations reasonable and ensuring that we are savvy enough to assess the research and marketing claims we encounter.
Guest blogger: At the recent Learning and the Brain Conference in Washington D.C.,Nancy C. Andreasen, M.D., Ph.D., discussed the importance of providing students with a “liberal education” that combines the study the arts and the sciences. She asked: How important are the arts for optimal development of the mind and brain? How important are the sciences? And how important is it to integrate both in our educational programs?
Concerns have been raised about the failure to integrate education in the arts and sciences for many years. In the 1950s the British writer C. P. Snow expressed concern about overspecialization and the creation of “Two Cultures,” producing a situation in which educated people from diverse backgrounds in the arts and sciences could no longer communicate with one another: “This is serious for our creative, intellectual, and above all, our normal life.” More recently E. O. Wilson addressed the issue again, in his book Consilience, arguing that consilience is a groundwork of explanation that crosses all branches of learning; he believed that in an ideal world knowledge should be unified across the humanities and the sciences.
The arbitrary division of domains of knowledge and the quest for specialization is a relatively recent phenomenon. During the Renaissance, one of the great eras of exuberant creativity, people did not divide the world into art and science. Instead they saw them as a seamless continuum. Michelangelo was a sculptor, architect, painter, engineer, poet and anatomist. Leonardo was an inventor, painter, engineer, sculptor and anatomist. Great naturalists, such as Charles Darwin, made discoveries that we call “science” while trying to understand the beauty and order of the natural world. As one great naturalist, Konrad Lorenz, has said, “He who has seen the intimate beauty of nature must become either a poet or a naturalist and, if his eyes are good enough and his powers of observation sharp enough, he may well become both.” To the extent that our current educational system fails to integrate art and science, it fails in an important aspect of nurturing creativity in young people.
What is the nature of the creative process? Many introspective accounts from individuals as diverse as Mozart or Poincaré or Coleridge share a common theme. Creative ideas, insights and solutions tend to occur rapidly and spontaneously, as sudden flashes of insight, although they may be preceded by an incubation phase. They are most likely to arise while a person is daydreaming or relaxing or engaging in “free association”—a state called REST (Random Episodic Silent Thought) or the “default state” in imaging research studies. During this state, regions of the association cortex are especially active, reflecting the fact that mental connections are being tossed around chaotically—until an original idea sometimes emerges. This process reflects the highly complex nature of brain organization. The brain is able to spontaneously generate novel ideas and content because it can function as a self-organizing system (a concept from “chaos theory”), a system in which components spontaneously organize to produce something new in a nonlinear, dynamic and unpredictable way.
In the Iowa Study of Creative Genius, highly creative people from both the arts and the sciences are currently being studied using neuroimaging tools, personality and cognitive tests, and structured interviews. Although the study is still in its early stages, imaging findings suggest that artists and scientists share similar brain activity during tasks chosen to stimulate the association cortex—thereby perhaps demonstrating scientifically that the arts and the sciences are indeed a unity.
Perhaps you are one of those who proudly don a “lucky” sock or hat and perform a pregame ritual before heading off to the sports field. And, if that’s the case, perhaps you’ve noticed an occasional glare or snicker from a bystander or nonbeliever. Well, brain science has something to say about why people believe in superstitions and curses, and you’ll find it in Your Brain on Cubs: Inside the Heads of Players and Fans. Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 4, “Curses!” by Tom Valeo and Lindsay Beyerstein:
As humans, we are constantly looking for causes to explain the effects we see in the world, and superstitious beliefs may result in from misperceiving these cause-and-effect relationships. A player who hits well may decide that his new socks had something to do with his performance and wear them in every game. …
Moreover, the brain cannot handle random patterns. We see shapes in the clouds and notice rocks look like faces or outlines of states. Likewise, because of our stubborn tendency to see outcomes as being connected to the events that precede them, we have a hard time accepting that sequential events are not causally related. Our brains are designed to learn from experience, with memories divided into fragments so we can retrieve the appropriate piece and apply it to a situation at hand. Such memory retrieval might be quite sensible. A batter with a two-strike count against a particular pitcher may recall that in the same situation three weeks ago, the pitcher threw a curveball and struck him out. However, it also makes it easy for the brain to cook up ridiculous reasoning: The last time this team made the World Series, a man and his billy goat were ejected from the stadium and supposedly placed a curse on the team—and that explains the decades that have passed without another World Series appearance. …
Also, subscribe to the Dana Podcasts series and checkout “Baseball and the Brain,” featuring former Giant baseball great Bobby Thomson and Your Brain on Cubs,contributors Hillary R. Rodman, Ph.D., Emory University, and Jordan Grafman, Ph.D., National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Dan Gordon, the book’s editor, moderates the conversation.
(from Chapter 2: Seeing, Smelling, Feeling—Heat and Cold: As Much in the Mind as on the Skin)
Human reactions to heat and cold, Shakespeare suggests, may involve states of mind as much as changes in temperature. Just before its violent climax, Hamlet offers a final comic scene. Hamlet is conversing with his friend Horatio when they are interrupted by the courier Osric. Hamlet wants to embarrass Osric and to reinforce the prevailing notion that he himself has gone mad. Hamlet thus shifts unpredictably in talking about the weather, insisting that he feels too hot or too cold. Osric tries to agree with both positions, proving himself a sycophantic fool.
Osric: Sweet Lord, if your lordship were at leisure, I should impart a thing to you from his Majesty.
Hamlet: I will receive it, sir, with all diligence of spirit. Your bonnet to his right use: ’tis for the head.
Osric: I think you lordship, it is very hot.
Hamlet: No, believe me, ’tis very cold, the wind is northerly.
Osric: It is indifferent cold, my lord, indeed.
Hamlet: But yet methinks it is very sultry and hot for my complexion.
Osric: Exceedingly, my lord, it is very sultry—as ’twere—I cannot tell how. My lord, his Majesty bade me signify to you that he has laid a great wager on your head. Sir, this is the matter—
Hamlet: [signing to him to put on his hat] I beseech you remember—
Osric: Nay, good my lord, for my ease, in good faith. Sir, here is newly come to court Laertes—believe me, an absolute gentleman, full of most excellent differences, of very soft society and great showing. Indeed, to speak feelingly of him, he is the card or calendar of gentry; for you shall find in him the continent of what part a gentleman would see. [Hamlet, 5.2]
...The body is able to distinguish a wide variety of sensation, including most particularly those of temperature, touch, joint position and vibration, because the different receptors in the skin are sensitive to distinct types of stimuli. Signals from these receptors are arranged in separate, parallel circuits that run to the brain. The circuits are built up from the axons (the nerve fibers that make up the wiring for the central nervous system) having different sizes and varying abilities to conduct signals.
For example, the axons carrying temperature sensations are very thin and conduct signals particularly slowly (that is why there a detectable delay between putting a foot in an overly hot bath and withdrawing it in pain). In contrast, the axons that carry information about the position of our joints are thicker and conduct signals quickly, allowing us to make split-second adjustments of position and balance as we walk or meet the unpredictable bounce of a tennis ball with our racket.
If you would like to read more about Shakespeare’s interest in the human mind and its parallels in the world of brain science, we’re offering a 30 percent discount on TheBard on the Brain. Visit www.press.uchicago.edu/directmail/ or call 773-702-7000; to receive the discount, refer to promotional code AD9191. Shipping and handling ($5 for the first book and $1 for each additional book) and appropriate sales tax will be added. This offer is valid through May 15, 2009. (Sales tax: IL residents add 10.25 percent, IN residents add 6 percent, CA residents add applicable local sales tax.)
Here in Dana Press’s production/design department, we often find ourselves ahead of reality. Brain Awareness Week (BAW) wrapped up recently, and by all accounts it was a great success, but for me, it concluded weeks ago. Because I’m in the design department, most of my work for BAW was finished back in December and January. The postcards, pamphlets, posters and mailings had to be designed and laid out and printed and bound and packed and shipped well in advance of the event.
While most of you find yourselves closing out March 2009, we in the design department are well into the end of August, when our next book, The Hourglass of Life by Nobel Prize laureate Rita Levi-Montalcini, hits the streets. We’ve already designed the cover, with text design on the horizon. Soon we’ll begin layout, all with an eye to making a delivery date five months hence.
We’re also well into 2010 with some other projects. Though Cerebrum 2009 released just this week, we’re deep in the planning stages for Cerebrum 2010, which means we’re already thinking about what we’re going to be doing in November and December. Our holidays are already planned, and when the real Thanksgiving rolls around, it will almost feel like our second crack at it.
It can get confusing, juggling real time and the future-that-might-be. But we do the best we can.
In November Dana Press published Try to Remember: Psychiatry’s Clash over Meaning, Memory, and Mind, by Paul McHugh. In this timely book, McHugh—driven by his lifelong commitment to ridding psychiatry of unscientific practices—discusses the “recovered memory” scandal of the 1990s. And he dedicates an entire chapter to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the “traumatologists” (therapists and psychiatrists searching for hidden memories) who “pass over crucial distinctions in their patients, exaggerate the role of trauma in their lives, and greatly complicate their care.”
As soldiers return from military service in Iraq and Afghanistan and others seek help from an ever growing number of therapists and psychiatrists, it’s important for the public to understand why the increasing diagnoses of PTSD are controversial. Because they are not made using evidence-based medicine, McHugh argues, such verdicts can cause more harm than good to patients and families.
For more information on Try to Remember, including McHugh’s interview on “CBS Sunday Morning”; a Webcast discussion of Try to Remember featuring Johns Hopkins psychiatrists Kay Redfield Jamison and J. Raymond DePaulo Jr.; and excerpts and order information, visit our book page.
At Dana Press, we are committed to providing books for general audiences that explore cutting-edge advances in neuroscience or that examine “tough” questions about the ethical risks that often accompany new developments in the field. With that in mind, we are excited to announce the publication of our newest book, Deep Brain Stimulation: A New Treatment Shows Promise in the Most Difficult Cases, by award-winning science writer Jamie Talan. Well-known scientists and best-selling authors, such as Joseph Ledoux and Mehmet Oz, have responded favorably—read their comments and more information on the book.
If you’re wondering, Deep Brain Stimulation is for you too, not just professional researchers and writers. What is deep brain stimulation? Who are good candidates for the treatment? What are the benefits and risks of a technique that requires brain surgery? What technological innovations lead to this novel treatment? With compelling profiles of both patients and the doctors and scientists who pursue this pioneering research, you’ll find answers to these and much more in Deep Brain Stimulation.
Finally, because you are reading this blog, we’d like to offer you a special 30% discount. Normally the book is $25, but if you visit the Deep Brain Stimulation ordering page or call 773-702-7000, and refer to promotional code AD9146, you can have the book for just $17.50. Shipping and handling is $5 for the first book and $1 for each additional copy, and appropriate sales tax will be added. Offer valid through May 15, 2009.
Two days after Christmas, and a little more than a month before his 23rd birthday, young Charles Darwin boarded the H.M.S. Beagle for its second voyage.
The first had resulted in a rough hydrological survey of several islands off the coast of South America, and for the second Captain Robert FitzRoy, hoping to waste no opportunity to gather information about the unstudied lands, proposed that “some well-educated and scientific person should be sought for who would willingly share such accommodations as I had to offer, in order to profit by the opportunity of visiting distant countries yet little known.”
Thus Darwin—a beetle collector, amateur geologist and recent college graduate—joined the crew. Delayed twice due to unfriendly weather, the ship launched from England’s Plymouth Sound not in October as scheduled but on December 27, 1831.
Today, 200 years after his birth, Darwin’s renown as a chronicler of the origins and odysseys of life on this planet overshadows the impressive odysseys of his own life. Merely 22, and studying to lead a modest parson’s life, Darwin left England on a planned two-year survey that turned into a five-year absence from home, much of which he spent exploring tropical islands and documenting the undocumented world. His journal from the trip, published shortly after his return, brought him fame and recognition as a geologist, theorist and writer, but while we remember well the theories of evolution borne of those early observations, we tend to ignore Darwin’s contributions to the field of travel writing.
Consider the passage Darwin wrote following the Beagle’s first landfall, several weeks after leaving port, on the island of St. Jago in Cape Verde:
The scene, as beheld through the hazy atmosphere of this climate, is one of great interest; if, indeed, a person, fresh from sea, and who has just walked, for the first time, in a grove of cocoa-nut trees, can be a judge of anything but his own happiness. The island would generally be considered as very uninteresting, but to any one accustomed only to an English landscape, the novel aspect of an utterly sterile land possesses a grandeur which more vegetation might spoil.
While travel writing lacks the scientific ideals of objectivity and peer review, as well as the rigor of scientific method (the modern understanding of which was rapidly developing during the years Darwin lived and worked), the passage above nevertheless conveys truth about the excited young writer and, more generally, about the human mind, touched by wanderlust. Reading his entries, one finds nearly as much of interest in the observations of an Englishman abroad as in the critical thinking of a budding scientist.
Good travel writing shares with good science the need for a keen eye to explore hidden details of a world—a penchant for insight into the literal or metaphorical geography under observation. It may be no coincidence, then, that one of the modern world’s most cherished scientists wrote so revealingly of his travels that we can observe the churning of thoughts, emotions and beliefs—the very workings of Darwin’s brain—even as he documents the build of an unremarkable island.
Your Brain on Cubs, a book I edited that published a year ago, focuses on the role of the brain in playing the game and in watching it as fans. During the 2009 baseball season, baseball is focusing on the brain—specifically on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
As reported this week in the New York Times, Major League Baseball’s efforts will peak July 4, the 70th anniversary of Gehrig’s on-field speech in which he called himself “the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
The speech will be reread during the seventh-inning stretch at all 15 ballparks where games are scheduled. One prospective reader is Michael Goldsmith, a Utah law professor who is battling ALS and who suggested that baseball focus its attention.
That baseball listened is heartwarming for fans of the sport. It’s an honorable tribute to Gehrig. But most important, it’s good news amid the ongoing effort to find a cure for his disease.
Dr. Kevin Tracey, chief executive officer at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research and author of the Dana Press book Fatal Sequence: The Killer Within, was featured this week in an article on CNN.com. “This isn’t a one in a million case,” he says of the recent death of 20-year-old Brazilian model Mariana Bridi da Costa, who died after an infection led to sepsis.
Most people haven’t heard of sepsis; if you have heard of it, you may believe that it strikes only the elderly and doesn’t affect healthy people. In fact, sepsis can affect people of all ages fighting off nonfatal illnesses or injury such as burns and pneumonia. Several well-known people have died from sepsis, including Jim Henson, Pope John Paul II and Christopher Reeve, each from a sequence of events in the immune system and the brain’s failure to regulate infection.
In Fatal Sequence, through the tragic example of a young burn victim, Dr. Traceydescribes how the brain plays an integral role in the onset of sepsis, how the brain’s failure can unleash the immune system and allow it to indiscriminately kill normal cells along with, or instead of, foreign microbes, and what conditions predispose patients to develop sepsis.
Understanding this “killer within” is essential—especially for those who think that it cannot happen to them. Sepsis is the third most common killer, Tracey writes; more people die from severe sepsis than from acute heart attack, at an estimated cost of more than $17 billion annually.
Through the Reader’s Review program, you can read advance copies of new books, then write and tell us what you did or didn’t enjoy about the book. We could post your reviews or link to your blog if you run a review there.
We’ll give you nearly six weeks to read the book (it’s less than 250 pages) and write your review. The deadline for reviews is Jan. 29, 2009. The rest of the country won’t get to read the book until it’s published, in late February 2009.
December signals the approach of the cold days of winter and the beginning of the annual holiday mania. As theaters across the country launch their productions of the Dickens classic “A Christmas Carol,” TV networks air the holiday classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” and retail stores and radios blast the seasonal music, I would like to offer you yet another option. It’s a book I’d like to call a “Dana classic”: The Bard on the Brain: Understanding the Mind Through the Art of Shakespeare and the Science of Imaging, by Paul M. Matthews, M.D., and Jeffrey McQuain, Ph.D.
What does “Shakespeare and the brain” have to do with the holidays? As we move through the holiday season, we’re all likely to experience many emotions, thoughts and memories brought about by music and gatherings with friends and families. Our senses will be activated strongly by traditional culinary delights and spirits. In The Bard on the Brain, through the beauty of some of Shakespeare’s greatest plays, we learn what brain science can tell us about our thoughts and feelings, memories both good and bad and the ways in which art and science together can provide us keen insight into the human mind.
December's title is Deep Brain Stimulation: A New Treatment Shows Promise in the Most Difficult Cases, by Jamie Talan:
More than 40,000 people worldwide have undergone deep brain stimulation, which involves implanting electrodes in the brain that are connected to a device similar to a pacemaker. With compelling profiles of patients and an introduction to doctors and scientists who are pioneering the research, Jamie Talan describes the ways in which deep brain stimulation has produced promising results —as well as the ethical issues that arise in the course of this research.
Requests for this book are due by Dec. 12; we will mail an advance reading edition by Dec. 17 and seek your reviews by Jan. 22. Stay tuned as more books become available in 2009.
If your purchase of a good book is predicated by good reviews, visit our book page for Try to Remember, where you’ll also find a review that appears in today’s Wall Street Journal and a review that appeared in the Nov. 6 issue of The Jerusalem Post. And learn more about the author in a fascinating interview, “Do No Harm: Q&A with Paul McHugh,” by Aalok Mehta.
How should we take companies’ claims that their functional magnetic resonance imagers (fMRI) can tell if we are telling lies? With a mighty grain of salt, said panelists during the second day of the Neuroethics Society’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C.
“Over the past 6 years, the press assumed fMRI was better than lie detection,” he said. “But no one really knows.” One reason is few controlled or real-world tests of the technology have been done; another is that people can confound lie-detection, whether a person is saying something they think is a lie, and mind reading.
In carefully controlled tests, with white male college students without known medical conditions and not on drugs, Langleben said, “we could sometimes detect deception,” but not always.
“There is no perfect lie detector,” said Steve Laken of Cephos Corp., which offers fMRI scanning to the public. Like standard lie detectors, fMRI “could be a forensic tool, not a definitive tool but a forensic tool,” he said. Cephos’s method has “78-97 percent accuracy,” according to the company’s research.
But the vast majority of his clients do not wish to prove lies but to show that they are telling the truth, he said. “Prosecuting attorneys and DAs aren’t interested; defenders are.” The company has a long list of explanations included on the informed-consent forms it requires clients to sign before administering tests, including the caveat that the client might not like the outcome. Cephos ensures that the people doing the scanning don’t know the details of the case and neither do the off-site researchers reading the images.
If the images light up the right way, “we say they believe what they’re saying is true,” Laken said, not that it is factually true.
But telling the truth may not look like telling lies in the brain, said Hank Greely of Stanford, who co-published a review of then-current fMRI detection studies in the American Journal of Law and Medicine in 2007. And there are even fewer tests of truth-telling.
Imaging for lie detection is just the first of a variety of neuroscience-based tests that will have legal implications, Greely said. Others include tests that might, in the future, detect levels of pain (for personal injury litigation) and whether we recognize people or crime sites. And interest is high: “The law is really interested in someone’s mental state,” he said.
Greely disagrees that fMRI for lie detection would be just another piece of forensic technology. “It is science saying this person is a liar, this person is telling the truth,” he said. Some studies show that simply showing a person information accompanied by an unrelated picture of a brain scan leads the person to think the information is true. “It is reckless, and so unethical, to proceed [with this technology] with so little knowledge if it is good—or good enough.”
What should we do? “It would be nice to have some regulation,” Laken said, but people disagree on what level to recommend and what agency should do it. In the short term, we could regulate the use of fMRI devices under standard medical regulations, just as we do other medical devices, suggested Langleben.
We all love books, but mostly as a matter of intellectual and social stimulation. But an exhibit at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, “A Moveable Feast: The Book as Art,” shows us a new way to love and appreciate books.
This fascinating exhibit features works from well-known artists from across the country. It features two dozen books, some well illustrated, some cleverly shaped and some with moveable parts and three dimensional elements. One of the artists whose work I liked is Carol Barton from the Washington, D.C. Visiting her Website, I loved, “Plant this Book” which takes the Chinese proverb, “A book is like a garden carried in the pocket,” to a new dimension.
Arts Education in the News Weekly update of news on teaching artists and using arts in the schools from sources around the Web
Brain Awareness Week Join/get involved in the internatinal campaign to increase public awareness of the progress and benefits of brain research
Brain Connections A PDF list of more than 240 U.S. organizations for those looking for information, referrals, and other guidance on brain-related disorders
Brain in the News Weekly update of scientifically vetted news stories from around the Web
Brain Resources for Seniors Sites related to brain health, education and general information for older adults
BrainWeb Information and links to validated sites by us and by outside sources about brain diseases and disorders
BrainWork Quarterly newsletter on the latest research on brain science
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Cerebrum The online monthly featuring essays on the cutting-edge of neuroscience
Books by Dana Press Books by neuroscientists and about neuroscience for the general reader
Dana Alliances Programs, events, publications and more about the brain and brain research for lay audiences from the Dana Alliance, an organization of the America’s and Europe’s preeminent neuroscientists and clinicians
Focus on Neuroethics Continually updated collection of news and essays on topics relating to the ethics of neuroscience and the neuroscience of ethics
Grants programs Support for scientists in neuroscience and immunology and in programs that train teaching artists
