The danger of myside bias

Fighting bad thinking is an uphill battle some days.

I'm very much including myself in this assessment.  I have biases and preconceived notions and places where I stumble just like everyone else.  Fixing these errors would be nice -- can you imagine the world if all of us were able to think clearly and make our decisions based on evidence?

A pipe dream, I know, and all the more so after I read a new paper in Journal of Cognitive Psychology called "My Point is Valid, Yours is Not: Myside Bias in Reasoning About Abortion," by Vladimíra Čavojová, Jakub Šrol, and Magdalena Adamus of the Institute of Experimental Psychology at the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, Slovakia.

In an elegant piece of research, Čavojová et al. gave a series of logic puzzles to volunteers who had been asked in a prior questionnaire what their attitudes toward abortion were, and whether they had prior experience with formal logic.  They were then asked to determine whether various syllogisms were valid or not.  Some were neutral:

All mastiffs are dogs.
Some mastiffs are black.
Therefore, some of the things that are black are dogs. 

(Valid)

Some had to do with abortion:

All fetuses are human beings
Some human beings should be protected.
Therefore, some of those who should be protected are fetuses. 

(Invalid)

To solve each of the syllogisms, it should be irrelevant what your opinion on abortion is; the rules are that if the premises (the first two statements) are true, and the argument is valid, then the conclusion is true.  The participants were told from the outset to treat the premises as true regardless of their views.

Gregor Reisch, Logic Presents Its Main Themes (ca. 1505) [Image is in the Public Domain]

What is fascinating is that both people who were pro-choice and pro-life had a hard time rejecting invalid syllogisms that gave them a conclusion they agreed with, and accepting valid syllogisms that gave them a conclusion they disagreed with.  This pattern held equally with people who had training in formal logic and those who did not.  It's as if once we're considering a strongly-held opinion, our ability to use logic goes out the window.

The authors write:

The study explores whether people are more inclined to accept a conclusion that confirms their prior beliefs and reject one they personally object to even when both follow the same logic.  Most of the prior research in this area has relied on the informal reasoning paradigm; in this study, however, we applied a formal reasoning paradigm to distinguish between cognitive and motivational mechanisms leading to myside bias in reasoning on value-laden topics (in this case abortions).  Slovak and Polish (N = 387) participants indicated their attitudes toward abortion and then evaluated logical syllogisms with neutral, pro-choice, or pro-life content.  We analysed whether participants’ prior attitudes influenced their ability to solve these logically identical reasoning tasks and found that prior attitudes were the strongest predictor of myside bias in evaluating both valid and invalid syllogisms, even after controlling for logical validity (the ability to solve neutral syllogisms) and previous experience of logic.

Which reinforces my not very optimistic notion that however good our brains are, humans remain primarily emotional creatures.  When something elicits a strong emotional response, we're perfectly willing to abandon reasoning -- and sometimes aren't even aware we're doing it.

All of which bodes nothing good from any attempt to correct these errors.  As we've discussed before, even trying to combat bad thinking initiates the backfire effect, wherein people tend to double down on beliefs if they're challenged, and even if they're given concrete evidence that they're wrong.

Makes you wonder what I think I'm accomplishing by writing this blog, doesn't it?

It's not futile, however; however this emotional bent is impossible to eradicate, you can adjust for it as long as you know it's there.  So I suppose this research should give us hope that even if we can't think with perfect clarity all the time, we can at least move in the right direction.
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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is from the brilliant essayist and polymath John McPhee, frequent contributor to the New Yorker.  I swear, he can make anything interesting; he did a book on citrus growers in Florida that's absolutely fascinating.  But even by his standards, his book The Control of Nature is fantastic.  He looks at times that humans have attempted to hold back the forces of nature -- the attempts to keep the Mississippi River from changing its path to what is now the Atchafalaya River, efforts in California to stop wildfires and mudslides, and a crazy -- and ultimately successful -- plan to save a harbor in Iceland from a volcanic eruption using ice-cold seawater to freeze the lava.

Anyone who has interest in the natural world should read this book -- but it's not just about the events themselves, it's about the people who participated in them.  McPhee is phenomenal at presenting the human side of his investigations, and their stories will stick with you a long time after you close the last page.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Last week's episode

One of the enduring mysteries of neuropsychology is how memory is encoded.

As I tell my introductory neuroscience students, think of the simplest thing you can.  Your middle name.  What 2 + 3 is.  What three colors are in the American flag.  Now, where was that information before I asked you?  And how did you retrieve it?  And where does it go when you no longer are thinking about it?

We have some ideas about where memory is stored, given recent studies with fMRI machines.  Scientists can see what parts of the brain are active when you recall different types of information, and we now know that different types and durations of memory are stored in different places.  But the other two pieces -- how memory is stored and how it is retrieved -- we honestly have no idea about.

We got another piece of the puzzle last week with some new research by Gabriel Radvansky of Notre Dame University and Aya Ben-Yakov and Rik Henson of the University of Cambridge.  What they were interested in is episodic memory, our brain's ability to slice what it recalls up into discrete chunks, rather like the chapters in a story.  They looked at what happens at the boundaries -- what we perceive as the end of one episode and the beginning of another.

"So much research is done with these little bits and pieces — words, pictures, things like that,” Radvansky says.  "But those dry tidbits aren’t what the human brain usually handles.  The mind is built to deal with complex events... Research like this helps us identify ‘What is an event, from the point of view of the brain?’"

[Image is in the Public Domain]

They had participants watching one of two movies, Forrest Gump and Bang! You're Dead!, and using fMRI watched what happened when obvious boundaries were reached -- a scene fade-to-black, a jump to a new location or new characters, and so on.  But what is interesting is that the brain perceives other moments as boundaries as well.  At any of those moments, activity in the hippocampus increases dramatically, suggesting that this is the structure that helps us divide what we remember into distinct episodes.

Laura Sanders, writing about the research in Science News, explains further.  "These transitions didn’t always involve jumps to new places or times in the story. One such boundary came near the beginning of Forrest Gump as Forrest sits quietly on a bench.  Suddenly, he blurts out his famous greeting: 'Hello. My name’s Forrest. Forrest Gump.'  The hippocampus may have helped slice that continuous bench scene into two events: before talking and after talking.  Such divisions may help package information into discrete pieces that can then be stored as memories."

In real life, of course, there are seldom such definitive boundaries.  A few artificial ones exist -- when it's quitting time at work, when the bell rings in a school, when your alarm clock goes off.  Most of the rest of life proceeds along fairly smoothly, but what this research suggests is that you don't store or recall memories that way.

Which is another nail in the coffin of the idea of our memories being accurate.  Research has been chipping away for years at the notion that we have any kind of a decent record of the past, but the results have shown the reality is very much the opposite.  Here, we find that our brains are slicing up what we've experienced into chunks with more-or-less arbitrary boundaries, leaving us with the sense of life being a series of disjointed episodes rather than any kind of continuous record of events.  

I'm also interested in what we remember of the boundaries themselves.  In movies, when a scene shifts, it usually doesn't occur to us to ask what's happening during the gap, and we don't form any kind of strong memory of the jump itself (at least, I don't).  What the Radvansky et al. research suggests is that when discrete edges don't exist, we superimpose them on what we remember.  So do we have the same kind of foggy sense of recall during these brain-created boundaries as we do when we're watching movies?

In any case, this is an interesting new piece of the puzzle of our memory, and how we create a picture of past events.  Now, I wish they'd get to work on two of the most intriguing memory-related events -- déjà vu and the "tip of the tongue" phenomenon.  Since we finally seem to be closing in on how we store memories, I have no doubt that scientists will one day be able to account for these, as well.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is from the brilliant essayist and polymath John McPhee, frequent contributor to the New Yorker.  I swear, he can make anything interesting; he did a book on citrus growers in Florida that's absolutely fascinating.  But even by his standards, his book The Control of Nature is fantastic.  He looks at times that humans have attempted to hold back the forces of nature -- the attempts to keep the Mississippi River from changing its path to what is now the Atchafalaya River, efforts in California to stop wildfires and mudslides, and a crazy -- and ultimately successful -- plan to save a harbor in Iceland from a volcanic eruption using ice-cold seawater to freeze the lava.

Anyone who has interest in the natural world should read this book -- but it's not just about the events themselves, it's about the people who participated in them.  McPhee is phenomenal at presenting the human side of his investigations, and their stories will stick with you a long time after you close the last page.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Trompe l'oeil

I have a fascination for optical illusions.

Not only are they cool, they often point out some profound information about how we process sensory input.  Take the famous two-and-a-half pronged fork:

The problem here is that we're trying to interpret a two-dimensional drawing as if it were a three-dimensional object, and the two parts of the drawing aren't compatible under that interpretation.  Worse, when you try to force your brain to make sense of it -- following the drawing from the bottom left to the top right, and trying to figure out when the object goes from three prongs to two -- you fail utterly.

Neil deGrasse Tyson used optical illusions as an example of why we should be slow to accept eyewitness testimony.  "We all love optical illusions," he said.  "But that's not what they should call them.  They should call them 'brain failures.'  Because that's what they are.  A clever drawing, and your brain can't handle it."

(If you have some time, check out this cool compendium of optical illusions collected by Michael Bach, which is even more awesome because he took the time to explain why each one happens, at least where an explanation is known.)

It's even more disorienting when an illusion occurs because of two senses conflicting.  Which was the subject of a recent paper out of Caltech, "What You Saw Is What You Will Hear: Two New Illusions With Audiovisual Postdictive Effects," by Noelle R. B. Stiles, Monica Li, Carmel A. Levitan, Yukiyasu Kamitani, and Shinsuke Shimojo.  What they did is an elegant experiment to show two things -- how sound can interfere with visual processing, and how a stimulus can influence our perception of an event, even if the stimulus occurs after the event did!

Sounds like the future affecting the past, doesn't it?  It turns out the answer is both simpler and more humbling; it's another example of a brain failure.

Here's how they did the experiment.

In the first trial, they played a beep three times, 58 milliseconds apart.  The first and third beeps were accompanied by a flash of light.  Most people thought there were three flashes -- a middle one coincident with the second beep.

The second setup was, in a way, opposite to the first.  They showed three flashes of light, on the right, middle, and left of the computer screen.  Only the first and third were accompanied by a beep.  Almost everyone didn't see -- or, more accurately, didn't register -- the middle flash, and thought there were only two lights.

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

"The significance of this study is twofold," said study co-author Shinsuke Shimojo.  "First, it generalizes postdiction as a key process in perceptual processing for both a single sense and multiple senses.  Postdiction may sound mysterious, but it is not—one must consider how long it takes the brain to process earlier visual stimuli, during which time subsequent stimuli from a different sense can affect or modulate the first.  The second significance is that these illusions are among the very rare cases where sound affects vision, not vice versa, indicating dynamic aspects of neural processing that occur across space and time.  These new illusions will enable researchers to identify optimal parameters for multisensory integration, which is necessary for both the design of ideal sensory aids and optimal training for low-vision individuals."

All cool stuff, and more information about how the mysterious organ in our skull works.  Of course, this makes me wonder what we imagine we see because our brain anticipates that it will there, or perhaps miss because it anticipates that something out of of place shouldn't be there.  To end with another quote from Tyson: "Our brains are unreliable as signal-processing devices.  We're confident about what we see, hear, and remember, when in fact we should not be."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is from the brilliant essayist and polymath John McPhee, frequent contributor to the New Yorker.  I swear, he can make anything interesting; he did a book on citrus growers in Florida that's absolutely fascinating.  But even by his standards, his book The Control of Nature is fantastic.  He looks at times that humans have attempted to hold back the forces of nature -- the attempts to keep the Mississippi River from changing its path to what is now the Atchafalaya River, efforts in California to stop wildfires and mudslides, and a crazy -- and ultimately successful -- plan to save a harbor in Iceland from a volcanic eruption using ice-cold seawater to freeze the lava.

Anyone who has interest in the natural world should read this book -- but it's not just about the events themselves, it's about the people who participated in them.  McPhee is phenomenal at presenting the human side of his investigations, and their stories will stick with you a long time after you close the last page.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Neanderthal family reunion

Last year, I did a 23 and Me DNA test.

Besides the not-particularly-earthshattering conclusion that I'm mostly French, Scottish, German, and Dutch, I was amused to find that the test showed I have 284 Neanderthal markers.  This puts me in the 60th percentile as compared to the population overall, which probably explains why I like my steaks rare and run around half naked when the weather is warm.

What's fascinating is that some research released last week, a paper in Cell by David Enard of the University of Arizona and Dmitri A. Petrov of Stanford University called, "Evidence that RNA Viruses Drove Adaptive Introgression between Neanderthals and Modern Humans," has shown that some of these genes didn't get passed along the usual way, but by a process called transduction -- when viruses transmitted from one host to another carry novel genes with them.

The authors write:

After their divergence 500,000 to 800,000 years ago, modern humans and Neanderthals interbred at least twice: the first time ∼100,000 years ago and the second ∼50,000 years ago.  The first interbreeding episode left introgressed segments (IS) of modern human ancestry within Neanderthal genomes, as revealed by the analysis of ancient DNA from a single Altai Neanderthal individual sequenced by Prüfer et al. (2014).  This first interbreeding event appears not to have left any detectable segments of Neanderthal ancestry in extant modern human genomes.  In contrast, the second interbreeding episode left detectable IS of Neanderthal ancestry within the genomes of non-African modern humans. 

Recent advances in the detection of introgression have led to the discovery that the majority of genomic segments initially introgressed from Neanderthals to modern humans were rapidly removed by purifying selection.  Harris and Nielsen (2016) estimated that the proportion of Neanderthal ancestry in modern human genomes rapidly fell from ∼10% to the current levels of 2%–3% in modern Asians and Europeans.
This history of interbreeding and purifying selection against IS raises several important questions. First, among the introgressed sequences that were ultimately retained, can we detect which sequences persisted by chance because they were not as deleterious or not deleterious at all to the recipient species, and which persisted not despite natural selection but because of it—that is, which IS increased in frequency due to positive selection?  If any of the introgressed sequences were indeed driven into the recipient species due to positive selection, can we determine which pressures in the environment drove this adaptation? 

Recently we found that proteins that interact with viruses (virus-interacting proteins [VIPs]) evolve under both stronger purifying selection and tend to adapt at much higher rates compared to similar proteins that do not interact with viruses.  We estimated that interactions with viruses accounted for ∼30% of protein adaptation in the human lineage.   Because viruses appear to have driven so much adaptation in the human lineage, and because it is plausible that when Neanderthals and modern humans interbred they also exchanged viruses either directly by contact or via their shared environment, we hypothesized that some introgressed sequences might have provided a measure of protection against the exchanged viruses and were driven into the recipient species by positive directional selection.  Consistent with this model, several cases of likely adaptive introgression from Neanderthals to modern humans involve immune genes that are specialized to deal with pathogens including viruses.

Which is amazingly cool.  Viruses are parasites, and as such usually wreak havoc with our systems, but here we have viruses acting as carriers not only for genes that generate diversity, but that protect our cells from the damage viruses can cause.

Great-great grandpa Ugg [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Stefan Scheer, Neandertaler reconst, CC BY-SA 3.0]

"It's not a stretch to imagine that when modern humans met up with Neanderthals, they infected each other with pathogens that came from their respective environments," lead author David Enard said.  "By interbreeding with each other, they also passed along genetic adaptations to cope with some of those pathogens."

"Many Neanderthal sequences have been lost in modern humans, but some stayed and appear to have quickly increased to high frequencies at the time of contact, suggestive of their selective benefits at that time," Petrov said.  "Our research aims to understand why that was the case.  We believe that resistance to specific RNA viruses provided by these Neanderthal sequences was likely a big part of the reason for their selective benefits."

"One of the things that population geneticists have wondered about is why we have maintained these stretches of Neanderthal DNA in our own genomes," Enard added.  "This study suggests that one of the roles of those genes was to provide us with some protection against pathogens as we moved into new environments."

So having Neanderthal DNA isn't something to be ashamed of.  All of this highlights how incredibly cool the evolutionary model is, and the depth of its explanatory power.  Now, y'all'll have to excuse me.  I'm going to go get a snack.  I wonder if I have any roast mammoth left in the fridge?  Probably not.  I guess grilled cheese will have to do.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is from the brilliant essayist and polymath John McPhee, frequent contributor to the New Yorker.  I swear, he can make anything interesting; he did a book on citrus growers in Florida that's absolutely fascinating.  But even by his standards, his book The Control of Nature is fantastic.  He looks at times that humans have attempted to hold back the forces of nature -- the attempts to keep the Mississippi River from changing its path to what is now the Atchafalaya River, efforts in California to stop wildfires and mudslides, and a crazy -- and ultimately successful -- plan to save a harbor in Iceland from a volcanic eruption using ice-cold seawater to freeze the lava.

Anyone who has interest in the natural world should read this book -- but it's not just about the events themselves, it's about the people who participated in them.  McPhee is phenomenal at presenting the human side of his investigations, and their stories will stick with you a long time after you close the last page.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Bubbles, dimensions, and black holes

One of the weirder claims of modern physics, which I first ran into when I was reading about string theory a few years ago, is that the universe could have more than three spatial dimensions -- but the extra ones are "curled up" and are (extremely) sub-microscopic.

I've heard it explained by an analogy of an ant walking on a string.  There are two ways the ant can go -- back and forth on the string, or around the string.  The "around the string" dimension is curled into a loop, whereas the back-and-forth one has a much greater spatial extent.

Scale that up, if your brain can handle it, to three dimensions of the back-and-forth variety, and as many as nine or ten of the around-the-string variety, and you've got an idea of what the claim is.

The problem is, those extra dimensions are pretty thoroughly undetectable, which has led critics to quote Wolfgang Pauli's quip, that it's a theory that "is not even wrong."  It's unverifiable -- which is synonymous to saying "it isn't science."  But the theorists are still trying like mad to find an indirect method to show the existence of these extra dimensions.

To no avail at the present, although we did have an interesting piece added to the puzzle last month.  Astronomers Katie Mack of North Carolina State University and Robert McNees of Loyola University published a paper in arXiv that puts a strict limit on the number of macroscopic dimensions -- and that limit is three.

So sorry, fans of A Wrinkle in Time, there's no such thing as the tesseract.

The argument by Mack and McNees -- which, although I have a B.S. in physics, I can't begin to comprehend fully -- boils down to the fact that the universe is still here.  If there were extra macroscopic spatial dimensions (whether or not we were aware of them) it would be possible that two cosmic particles of sufficient energy could collide and generate a miniature black hole -- which would give rise to a universe with different physical laws.  This new universe would expand like a bubble rising in a lake, its boundaries moving at the speed of light, ripping apart everything down to and including atoms as it went.

"If you’re standing nearby when the bubble starts to expand, you don’t see it coming," Mack said.  "If it’s coming at you from below, your feet stop existing before your mind realizes that."

This has been one of the concerns about the Large Hadron Collider, since what this thing does is slam together particles at enormous velocities.  Ruth Gregory of Durham University showed three years ago that there was a non-zero possibility of generating a black hole that way, which triggered the usual suspects to conjecture that the scientists were trying to destroy the universe.  Why they would do that, when they inhabit said universe, is beyond me.  In fact, since they'd be standing right next to the Collider when it happened, they'd go first, before they even had a chance to cackle maniacally and rub their hands together about the fate of the rest of us.

"The black holes are quite naughty," Gregory said, which is a sentence that is impossible to hear in anything but a British accent.  "They really want to seed vacuum decay.  It’s a very strong process, if it can proceed."

"No structures can exist," Mack added.  "We’d just blink out of existence."

Of course, it hasn't happened, so that's good news.  Although I suppose this wouldn't be a bad way to go, all things considered.  At least it would be over quickly, not to mention being spectacular.  "Here lies Gordon, killed during the formation of a new universe," my epitaph could read, although there wouldn't be anyone around to write it, nor anything to write it on.

Which is kind of disappointing.

Anyhow, what Mack and McNees have shown is that this scenario could only happen if there was a fourth macroscopic dimension, and since it hasn't happened in the universe's 13.8 billion year history, it probably isn't going to.

So don't cancel your meetings this week.  Mack and McNees have shown that any additional spatial dimensions over the usual three must be smaller than 1.6 nanometers, which is about three times the diameter of your average atom; bigger than that, and we would already have become victims of "vacuum decay," as the expanding-bubble idea is called.

A cheering notion, that.  Although I have to say, it's an indication of how bad everything else has gotten that "We're not dead yet" is the best I can do for good news.

That's our news from the world of scientific research -- particle collisions, expanding black holes, and vacuum decay.  Myself, I'm not going to worry about it.  I figure if it happens, I'll be gone so fast I won't have time to be upset at my imminent demise, and afterwards none of my loved ones will be around to care.  Another happy thought is that I'll take Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham along with me, which might almost make destroying the entire universe worth it.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is from the brilliant essayist and polymath John McPhee, frequent contributor to the New Yorker.  I swear, he can make anything interesting; he did a book on citrus growers in Florida that's absolutely fascinating.  But even by his standards, his book The Control of Nature is fantastic.  He looks at times that humans have attempted to hold back the forces of nature -- the attempts to keep the Mississippi River from changing its path to what is now the Atchafalaya River, efforts in California to stop wildfires and mudslides, and a crazy -- and ultimately successful -- plan to save a harbor in Iceland from a volcanic eruption using ice-cold seawater to freeze the lava.

Anyone who has interest in the natural world should read this book -- but it's not just about the events themselves, it's about the people who participated in them.  McPhee is phenomenal at presenting the human side of his investigations, and their stories will stick with you a long time after you close the last page.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

The long game

A lot of people I know are devastated by this weekend's swearing-in of Brett Kavanaugh to a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.

Let me say up front that the outrage I'm seeing has very little to do with political stance.  I have friends who are Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and Libertarians who all seem equally appalled.  If you doubt that -- if you think this is some kind of butthurt response from liberals -- allow me to do a reality check for you that there was no such outcry from liberals over Neil Gorsuch's appointment.  Sure, liberals don't much like his views, and weren't happy that he was going to tilt the Court to the right.  There was a hell of a lot of anger over the fact that Mitch McConnell and others contrived to prevent Merrick Garland from getting a fair hearing.

But Gorsuch himself?  Whatever you think of his opinions, there's not much doubt that his credentials are excellent and his background squeaky-clean.

Kavanaugh, on the other hand.  Here we have not just one but three credible allegations against him of sexual abuse, multiple instances where it is claimed that he lied under oath about his past, and the withdrawal of support by the American Bar Association and the National Council of Churches.  What was the response?  A cursory look at the situation by the FBI in which investigators didn't even interview the people central to the claim, including Julie Swetnick (Kavanaugh's third accuser) and several friends of Deborah Ramirez (the second accuser) who said they would corroborate Ramirez's claim under oath.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The worst part is that the Republicans have known that Kavanaugh was a sketchy candidate from the start.  They prevented access to most of his records as White House Staff Secretary, his contributions to the Starr Report (which recommended the impeachment of Bill Clinton), and his work in the 2000 recount that gave the presidency to George W. Bush, papers that had direct bearing on his opinions and legal qualifications.  It's never been about giving the man a fair hearing, where the decision makers have all of the information they need to make a thorough evaluation.  It's been about getting Kavanaugh through the process as fast as possible.  Any attempts to slow things down were labeled as "Democratic obstructionism" and the person making them was steamrolled.

So Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham, and Chuck Grassley rammed the nomination through because they could.  I have to admit there's a piece of this I still don't understand; why they didn't cut their losses with Kavanaugh when it was obvious he was a deeply flawed choice, and find someone (like Gorsuch) with strong conservative views and an unimpeachable background?

But that's minor at this point.  What is certain is that McConnell et al., with the approval of Sexual-Abuser-in-Chief Donald Trump, pushed this appointment through, and people like mealy-mouthed, spineless Jeff Flake (who excels at looking sad and telling everyone how troubled he is over the situation, then voting the party line every fucking time) let it happen.

And look at Susan Collins.  She's the one that's generated the most anger.  "I do believe that [Dr. Ford] was assaulted," she said, after Kavanaugh was sworn in.  "I don't know by whom.  I'm not certain when."

Well, Senator Collins, then how about we do a thorough investigation, not just the five-day farce that happened last week?  How about we give a careful look at the other accusers' claims?  Maybe he'd get cleared, I dunno.  Maybe at least it'd be found that there wasn't enough concrete evidence to decide one way or another. But as it stands, we have three women who at great cost to their personal lives have come forward and made themselves the target of right-wing rage, and accomplished exactly nothing.  Hell, Christine Blasey Ford was publicly ridiculed by the president of the United States.

Is it any wonder that victims of sexual abuse are reluctant to come forward?

I have several friends who are survivors of abuse, and I can't begin to imagine what they're feeling right now.  They seem to be in shock that the people they elected to represent them have shown such callous disregard for the trauma they've been through.  Myself, I'm trying not to give up completely.  There has been so much in the last two years that seems to be a slow slide into autocracy, where dissent is labeled as treason, where any media that is not following a North-Korea-style state-sponsored party-line-über-alles style is disregarded as fake news.  I've been writing about this since Trump was first seeking the nomination, as have many others with far more reach than I have, and all of it has availed us nothing at all.

But it seems to me that the only thing giving up accomplishes is that we'll have more of the same.  A wise friend of mine said, "Use alchemy.  Take your despair, disillusionment, and frustration, and distill it into anger."  She's exactly right.  We can't allow the likes of McConnell, Grassley, and Graham, alternately raging when they're challenged and smirking when they're not, to win the day.  Yes, we lost this battle.  But we've got to play the long game, here.

I will end with a quote from one of my heroes, the incomparable Kenyan activist Wangari Maathai, winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize for her work in reforming environmental policy and supporting women's rights in her home country.  "The only way to accomplish anything is to keep your feelings of being empowered ahead of your feelings of discouragement and inertia.  There is no one solution for everything, but there are many solutions to many of the problems we face.  There is no excuse for inaction."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is from the brilliant essayist and polymath John McPhee, frequent contributor to the New Yorker.  I swear, he can make anything interesting; he did a book on citrus growers in Florida that's absolutely fascinating.  But even by his standards, his book The Control of Nature is fantastic.  He looks at times that humans have attempted to hold back the forces of nature -- the attempts to keep the Mississippi River from changing its path to what is now the Atchafalaya River, efforts in California to stop wildfires and mudslides, and a crazy -- and ultimately successful -- plan to save a harbor in Iceland from a volcanic eruption using ice-cold seawater to freeze the lava.

Anyone who has interest in the natural world should read this book -- but it's not just about the events themselves, it's about the people who participated in them.  McPhee is phenomenal at presenting the human side of his investigations, and their stories will stick with you a long time after you close the last page.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

The seat of free will

The subject of whether or not humans have free will has been debated ad nauseam for centuries by much wiser heads than my own.  I'm up front about being a generalist (the type of person whose knowledge has been described less flatteringly as "a light year across and an inch deep"), and although there are a few areas I have some small degree of expertise in, philosophy ain't one of them.

So I'm unqualified to discuss whether free will actually exists, but I was still pretty intrigued when I read a paper a few days ago about some neuroscientists who have found the brain regions where activity gives us the sense of having free will.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The researchers, R. Ryan Darby (of Vanderbilt University), and Juho Joutsa, Matthew J. Burke, and Michael D. Fox (of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the teaching hospital for Harvard University), looked at people with brain lesions that seemed to interfere with volition.  They investigated two different odd neurological disorders stemming from lesions -- akinetic mutism (which causes people to move their own limbs to accomplish actions without being conscious of it) and alien limb syndrome (in which one or more limbs seems to be under someone else's control).

The authors write:

Our perception of free will is composed of a desire to act (volition) and a sense of responsibility for our actions (agency).  Brain damage can disrupt these processes, but which regions are most important for free will perception remains unclear.  Here, we study focal brain lesions that disrupt volition, causing akinetic mutism (n = 28), or disrupt agency, causing alien limb syndrome (n = 50), to better localize these processes in the human brain.  Lesion locations causing either syndrome were highly heterogeneous, occurring in a variety of different brain locations. 

The scientists reasoned that despite the lesions not seeming to form a pattern of any kind, there had to be some commonality given the similar symptoms of the lesion sufferers.  And they found it:

We next used a recently validated technique termed lesion network mapping to determine whether these heterogeneous lesion locations localized to specific brain networks.  Lesion locations causing akinetic mutism all fell within one network, defined by connectivity to the anterior cingulate cortex.  Lesion locations causing alien limb fell within a separate network, defined by connectivity to the precuneus.  Both findings were specific for these syndromes compared with brain lesions causing similar physical impairments but without disordered free will.  Finally, our lesion-based localization matched network localization for brain stimulation locations that disrupt free will and neuroimaging abnormalities in patients with psychiatric disorders of free will without overt brain lesions.  Collectively, our results demonstrate that lesions in different locations causing disordered volition and agency localize to unique brain networks, lending insight into the neuroanatomical substrate of free will perception.

The final piece came into place when they looked at cases where people who had strange (temporary) side effects from targeted magnetic fields "knocking offline" certain brain regions -- and found that the ones who had akinetic mutism-like symptoms lost activity in brain networks connected to the anterior cingulate cortex, and those describing alien limb syndrome-like symptoms lost activity in ones connected to the precuneus.

What I find most interesting in all of this is how easily our sense of agency can be disrupted.  It seems to be one of our most basic sensations, that we are in control of what we think and do.  The idea that it's this easily altered is a little frightening, and once again brings home what I always tell my neuroscience students -- that in reality you just have one sense organ.  Your brain.  If you alter the electrical impulses coming into or out of your brain, that altered pattern becomes your reality -- even if it's completely at odds with the real world.

So the Darby et al. research doesn't even begin to settle the overall free will question, but it does give us a lens into why we feel like we have free will.  As for me, I think that's about as much philosophy as I can handle.  I'm gonna will myself to get up and get a second cup of coffee.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one -- Hugh Ross Williamson's Historical Enigmas.  Williamson takes some of the most baffling unsolved mysteries from British history -- the Princes in the Tower, the identity of Perkin Warbeck, the Man in the Iron Mask, the murder of Amy Robsart -- and applies the tools of logic and scholarship to an analysis of the primary documents, without descending into empty speculation.  The result is an engaging read about some of the most perplexing events that England ever saw.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]