A review article published this month in the journal Neuron looks at the last decade of the brain in popular media. In “Neuroscience in the Public Sphere,” [full text available here], the authors reviewed media databases for articles discussing brain research published between January 1, 2000 and December 31, 2010 in the six top-selling British newspapers and tabloids. The results? The majority of stories (43%) dealt with brain optimization in some regard, with disease and psychopathology coming in second (36%). Most interesting to me was the topic at the bottom of this list: the brain as it relates to spiritual experiences and religion (1%).

From their analysis, some major, overarching themes jumped out about how the brain is typically portrayed or used to further a point in popular media. In the words of the authors:

This research identified three emerging trends in media interpretations of neuroimaging. Neurorealism describes the use of neuroimages to make phenomena seem objective, offering visual proof that a subjective experience (e.g., love, pain, addiction) is a “real thing.”Neuroessentialism denotes depictions of the brain as the essence of a person, with the brain a synonym for concepts like person, self, or soul. Finally, neuropolicy captures the recruitment of neuroscience to support political or policy agendas.

You can see the full results and read the article here.

In an interview with Casey Schwartz for Newsweek — The Daily Beast, neuroscientist Stuart Firestein argues that knowledge is overrated:

As I began to think about it, I realized that, contrary to popular view, scientists don’t really care that much about facts. We recognize that facts are the most unreliable part of the whole operation. They don’t last, they’re always under revision. Whatever fact you seemed to have uncovered is likely to be revised by the next generation. That’s the difference between science and many other endeavors.  Science revels in revision. For science, revision is a victory. In religion, or astrology, or any other belief system, revision is a kind of defeat. You were supposed to have known the answer to this. But the joy of science is that it’s about revision.

Dr. Firestein, the chair of the biological sciences department at Columbia University, has taught a popular course called IGNORANCE, dedicated to what we don’t know.  His new book, Ignorance: How it Drives Science, was released today by Oxford University Press.  It promises to be a great read.

The eminent primatologist Frans De Waal’s recent TED talk may be one of my favorite TEDs yet. De Waal presents compelling data on primate senses of fairness and empathy, buttressed by entertaining (and mesmerizing) videos of complex primate social behaviors (the Capuchin monkey experiment is my personal favorite). Oh yea, there are elephants too.

De Waal makes a strong case that empathy and fairness are not traits only seen in humans, and that they have older evolutionary roots.  Take a look and tell us what you think:

If you love hip hop, you love the Wu Tang Clan, which many people would say is the greatest thing to ever come from Staten Island.  (Please understand that I mean no offense to Staten Island; we’re talking about legends here.)  Matthew Perpetua caught up with one of them — GZA aka The Genius aka Gary Grice — and asked about the influence of science on his upcoming album Dark Matter.  Here is an excerpt from the interview in Rolling Stone:

You have a new album, Dark Matter, that is coming out. I understand that you put another record on hold to start on this. What made this record more urgent?

I didn’t make it urgent. I just pick and choose. I mean, it would probably be urgent in the sense that I decided to do this before. Plus, the other needed more of a setup and different type of approach. I mean I had several different ideas and concepts in my head. It’s just a journey of the universe. Dark matter, dark energy.

So this is about astronomy and physics?
Yes. And not necessarily so in that sense. It’s just a beautiful story – planets, black holes, comets.

A view of the gallery space at MUSECPMI.

Visual art and neuroscience are stitched together in a new gallery show in New York City at MUSECPMI, and the results are a mixed bag of intriguing syntheses and frustrating shortcomings. MUSECPMI’s gallery space occupies the sixth and seventh floors of a nondescript office building at Eighth Avenue and 38th Street, and for the past weeks the space has been filled with a collection of paintings, photographs, sculptures, digital projections and interactive stations that all orbit around questions of the mind, identity, and medical imaging of interior spaces.

Curated by two M.D.s, Koan Jeff Baysa and Caitlin Hardy, “Seeing Ourselves” features work by some of the same brain-focused artists and scientists we’ve featured on our pages here at The Beautiful Brain, among many others (Pablo Garcia, Elizabeth Jameson, Jason Snyder). According to the exhibition’s press release, the intent of the show is to

encourage the sharing of institutional knowledge as well as to examine the contexts of these medical images from the perspectives of the humanities, in addition to the sciences. By displaying the most advanced medical imaging examples in conversation with other visual images, and as artwork themselves, the curators blur ingrained distinctions between art and science and encourage audiences outside of the medical communities to appreciate and to be inspired by the remarkable scientific advances. (source)

While excited by this description of a conversation between science and art in the same space, I was disappointed to find that the setup of the conversation seems to have been rushed through and dropped mid-sentence. There are no wall labels placing the scence and art into any sort of context, nor are there even identifying labels next to each piece for the artists’ names or the titles of their works. Scientific projections play on walls with no explanation of what we’re seeing. The tones set by the imagery are interesting, but we need more– even a short description would help. Because the visitor gets no orientation or context, what could have been a groundbreaking exhibition of medical imagery and artistic answers to questions of inner space has been set forth in a strange, partially thought-through manner.

Despite the disappointments in presentation, the visual dialogue established merely by placing of all this work in one space left me hopeful for future brain and art exhibitions in New York. One can imagine Pablo Garcia’s large-scale cortical butterfly pieces– wonderful to see in person for their three-dimensionality– presented next to the very Cajal images and quotations he’s inspired by, for example. I’m grateful to MUSECPMI for the first move in this direction, and eager to see what future shows will bring.

“Seeing Ourselves” at MUSECPMI will be open until Saturday, April 14th. MUSEPCMI is located at at 580 Eighth Avenue, 7th Floor at 38th Street, New York City. The gallery is free and open Tuesday through Saturday, 12:00 PM to 6:00 PM.

On Monday, the New York City-based group NeuWrite hosted a public debate on minds, maps, and the future of neuroscience between Sebastian Seung of M.I.T. and Anthony Movshon of NYU, moderated by Robert Krulwich (Radiolab) and the esteemed science writer Carl Zimmer (NYT, Discover). As eager attendees packed Columbia University’s Havemayer Hall on Monday evening and another three hundred watched a simulcast from a nearby room, two things were immediately clear: there is a hunger for a true debate about the brain, one that moves the conversations usually held behind closed doors at scientific conferences and over late-night beers to the public sphere, and Sebastian Seung is wearing gold sneakers.

Credit for organizing the event goes to NeuWrite, an innovative and resourceful group of scientists, writers, and, as their website explains, “those in between: graduate, post-doctoral and faculty researchers, fiction and non-fiction writers, as well Journalism and MFA students at Columbia.” NeuWrite regularly workshops pieces of print journalism and books-in-development with a scientific focus, as well as film, radio, and poetry that present threads of scientific inquiry. In public, this is NeuWrite’s second event about the brain—last year paired Patricia Churchland, author of Braintrust, with Roger Bingham of UCSD and Jesse Prinz of CUNY, for an engaging discussion about morality and neuroscience.

Some were desperate to get in.

It was clear from the opening statements at Monday’s debate that Movshon and Seung represent two different schools of thought, but their conversation ended up being less a “brain brawl” and more a respectful airing of differences. Seung believes neuroscience is stuck in a traditional mode of research, where the necessity to publish the next paper and get the next grant corrals scientists into overly-specific, limited fields of view of the whole system they’re studying. As a result, Seung argued, “neuroscientists can be very short-sighted.” Seung’s own plan of attack is one he’s elaborated in his popular TED talk and documented thoroughly (and very accessibly) in his new book, Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are. On Monday, he reiterated this philosophy: the best way to understand perception, memory, and the basis of psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia and autism, Seung believes, is to study the brain at the level of the synapse—to trace all the connections between all the neurons in a brain. By generating a map of the whole system, we may be able to finally see engrams for memories and perceptions, as well as what might be going wrong with these networks in the aforementioned disorders, perhaps due to various problems in the ways neurons are wired up, which Seung calls “connectopathies.”

So where’s the debate? Movshon made his position clear: “I’m not going argue against the acquisition of information. I just don’t think the connectome is the way to do it.”

Movshon then presented some of his concerns about Seung’s connectomics. Among them:

• There is a scale mismatch between the microscale field of view that tracing a connectome gives you (you’re looking at connections between cells of one specific organism) and the mesoscale understanding that Movshon argues is what’s really needed to understand the big questions (the mesoscale being statistical probabilities of wiring and activity common to the different brains of individuals).
• The relationship between the computations carried out by a brain and the substrates of those computations remains elusive. In other words, even if we can see the connections between all the neurons in a brain (the substrate), how can we be sure that we’ll then make the leap to understanding how those connections give rise to a perception or memory (the computation)? Movshon brought up work done by Todd Sacktor that suggests there may be molecular switches within neurons and at the synapse that play a major role in the maintenance of memories. Movshon argued that connectomics would not show us the potentially crucial molecular mechanisms such as those studied by Sacktor (for more on that work, here’s an interview I did with Sacktor on a past edition of our podcast).

With their differences stated, some of the most intriguing moments of the evening arrived nearer to the end of the debate. Krulwich turned to Movshon and posed an important question: if you don’t want to map the connectome, how are you going to understand the brain?

Movshon responded by reminding the audience that “neuroscience is a cottage industry,” meaning the study of the brain has traditionally been carried out by many individual labs focusing on different parts of the whole, communicating their results to the scientific journals for circulation to the other cottages. In this philosophy, which Movshon believes is still the best way forward for the field, a better understanding of the whole brain and the answers to the big questions of perception, memory, and disorder will emerge from a better and better understanding of all the parts– as carried out by the localized cottage industries– and eventually consensus will emerge about the whole.

Seung’s approach is one injected with a bit more grandeur—and Movshon pointed out that “The problem of grandeur in neuroscience is one we’re all concerned about.” Connectomics is a large-scale undertaking that, a bit like large-scale brain simulation projects, demands rapid, parallel improvements in computer technology. Connectomics does not follow the research traditions of the cottage industry that Movshon represented in the debate—though the questions connectomics could answer are indeed big ones, no one can be totally sure yet exactly how those questions will be answered, or when. It’s a very different research approach than, say, studying fear response in the mouse brain for one’s entire lifetime.

The discussion of grandeur in neuroscience inevitably led to a briefly contentious back-and-forth about Henry Markram’s Blue Brain Project. When Movshon brought up Blue Brain and seemed to suggest a parallel between Seung and Markram, arguing that what we really need are more “guided, more focused, and more hypothesis-drive projects,” Seung pounced on the chance to distinguish the aims of his work from those of Blue Brain. While Markram famously declared in 2009 that he would have a full human brain simulation completed within ten years, Seung takes a somewhat humbler approach to his work: “Hey, I just want to map some connections,” he joked, draining the tension out of the hall with a good laugh. Indeed, Seung is hoping that in his lifetime he can map a mere cubic millimeter of mouse brain—just that, he said, would be a big step forward for the field.

Though there was no blood spilled in the end, one can hope that this “brain brawl” will be the start of more such public discussions of neuroscience’s direction and goals in the 21st century. The difference of approach between Movshon’s cottage industry and Seung’s connectomics is not necessarily one of ambition but one of scale. Both scientists emerged as ambitious explorers using slightly different tools and drawing slightly different maps.

These questions of approach and scale may present more two-camp issues as fodder for future debates (it could also be interesting to see such a debate unfold in more of an Oxford-style, Intelligence Squared format). While the actual science happens in labs and is reported on in journals, at conferences, and eventually in the press, we rarely get to hear actual scientists talk to the public and to each other about why it is they are going about studying the brain in the way they’re studying it. One can only hope Monday evening was the first of many such synapses between the scientific community and the eager public.

]]> http://thebeautifulbrain.com/2012/04/a-heavyweight-brain-debate/feed/ 0 Dispatches Seung and Movshon Sebastian Seung (L) and Tony Movshon. Desperate for tickets. Some were desperate to get in.