If you are frequently procrastinating at work by watching YouTube videos, you might be familiar with this one (It's not very new, but I learned about it only recently):

Amazing, right? The study to which the video refers was quite big news: Chimps outperform humans in a working memory task!

But, although it's a cool video, these reports were overly enthusiastic. I'm sure you've spotted a few huge confounds in the comparison between the humans and the chimp. First, the celebrity chimp was selected based on his excellent performance on this particular task. So, who knows, he might be an idiot savant? But a far more serious concern is the amount of practice that the chimp received. According to the supplementary data, the chimp's practice consisted of four sessions a day, 5 to 6 six days a week. The humans' practice routine doesn't appear to be specified, but according to the criticism by Silberberg and Kearns they received no practice at all.

At any rate, even if the humans received some practice, we may safely assume that they were not trained as extensively as the chimp. So the obvious question is what happens if humans are heavily trained. And the unspectacular answer is that they become just as good as the chimp. So, did chimps beat humans at this memory task? Yes, because they practiced...

References

A while back I wrote about NeuroDebian, a repository of neuroscientific software (Linux only, I'm afraid). I'm happy to announce that OpenSesame is now officially part of NeuroDebian! This page explains how you can add the NeuroDebian repository to your software sources. After you have done this, you simply install OpenSesame through your package manager or by typing the following commands in a terminal:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install opensesame

Right now, the version in the repository is the latest snapshot (0.23-pre1), so you will even have a minor edge (at the risk of some instability) over the regular OpenSesame packages (which are at 0.22)! And, of course, NeuroDebian has many more software packages to offer. Special thanks go out to Michael Hanke, who has handled the packaging.

We know more about the early visual cortex than about any other brain area. This is because neurons in the early visual cortex are delightfully predictable. For example, a neuron may respond optimally to a bar of light of a particular width and orientation: If an observer sees such a bar of light, the neuron will start to fire. In order to fully characterize this neuron, all you need to do is systematically try out a lot of different widths and orientations and see which combination works best. This may be a lot of work and requires a highly invasive procedure (i.e., opening up the observer's skull and sticking electrodes into the brain), but it's definitely within the realm of possibility. (If you're interested, you may enjoy the paper by Wurtz (2009), in which he describes the seminal contribution of Hubel and Wiesel to the understanding of the early visual cortex.)

But, of course, researchers want to go beyond the early visual cortex. After all, neurons that “like” titled bars of light don't tell us much about what we really want to know, such as how we are able to recognize things. Unfortunately, it has proven very difficult to characterize more complex neurons. This does not mean that it's difficult to elicit a response from these neurons, not at all. But it's difficult to figure out exactly what it is about a certain stimulus that makes a neuron respond. For example, in a famous study, Quiroga and colleagues (2005 …

Last week I wrote a glowing review of Ben Goldacre's "Bad Science". The book is full of amusing anecdotes and trivia, such as the section on the well known publication bias: Studies finding positive results are more likely to be published than studies finding no results. For example, a study showing that a particular treatment for (say) depression is effective may be published, whereas ten studies that fail to show an effect are not published (or published in low-impact journals), because they are considered uninteresting. This would falsely give the impression that the treatment is effective, even to those who go through the trouble of doing a literature search, whereas the evidence clearly suggests otherwise.

The amusing part is that, according to Goldacre, "a paper even found evidence of publication bias in studies of publication bias"! In other words, review papers that fail to show a publication bias are not published; The publication bias bites itself in the tail. You gotta love it, right? But when I looked up the study to which Goldacre refers, the authors actually conclude that they "found no evidence of publication bias in reports on publication bias"!

So the first time I look up a reference from Bad Science, I find a blatant misinterpretation. In all fairness, the authors did find a hint of a publication bias in studies of publication bias (and the statistical power was low, etc.), but it does seem that Goldacre was a little sloppy here... Normally I wouldn't pick on …

4^th estate, 2008

Conclusion Ben Goldacre is on a mission to teach us about how scientific evidence is systematically ignored, manipulated, misinterpreted, fabricated, and otherwise molested. “Bad Science” is both funny and alarming. It's a recommended read for … anybody, really.

Ben Goldacre is a man on a mission. He wants to teach the general public about science. About what it is: Careful interpretation of results from properly conducted experiments. But most of all, Goldacre wants to teach us what science is not about: Unquestioningly accepting unsubstantiated claims from authoritative figures.

The book starts out lightly, describing fairly innocuous cases of bad science. For example, Aqua Detox is a treatment for getting rid of all the toxins that accumulate in your body throughout your life (or something along those lines). Essentially, the treatment consists of putting your feet into a bath of salt water, through which a small electrical current flows. The effectiveness of the treatment is obvious: The water turns brown and a foul smell is released—clear evidence of toxins leaving your body, right? In actuality, the brown color is due to rusting electrodes and the smell is the result of chlorine being released from the water. Both are the result of electrolysis and occur regardless of whether you have put your feet in the bath or not (if you are interested you can work out the details for yourself with a little high-school level chemistry). I think this is pretty funny, because a) you're an ass …