The Neuro Times

Ink Blots or Profile Plots: Notes to Roderick Buchanan's 1997 Article in Science, Technology and Human Values

2012-05-29T16:24:00.003-04:00

Roderick D. Buchanan's essay is both fascinating and informative, and it has really helped me to think about how personality inventories and projective tests worked together in modernity and postmodernity. As I was reading it, I took fairly extensive notes from the work. These may well interest regular readers. Where appropriate, I provide a bit of context. My comments below are in bold italics.

Buchanan begins his essay by setting up a comparison between the Rorschach Ink Blot Test and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (hereafter MMPI). While it is clear the Buchanan's past essays examined the emergence of the MMPI and the controversy it invited in the 1960s, this particular essay focuses on the question of how tools change as contexts change and how together tools and contexts produced successful diagnostic work in psychology (and I would add neurology and psychiatry too).

It is clear that Buchanan regards both tests as part-and-parcel of the story of postwar psychology's professionalization.

"Changing conceptions of the purpose and use of the MMPI and the Rorschach paralleled the changing context and charactersitics of clinical work since the Depression - from asylum to private practice, from test-artisan to psychotherapist. The MMPI proved enduringly useful in defining the changing professional identity of the clinical psychologist. MMPI researchers and users adjust to, and adjusted, the standards of empiricism developed in the academy and the new priorities of postwar clinical practice. (169)"

In the world post-Wündt, experimental psychology as a movement (think Titchner) began to dominate the American institutional structure of psychology in academia.

"Binet-type intelligence testing was the primary technology for marketing the practical capabilities of early American psychologists." (169)

And thus it was that applied psychologists and psychiatrists found themselves increasingly rivals in the medical landscape.

"Since the turn of the century, the mental hygiene movment had helped American psychiatrists overcome their traditional isolation as custodia caregivers in the state asylums. This, in turn, created opportunities for allied professional groups. Applied psychologists with an interest in learning and psychopathology - those beginning to define the emerge field of clinical psychology - found work in state mental hospitals, traning schools for the mentally defective, child guidance clinics, and psychoeducational clinics affiliated with schools and universities." (170)

Neurologists had mixed feelings about emergent clinical psychology.

"For Cornell neurologist Charles L. Dana, clinical psychologists were in much need "of an uplift and a delimitation of their good work." He caustioned his colleagues by asking whether this psychology might be, like a woman, a "desirable calamity". (171)

Curiously, it seems that the evident value of testing was not foreseen initially by clinical psychologists, who might well have protested remarks like those by Dana.

"Clinical psychologists, however, came to perceive the testing role as both second-rung and restrictive." (172)

Partly this was because the promises of "psychometrics" were not as clearly realized as many had hoped they would be. But soon psychological tests expanded and became more powerful.

"The earliest personality inventories were based on an extension of the intelligence testing model, though with certain important modifications." (173)

There perhaps most novel feature:-

"Like intellengence scales, these tests assumed that the important components of psychological functioning were present to some degree in all individuals; personality inventory items operationalized the measurement of these magnitudes. Item responses could then be combined to give an indication of an individual's tendency toward psychopathology or the strength of a personality attribute. Response totals were given meaning through comparison with a distribution of scores of a group of respondents."

And (this is very smart):-

"The personality inventories cosntructed two social worlds: one for the omniscient psychologist-tester and one for the passive, naive test "subject". No room for any negotiation of item meaning was envisaged; items had a fixed meaning understood by the psychologist and imposed upon the subject through the technology." (p. 174)

From here the essay moves towards exploring the objects of its comparison. First up: The Rorschach, which arrived in America in 1924.

"The respondent was interpreted as "projecting" his or her feelings, emotions, and underlying personality in response to the test stimulus. Individual differences in the style and content of responses were assumed to be a function of personality differences." (175)

The Rorschach quickly - albeit in limited fashion - found footholds in institutes and clinics. It also spawned imitators such as Henry Murray's TAT. It was marketed to biomedical and social science audiences. And it was critiqued in the late-interwar period for its lack of system and haphazard standards. The quote below suggests in fact that there was a Romantic component to the Rorschach.

"An interdependent mix of qualitative and quantitative data was blended together to form an overall psychodyamic intepretation. Rorschach testing contrasted sharply with traditional psychometrics, where numerical scores on linear scales were intepreted in comparison to population distribution. Additionally, the Rorschach was very open-ended: the ten stimulus cards allowed multiple response possibilities, within the constraints of the particular administrative framework employed. In sum, it was the antithesis of American psychometry." (176)

The Rorschach was easily applicable - it did not require high intellegence etc to participate in the test situation. In this sense, it was a means for overcoming the problem of the patient.

"For the test-taker, the Rorschach was less threatening and overtly evaluative than conventional tests and interviews; it was an enjoyable game for man, especially children." (177)

One fascinating feature was how the idea of technology and the Rorschach blended together.

"Psychologists touted the Rorschach as a kind of personality "X-ray," not for the first time borrowing a metaphor from medicine to describe (and legitimate) their work." (177)

The test also offered and artiful clinical style:-

"Projective techniques provided clinical psychologists with the technical basis for a specialized, relevant expertise and elevated testing to artful clinical craft." (178)

Buchanan then turns to his second object of comparison, the MMPI, which was developed by Starke Hathaway and John McKinley. Interestingly, he claims without citation that:-

"Hathaway and McKinley used the local version of psychiatric classification to define scales, hoping that this would guarantee its relevance in day-to-day psychiatric work." (178)

In addition:

"Items that showed large frequency differentials were assembled in scales so as to maximize the separation between a diagnosis-specific psychiatric group and normal or psychiatric patients in general." (179)

The individual's responses to the questions mattered not at all, and:-

"Thus the actual content of the item was, for the purposes of scale construction, irrelevant. Only the aggregate pattern of responses to items was important for the purposes of scale construction." (179)

And:-

"The subjects would have little idea what their responses might mean. Again, psychologists had the final say on how test results should be intepreted." (179)

Subsequent years saw the MMPI popularized through chiefly military applications (although why this did not happen with the projective tests is something ignored here). However, the postwar institutionalization of psychology (and psychiatry and neurology) was enormous. What a difference a war had made!

"MMPI research and use during and just after the war took place amid these changes in the mental health field and displayed a transitional instability. Attempts to corroborate or predict psychiatric diagnoses with the MMPI, Hathaway and McKinley's original goal, were only moderately successful. In these terms the test "failed". The MMPI had promised enhanced professional legitimacy for psychologists but used biomedical psychiatry as the scientific yardstick and dominant professional model." (181-82).

Indeed:-

"The MMPI's debt to psychiatry was written off as clinical psychologists began to outline a more distinctive professional and intellectual agenda. Outspoken criticism of psychiatric diagnosis had been almost unthinkabout for clinical psychologists prior to the war; in the postwar years, it became commonplace." (182)

Hathaway, with another collaborator, created an atlas that made MMPI intepretation easier. It set out to match types with MMPI codes.

"Despite the medical legacy of its construction, despite an item content that leaned heavily toward somatic symptomatology, the MMPI was demedicalized. Instead, it was now conceived as a measure of psychological character." (p. 183)

And the MMPI became very popular:-

"Use of the MMPI quickly spread westward, but eastward with the same momentum. Few Minnesota clinical graduates obtained positions in the East after the war. Lacking such personal sponsorship, the MMPI was virtually excluded from Ivy League schools in the 1950s." (184)

In this way, the MMPI became a tool by which psychology began to standardize its clinical practices. Statistics were especially important in that process. In addition:-

"Higher qualification levels and sheer numbers had given clinical psychologists a sense of legitimacy and power that backed a more aggressive marketing of their services." (p. 189)

Buchanan argues that partly this was the case because the MMPI was more efficient than the Rorschach. I'm not sure that I agree on this point.

"The MMPI had the advantage of being far more labor efficient for the clinical psychologist than rival projective tests, particularly the Rorschach. The MMPI was lengthy, with many scoring and interpretive peculiarities. However, the development of booklet format and machine scoring made sure that giving the test taxed only the goodwill of test respondents." (190-91)

By contrast:-

"Although labor time for the total testing service would vary, administering, scoring, and interpreting a single Rorschach might take up to four or five hours of the clinician's time. This was far longer than would usually be the case with the MMPI." (192)

Buchanan concludes his article with the following observation:

"The contrasting stories of the MMPI and Rorschach offer compelling examples of the co-production of tool and context. The MMPI initially reflected the subordinate position of psychologists' prewar hospital work. As clinical psychologists made a self-conscious break from a medically-defined identity and model of mental maladjustment, the test was reinterpreted accordingly. The easy administration and scoring the MMPI, and the formalized strategies developed for its interpretation, promised and delivered a labor-efficient package." (p. 193)

Whither the Rorschach?

"As academia became more crucial for the teaching of testing, the "unscientific" tag stuck." (194)

When something looks like science we assume it is....

2012-05-29T07:18:00.001-04:00

In an essay describing Leonardo's self-fashioning, Darin Hayton has this smart observation:

The identity of science and the authority it enjoys in our modern world often inform how we categorize past activities. In a sophisticated version of Collingwood’s scissors-and-paste history when something looks like science to us we assume it is science. Here the historian in the present decides what was science in the past and then goes off in search of it. The historian then compiles a story to support those decisions. The historian determines both the appropriate questions or topics and the legitmate answers or accounts. Such an approach seems to work fine, giving us histories populated with names like Copernicus, Vesalius, Kepler, Harvey, Galileo, Descartes, Boyle, Newton, etc.

And he follows it up with some fascinating reflections.

N. B. Why the Environmental Movement and Neurohistory?

2012-05-22T09:41:00.000-04:00

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring treated the organism as normal and natural. Throughout human history, the environment was taken to be constant and therefore also "normal". Environmental change was gradual. And then something happened: humans began to change the earth's environment in radical ways. The Enlightenment saw emergent human migrations, mercantile economics, proto-capitalism turning into capitalism, and proto-industrialization becoming full scale industrialization. Putting it perhaps too dramatically humans began making their environment unnatural and therefore it threatened the human ability to adapt to environmental changes.

One can see here the makings of an argument for neurohistory; presumably putative environmental changes altered brains. Human brains became maladapted from their "natural" adaptations. Maladaption occurred quickly. Theo Colborn et al's Our Stolen Future (link here) comes to mind as a sequel to such arguments; their neuroendocrine analysis makes a strong case for raising concerns about heavy metals and other toxins and human health.

From a distance, then, we begin to see a convergence between neurohistory and the environmental movement. Does the environmental movement really need the brain? Or is this yet another way in which neuroculture spreads?

The Return of Neurohistory

2012-05-21T10:00:00.001-04:00

News reached me today of the formation of a web-forum for Neurohistory. Discipline formation follows rather typical patterns. I would therefore predict that soon there will be a new journal, a society, and thereafter courses will appear in many universities.

This is the long overdue follow-up to last year’s email, to let you know that the Neurohistory forum is up and running at this site: http://www.neurohistory.ucla.edu/neurohistory-web-forum. Our thanks to Lynn Hunt and her group at UCLA for providing the host and tech support. A link to opt-in to a subscription to a mailing list also should have arrived in your inbox. If it hasn't arrived, or got lost or re-directed to your spam folder, please let us the list admin know at neurohistory.net@gmail.com.

The contents of the forum are still somewhat skeletal; among other things, we haven’t yet tried to put together anything like a complete bibliography (check under Resources), in part because we need to put more thought into the categories. Under the most expansive understanding of the field, the bibliography could range from psychohistory and some areas of evolutionary psychology to cognitive archaeology and the history of addiction, and from books and articles that constitute solid contributions to the field of neurohistory to important works that make promising allusions. The list of relevant papers in neuroscience alone could go on for pages. Is more necessarily better? We would welcome thoughts about this, as well as any suggestions you might have about content and form. One thing we would certainly like to develop is a page for syllabi or for threads describing how you have worked neurohistorical perspectives into your courses. Please do take a moment to explore the site and send along suggestions or ideas. It would be helpful to constitute a steering committee; if you would like to volunteer, write to Dan Smail at smail@fas.harvard.edu.

I rather regret that students studying history will now be even less likely to read Braudel, Collingwood, Carr, Ginzburg, Hobsbawm, Oakeshott, or Thompson. I can, of course, see how our collective fixation on "ends" and "technology" makes neurohistory the logical replacement of history in the epoch of postmodernity. Yet it is still depressing to think of undergraduates majoring in history reading maintenance manuals of MRI machines and examining EEG prints to detect our paleolithic, hard-wired and inevitably determined patterns of behavior - all in the name of scholarly respectability. It is still sadder to think about the undergraduates majoring in neuroscience who will eventually take a neurohistory course in lieu of a course focused upon Chinese, Japanese, African or European history, and thus have even fewer opportunities to read, for example, Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson, or De Tocqueville.

A final thought: the most challenging course I ever took as an undergraduate was Physical Biochemistry. Trust me: enzyme kinetics, quantum problems are tough going. There is one reason only that I passed that course. I was taking "History of Modern Physics" at the same time, and I was reading the primary sources to the science I was endeavoring to learn by textbook, lecture, and pen and problem. Without the history, I would have been sunk.

Can the Faculty Be Saved? Some Thoughts on Anthony Grafton's Essays in the New York Review of Books

2012-05-13T17:30:00.002-04:00

Changing the world always takes time, and the way in which a book can be the agent of change needs a fair amount of explaining.

Anthony Grafton (here)

Anthony Grafton's books are brilliant. His writing is beautiful, clear and provocative. For me, his history-telling falls somewhere between Marc Bloch and Carlo Ginzburg, with an historiographic twist of R. G. Collingwood. In any case, it is impossible to imagine him as anything but an inspiring teacher and mentor. And he possesses an incredible ability to gut books; to reveal their nuance, to identify their spirit, unpack their deficiencies, and then, finally, to aim his readers towards their possible futures. These are rare qualities, and inspiring ones too.

In two recent essays in the New York Review of Books, Grafton has turned his eye towards a seemingly emergent genre: works of analysis dedicated to analyzing our universities and to explaining "why they are failing" (here) and, more hopefully, how they might be saved (here). In the former essay, he observed that perhaps there was a different kind of crisis taking shape, one of empathy and society:

After all, as many observers have pointed out, this is the way we live now, and room remains for exceptions and for hope. Still, the dark hordes of forgotten students who leave the university as Napoleon’s army left Russia, uninspired by their courses, wounded in many cases by what they experience as their own failures, weighed down by their debts, need to be seen and heard. Perhaps some of those who write seriously about universities could stop worrying so much about who gets into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton and start worrying about the much larger numbers who don’t make it through Illinois and West Virginia, Vermont and Texas.... Polemics about the death of the humanities, however eloquent, won’t remedy the inhumanities that thousands of students encounter, predictably, year by year.

I suspect that the allusion at work in Grafton's reference to Napoleon's army was not the actual historical events of 1812 but the rather more urgent historical questions central to Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace: Could any individual have changed the course of this history? In what ways were all people products of their historical circumstances? What choices did they have? Were alternatives available to them? Did they have any impact at all on the way in which events and transformations took place in their worlds? Did they see their world clearly? These are the questions we really seem to be asking now about the purpose of the humanities and social sciences as well as the status of our universities.

Indeed, in many respects, the suffering that Grafton directs our attention towards - those forgotten and wounded students of non-elite institutions - conjure up rather starkly the ironies and contradictions of Russian aristocratic society. Our world is not so different. A reader of War and Peace is always aware that underpinning the tragic moments of Andrei, Nikolai, or Natasha is a huge, unwieldy and intricate social system of peasants, Christian orthodoxy, inevitable industrialization, conspicuous consumption, nepotism, desperate poverty, cultural - at any rate French - imperialism, to say nothing of deep indebtedness and falling productivity. Like I said - not so different from our contemporary moment.

Although we live in a different age with different contradictions it is not so hard to understand why the secular institutions at the heart of our cultural order always must stand rather precariously. If a society and a faculty can so easily rage against and also promote the dying of the humanities while forgetting the people at the heart of these changes, then it may well be that that same society, and those same faculty, may forget eventually even to protect their most hallowed and revered institutions as well. In his more recent essay, a review of Andrew Delbanco's College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, Grafton notes that "In research universities, passionate and effective undergraduate teaching offers no prestige, no profit, and no prospect of permanence. A governing scientific ideal, which emphasizes the ongoing transformation of all fields of knowledge, relegates the transmission of knowledge to at best a secondary status."

Is not this really the place of crisis? And it is not really the newly governing ideal that is the culprit, although Grafton directs our attention towards it, but rather it is the unwillingness to value the teaching, to demand that it be recognized for its intrinsic worth. This problem is not solely for the humanities and social sciences either. How many universities, even elite ones, teach introductory courses with less than twenty students in calculus, trigonometry, physics, chemistry, fluids and mechanics, accounting, statistics, and biology? And let all the faculty who pride themselves on teaching those surveys raise their hands too.

Grafton, acknowledges these sad facts, writing once again of the humanities: "Saddest of all, the serious courses on the bases of the Western tradition that [are] best adapted to opening minds and building characters are rarely required. And even at Columbia and Chicago, where students have to take them, they are mostly taught by younger faculty and graduate students who can be assigned to them, along with a few true believers from the older faculty. Most younger professors look forward to their release from this sort of required generalist teaching, for which they have neither the training nor the taste." He does not recognize that similar circumstances prevail in the sciences, maths, and business courses too. Thus, we may generalize his observations, that:

What’s missing [from graduate school] is not training in teaching, though this could certainly be improved and made more systematic, but something at once tenuous, essential, and difficult to create: a sincere belief that teaching should play a substantive part in choosing university faculty, and a grasp of how to evaluate and promote it in a rigorous way.

If this were the only problem, then universities could likely solve it. But it is not really the disease, but rather the most evident symptom. The complaint is that somehow the faculty writ large appear to have begun dreaming of bigger things, different ambitions, and loftier status. And that's all well and good if Ted Lectures, Presidential Commissions, and punditry are the things we wish to laud, but maybe it would be better if some of us would dream a little bit more loudly against those things in favor of dusty books, crappy laboratory equipment, and the joys of the footnote.

Wouldn't it be novel if, for example, our academic conferences took place on our campuses? And if instead of sleeping in Marriott's, we slept in dorm rooms? After all our predecessors did that - didn't they? And how about thinking about how we transmit our knowledge? And maybe having conversations about our values and ideals? And talking about why it is that so many graduate students vanish? And why so many of our undergraduates carry mortgage size debts when they leave our institutions. And whether tenure and promotion systems need to be changed? And whether the peer-review system works? Or how about why open source journals are not good enough?

In some sense, the conversation that is missing is the one where the faculty talk about what we're doing and why and what we are prepared to give up for our profession and our students so that our knowledge and passion and ideas survive. Perhaps instead of letting our departments hire and exploit adjuncts we should teach more, not less. Maybe we have a duty to work against grade inflation and make it normal again for a "C" to be evidence of achievement. If our students really are academically adrift, what are our responsibilities to them?

I'd appeal here to several historical examples. Ginzburg's miller cared about books he couldn't really read because he mysteriously cared, no matter the Inquisition. John Milton, some claim, knew everything there was to know. Is it so wrong to try? Samuel Johnson was sometimes homeless. Our times can hardly be claimed as dangerous as those of De Staël, salons, and all (rhyme intended). The 19th century - the world of Matthew Arnold, John Henry Newman, Thomas Henry Huxley - saw no end of efforts to reform education and make it available to the masses.

Ask yourself seriously: what else would you rather be doing? Somehow our current complaints seem rather shallow. We seem not to be living up to our ideals or our heroic idols. We seem not even capable of being fascinated by what academia has achieved. Write a list of the names of the last century's scholars - it is an amazing list. Think of our Republic of Letters! Maybe we should try looking forward; may be we should look for languages and ideals for our Age. To be sure, it is right to worry about our economic condition and the Taylorist nature of institutions. However, the cenotaphs and epitaphs to the university have become a bit thick of late. Shouldn't we instead cultivate the courage to protect our students and our values and celebrate our collective accomplishments despite these realities? After all, that path is fairly well worn, if a bit harder to walk.

The Ironies of Academic Publishing: A Manifesto?

2012-05-09T09:12:00.004-04:00

Dive into the archives of the Royal Society of Medicine in London, and it won't be long before you come across letters pledging to subscribe to monographs. What are these epistolary sources? Long before it was a commonplace for academics to publish books with university presses, scientists and academicians supported the publication of monographs by soliciting purchase agreements from their friends and colleagues. Fifty or sixty individuals would agree to buy a book, and in this way many of the classic studies of the nineteenth and early twentieth century found their way from publishers into university libraries and private collections.

Times have changed. But academics still publish books. And in history, for example, the academic monograph remains the game changer. Over the last three generations, the monograph has so risen in stature that it has become the hallmark of mid-career achievement and promotion within university systems. The monograph is the global standard of academic success. An historian might publish fifty articles in a lifetime of effort, but without a book, his or her colleagues would typically regard him or her as a scholar who never realized their full promise. The book is the promised land, and for many young scholars their doctoral dissertation is the road map for getting them there (never mind what this guy says. Oh and similar thoughts about museums here.)

Prospective authors need to acquire a rather remarkable habitus in their pursuit of book-publishing in academia. The Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University accordingly offers excellent advice on how to fashion a dissertation into a seemingly book-worthy project. They note that it is often informal networks that achieve the desired end: "Some presses prefer authors to approach them through personal contacts; cold submissions are disfavoured. Others do not encourage communication through private channels. Talk to supervisors and those who have previously published about the vagaries of each publisher." They also observe that authors should prepare themselves for a "frustrating time lag" after they submit their first prospectus.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education to Inside Higher Education, the myriad advice columns that have focused on publishing the first academic monograph all call attention to the fact that a dissertation is different from a book. Indeed this fact might be called the first cliche about academic publishing. Again the Cambridge HPS column advises that: "Your thesis may lose quite a lot of material before publication, especially in a history PhD. Complex footnoting, for example, which works to establish your credentials in the PhD, is not necessarily essential in a book."

These facts conjure up the first irony. Generally academic books are supposed to possess sustained arguments, be mildly revisionist, and appeal to a wider community of scholars. A newly-minted PhD supposedly finds that the work he or she has slaved over for as long as a decade doesn't qualify for any of these categories.

But an ethnographer of academia might be forgiven for immediately pointing to evidence against these claims. Firstly many dissertations are reviewed and many are published by ProQuest. It seems likely that the same academics who review those dissertations as book proposals - the people who create the frustrating time lag - could be found eagerly checking out ProQuest dissertations in their own university libraries and greedily acquiring the knowledge of their junior colleagues. Were there really no market, then it seems unlikely that ProQuest could survive at all.

But the ironies do not simply stop there. If efforts to make books appealing to a wider market really succeeded, then it seems likely that authors would not have to find subventions for books, pay professional indexers, and sometimes pay professional copy-editors (at the American Association for the History of Medicine I actually met two individuals who have made lucrative careers by providing essentially ghost-writing services to academics). And by the way - this pay structure is truer for the sciences.

But even when authors manage to ~~pay for~~ do all of these things, academic books remain expensive for institutional and individual purchasing. It is common for academic books to sell for more than $50.00. And in book series prices can be much greater. Books published for instance in the Routledge Series in History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, which are often excellent and important works, are regularly priced higher than $125 - well out of my price range and I imagine their books don't sell well in the Global South. Such prices could be taken as an indication that there is little difference between the market for dissertations and academic monographs. In other words, the cliches seem somewhat overwrought in comparison with market conditions.

There is no good reason for this system any more. In the same year that L. Stephen Jacyna and I published The Neurological Patient in History with Rochester Studies in Medical History, my father self-published his novella The Far End of the Park. Both of our books have nice covers. Both of our books are beautifully typeset. Yet his book costs a fraction of ours and is already available for electronic readers. Ours is expensive and not yet available electronically.

Now in the instance of The Neurological Patient in History, a number of points can be attributed to the higher cost. The press poured a great deal of energy into the volume. Edited volumes are notoriously tricky to make cohere together, and we benefited enormously from all of their work. So these observations are not sour grapes. Nevertheless when my father's book is compared to our book, the difference between the two is impossible to spot. And that is a third irony.

Of course there would be real perils if academics began self-publishing without some systems of peer-review in place. Yet in the case of converting dissertations to books, one could hardly argue that a system of peer-review has not been in place. Either the viva process works - or it doesn't. And if scholars feel it doesn't work, then that raises many different issues that have less to do with publishing and more to do with graduate education.

But we can push this issue further. My father's book actually generates income and at a much higher percentage than any academic book would for any author (I'm not saying he's making money). Many complain that academic studies have no evident value. The recent fervor at the Chronicle of Higher Education is just one example among many of the conservative cliches (discussion here) that routinely denigrate good academic work on the basis that supposedly no one cares about it. The experience post-graduate school actually seemingly validates those conservative gripes; shopping a book prospectus can be a totally humiliating experience, especially because the book supposedly passed academic muster already and sometimes even won a prize along the way. What better way to answer the critics than to point to the existence of an audience for academic work. The determinants standing in the way are gatekeepers in publishing and the exigencies of the professional publishing world - which frankly have nothing to do with scholarship.

Naomi Schaefer Riley - may her name live in infamy forever- was quoted in The Huffington Post as saying: "I read some academic publications ... but there are not enough hours in the day or money in the world to get me to read a dissertation on historical black midwifery. In fact, I’d venture to say that fewer than 20 people in the whole world will read it." That just shows how incredibly stupid Riley is and how backwards current trends are in contemporary academic publishing. Factually I am quite certain that I know at least one hundred people who would buy a book on black midwifery (see the AAHM group Facebook page). I suspect that globally there is an audience approaching approximately ten thousand customers for a book on that topic (there are 5000 midwives in the USA alone), provided it were priced correctly, marketed via social networking, and readily available for download (7 billion people means there is whole big market for ideas). Riley is clearly no medical historian; people are voracious readers. It is just that most readers can't afford (or won't pay for) a $75 dollar book. But they are interested, and the world of academic publishing is actually preventing them from accessing those books.

So here's the picture: young academics - often broke and being exploited as adjuncts - have been told that their dissertation qualified them for a PhD. Their work is being disseminated in articles and by ProQuest. Others are already making use of their ideas, and idiots like Riley make fun of their lack of success (which has nothing to do with the merits of their scholarship). Meanwhile, academic publishers (and their reviewers) are telling young academics that their work is simply too niche and too scholarly. Moreover, if the young academic succeeds in publishing, then their ideas will be locked up forever in a monograph that not only pays them next to nothing for their labor but also makes their ideas far too expensive for most members of the academic community across the globe to purchase.

Meanwhile, their senior colleagues admit that it is becoming harder to publish monographs, but they continue to insist that the path to academic advancement is publishing a scholarly monograph with a university press. That is, by the way, a fourth irony. So even as my father can publish his book in a global market with a vanity press and sell it at a fraction of the cost while reaping a higher percentage return personally, junior academics who have had their dissertation peer-reviewed can't.

Putting it mildly - this system is stupid.

There may be a path forward here. The issue remains that monographs need to be peer-reviewed. It seems therefore necessary for academics to change with the times and create not-for-profit, peer-reviewer networks. These networks would rigorously peer-review works in exchange for a small percentage of sales from the first two years following publication. Such networks would be charged with making sure that the authors and reviewers have no preexisting relationship. The percentage would be paid to reviewers as an incentive for them to their jobs well.

These systems of peer-review should also be open, along the lines of, for example, the BMJ publishing group. Authors would know who their reviewers were and reviewers would know who the authors were, and it would be expected that they would form a positive relationship (such as Dissertation Reviews encourages between their reviewers and authors). The peer-review networks would only authorize books that had passed muster with all reviewers and such networks would work as mediating authorities in circumstances were there were irreconcilable differences between parties.

Authors would self-publish their works, but the reviewer networks would provide a page for each book that acknowledged that it was a work recognized by a community of scholars and the peer-reviews of the book would be published online so that scholars could compare the finished product to the original reviews. Thereafter, the author would be responsible for marketing the volume. In a world of blogs, twitter, websites, and social media, the returns to the author would be invariably higher. But, more importantly, the return for readers would be even larger, since books that would have been formerly priced out of reach or not available at all would now form a part of the library collection of humanity that is the internet. It really is time for academia 4.0.

TTT Redux

2012-05-06T17:15:00.000-04:00

The conference began with three papers that gave an architecture to the imbricate nature of psychology, psychiatry, and neurology/neurosurgery. Cutting across all of these talks were medical and scientific concerns about the status and technique of psychotherapy. Thus in Jeremy’s talk, the quixotic émigré figure of Hugo Münsterberg – then American’s pre-eminent psychologist - introduced us to not only his particular form of psychotherapy but located that form within the shifting status of psychology as an applied subject. Jeremy reminded us, however, to look beyond the ivory tower’s wall andthe cloistered space of the clinic to see the wider setting of psychology, which included in his talk a rather provocative map featuring the Emmanuel Church and the Church of Christian Science adopting a seeming tactical position against Harvard psychology: the huns were literary at the ivory tower’s gates.

Similarly Katja’s paper centered upon the question of engagement between psychoanalysis and neurology. Katja called our attention to the intriguing figure of Paul Schilder. Trained in the Meynert-Wernicke tradition of neuropsychiatry, Schilder clearly had, as she put it, an “ambivalent relationship to psychoanalysis”. In her case study of his theories of body image, Schilder seems to have deviated from the psychoanalytic tradition of interpreting and making manifest patient responses and moreover committed the heresy of taking the patient at her word. Such a view placed Schilder on the margins, and perhaps it was for this reason that Katja infers that he moved to America. In America, Schilder found Adolf Meyer, who emerges in her story as also conflicted about the limits of psychoanalysis. The subtly of Katja’s story – it seems to me – was in its revealing of the tensions between and within the psychoanalytic tradition and its slippages in the somatic traditions of neurology/neurosurgery.

Susan’s paper took us further into the world of Baltimore psychiatry and investigated those slippages still further. Susan described Adolf Meyer as America’s preminent psychiatrist. She noted that Meyer’s psychobiology drew heavily upon a deeply biologized account of the human nervous system. The figures of John Hughlings Jackson, and thus Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer were not far away. And yet there was a thread of American pragamaticism too, of common sense, throughout Meyer’s paradigm and therapeutic commitments. Susan showed us how both were eventuated within the Phipps Clinic – a world in which patients (and it seems also Meyer himself) were obsessively observed, recorded, analyzed, and then when possible intervened upon. It was as though Meyer created a miniature world of everyday things and habits, a world in which he was embedded with literally a stenographer peering over his own shoulder – all of which functioned as a result of a huge administrative apparatus for organizing, filing and categorizing the paper trail left in the wake of the Meyer project.

In many respects, Meyer’s world anticipated the world of medicine we encountered in Nicholas' paper. Nick’s story of fainting, of blood, of personality, of donar psychology – these were all predicated upon the structure of state medicine, a medicine in some sense only possible in the context of total war. The fascinating feature of Nick’s paper was that it showed how blood is always the forgotten tissue in the story of brainhood. Is blood part of the brain? Is the barrier between the blood and brain truly a barrier – or as seemingly innocuous chemical things permeate that barrier is it possible that more serious things like personality also accompany it. Whatever the case, blood and blood transfusions are crucial to the story of the emergence of not only neurosurgery and neurology but also in a chemical way, blood literally makes the neurochemical self a possibility too. But unlike the brain – blood is most definitely not fixed. Or if it is, then the body and the brain are in serious danger, and selfhood itself is in doubt.

We also encountered selfhood in Jesse’s remarks on transgenic mice and Alzheimer’s disease. Leaving to one side the question of whether the mice do represent a model of AD, what’s clear is that mouse models emerged in a very peculiar epoch – post the Bayh-Dole Act – such mice conjure up questions of public good and private concerns and thus the ways in the last three decades that the university has changed as a site of knowledge. Jesse, moreover, pushed us to think about how these mice have constructed human identity. It seems clear, at least to me, that at the core of such questions is the problem of postmodern science’s ever increasing desire to hype and – as scholar Mark Robinson calls it – its tendency to speculate on the future returns of technology or novel therapies.

I can’t help but see then in Jess’s talk a cultural structure that also underpins Tobias' subtle enthography, which increasingly seemed to me to be as much an ethnography of the historians of the mind and brain sciences as it was an ethnography of the neuro-practitioners . Tobias called our attention to the way in which a certain formulation – one that privileges the idea of fixed brain – has become a dominant presupposition of historiography. In this way, he charged us to look closely at the ways in which our own histories – which, yes, are “critical,” “rigorous,” etc – sometimes accidently continue the project of making the – as Fabio de Sio terms it – “leviathan subject of the leviathan brain.”

Rachel then helped us think about technique – as seen from a broad historical and philosophical view. Rachel pointed out that no single view of technique adequately captures it meanings for different disciplines and in different periods. Indeed, Rachel described how technique in music, for example, could be seen as a rather ambivalent idea; she alerted us to the view that sometimes scholars argued that too much faith was placed in the powers of technique – suggesting that in at least a meritocratic world, in a world where careers are open to talent, technique – which can be acquired – may not be adequate to the task of competing with genius. I think we were left with the impression that “technique” could teach competence but not necessarily promise success, and could be in some cases as much as slander as a compliment.

In some sense, Heidi’s paper on the stereoscope enlarged upon these ideas about technique, expanding through several encounters with science, applied science, leisure, technology, and nascent consumer culture. In Heidi’s paper, technique emerged as many-sided thing: there was the technique of transmitting natural knowledge through teaching people the proper usage of the stereoscope; then there was the technique of teaching people to see ‘the real’; there was the technique of setting scenes within the photographs; and there were the techniques of developing the photographs themselves. Heidi’s paper recalls and at the same time also contextualizes in important ways Hugo Münsterberg’s psychotechniks. It also recalls the commonsense world of Adolf Meyer’s Phipps Clinic in which habits in everyday things had to be taught and reinforced. All of these papers capture in a rather unique way a transnational Atlantic culture - I’m thinking Daniel Rogers here – of progressive and modernist ideals and actions, as well as the pragmatic uses and limits of technology in an age of mass industrialization.

Freud, of course, was a product of that culture; and among Freud’s admirers was the figure of Otto Pötzl, introduced by Scott. Pötzl, as we encountered him in Scott’s paper, emerged as something of illusionist who could on one hand read the minds of the blind and see in their dreams what they had not seen in their waking states, and on the other he produced his readings from photographs which he had doctored to accord with the realities of patient’s dreams. In his studies of neurological patients with traumatic brain injuries, Pötzl analyzed the novel condition “anosognosia,” i.e. an unawareness of disability. Scott’s paper recalled the figure of Paul Schilder too; both appear to have expressed a Husserl-ian faith in the truthfulness of patients’ self-reports. For Schilder, this was a heresy within orthodox psychoanalysis; for Pötzl it seems to have functioned as a mechanism for crystallizing the ‘whole’ visual experiences of even blinded patients. Perhaps what distinguished that continental tradition of neurology and neuropsychiatry – and the psychoanalytical tradition too – from that in Britain, was this faith in the report of the patient. Although the psychoanalyst was supposed to interpret, and Schilder and Pötzl appear to have broken somewhat with this ideal, British neurologists and psychiatrists seemingly saw patient reports as merely a means of furthering the cause of diagnostics. There is some discrepancy between the Anglo and the Continental tradition that appears fruitful here.

Part of what makes those differences challenging to spot was the existence of a broader modernist and literary culture. Joe’s paper and his poem directed attention to whole variety of figures – from Henry James and T. S. Elliot to William Carlos Williams and Robert Lowell. The confessional poem, a style which Joe unpacked for us, recalled for many of the historians in the room the famous stories of engagement between physicians of the mind and brain and poets like Robert Nichols and Siegfried Sassoon, or artists or Ernst Kirchner’s self-portrait as a shell shocked handless soldier juxtaposed to his comparatively realist portrait of his neurologist. Joe’s poem, moreover, invited the question of how much the literary and artistic sensibility of modernism influenced the ways in which the science and medicine of the mind and brain was constructed in the same period. Did literary techniques spill into scientific and clinical ones? Did artistic depictions of affect and sensibility determine the status of psychiatric and psychological interpretations of the norm? It is difficult to not think of Muybridge or Marey and the neurology of motion without recalling Benjamin’s later essay on mechanical reproduction, Münsterberg’s engagement with cinematography, or the seemingly repressive urge to teach people to see as exemplified by Oliver Wendell Holmes’ evangelism for the stereoscope.

Somehow encephalitis lethargic seemed to me to be located in between Pötzl and poetry. Kenton and Francisco unpacked the myriad of receptions, the scale of the literature, and disciplinary formations that arose out of the epidemic disease. Itself called many names – e.g. epidemic encephalitis and encephalitis lethargic – the disease was evidently neurological in nature. But not all who saw it regarded it as so, or at least expressed curiosity about it. It should have been discipline making, but instead it became many things. In London, neurologists never wholly adopted it as their own; in New York it became a mainstay of specialization. Meanwhile, at an international level, epidemiologists, bacteriologists, histo-pathologists, as Kenton and Francisco say in their paper, “stripped epidemic encephalitis of its significance for clinical neurology” and indeed neurologists largely ignored the condition – as they did with many others, including stroke, or as Jess showed, Alzheimer’s dementia. And perhaps this was because no condition was ever self-evidently neurological ? Neurology and psychiatry seemingly possessed this protean characteristic – everything is neurological and psychiatric and thus perhaps no area of disease and illness qualifies as their special and exclusive domain solely.

Schizophrenia must be another instance of this fact, and as Justin showed us in his paper, schizophrenia appears indispensible to both psychiatry and neurology. But no one knew, and no one knows what schizophrenia is. In the mid-1970s, psychiatrists and neurologists argued for the dopamine hypothesis of the condition. They grounded this hypothesis in two facts – one was antipsychotics; the other was amphetamine psychosis. This idea had been first introduced in the 1950s, but in the 1960s, LSD intoxication was felt to be a better model of schizophrenia; yet Justin observed that LSD counter culture – communalist, ostensibly high-minded, and pure – collided with amphetamine culture – speed, individualism, violence, and hedonism. It was in this counter-amphetamine culture that amphetamine psychosis began to be accepted as model for schizophrenia. Where this idea of a model came from is perhaps worth thinking about more. Certainly transgenic models of mice for dementia were models; and so too were snail reflexes for memory. Whatever the case, Justin’s paper calls attention to the way that the chemical theory of the nervous system had become transcendent by the 1970s, and perhaps this was due to the rise of so-called “biological psychiatry.”

Brian’s paper explored the origins of this biological revolution from the perspective of the National Institutes for Mental Health. What was striking about NIMH polic in the seventies, as recounted by Brian, is not only that NIMH seized upon biology rhetoric, they were somehow in the vanguard of advancing and promulgating it as well. In particular, Brian’s paper recalled Tobias’s concerns about the way in which formations within historiography cast aside certain stories even as they claim inevitable the way in which psychiatry became biologized. Curiously other imperatives - ones that matched Jess’s story of mice – appear in the NIMH branding of psychiatry as biology. The idea that biology and technology would furnish the most fruitful approaches to mental health became a hegemonic one from which there appeared no evident escape route. Yet, as Kenton pointed out, there is too the reality that NIMH was promoting a particular biology. It is the rhetoric of a particular notion of biology that has subsumed mental health, but this also invites the question how has mental health shaped notions of biology. In our paper, we wondered if there had been sometime a blurring between psychiatry and neurology. It is a seeming article of faith that the neuro turn must influence theories of mental illness but why we wondered would we not also say that the practices surrounding mental health exerted an influence on neurology and neuroscience. To me, both Tobias and Brian raise this possibility in clear fashions and I would say also that in the rhetoric of fMRI we are witnessing the realization of those older aspirations on mental health, mental hygiene, and neurology.

The Neuromania Antidote

2012-04-23T13:41:00.004-04:00

Steven Poole has just been cured. The antidote is called "honesty". It happens to the nicest people. It happened to me. And at some point it will surely happen to you.

Currently researchers have not yet discovered the combination of words that triggers this powerful remedy in victims of neuromania. All we know is that some combination of the words "brain", "nerves", "human nature," "cognition", "fMRI", and "scientists now know" causes a rapid proliferation of neuro-meme-eating white blood cells. We also know that some studies have shown that the words "evolution" and "instinct" have been correlated with the heightened activity of the BS-enzyme, a catalyst that aids the white blood cells in quickly targeting and destroying vestiges of neurocultural transmission.

Beware that there are immediate side-effects with the onset of the cure. The antidote immediately causes numerous, stereotyped behavioral manifestations. The first is an explosion of indignation and frustration which leads to heightened blood pressure and an outbreak of bodily tremors and shakes as well as secondary feelings of fury. The second manifestation is a burst of energy that leads to either immediate written or verbal communication as the white blood cells crush the underlying causes of neuromania.

In this second stage of the cure, it is common for treatment to produce invective, abuse, and sarcasm. These are aimed usually at the victims of the disease, who - being still very sick - are in no condition to comprehend why their enforced quarantine has suddenly struck the cured patient as a public good. In some instances, the cure leaves people with a lasting and permanent impatience with banality and can even cause reflexive public reactions to other forms of stupidity.

Usually after a matter of months or as long as a year the post-cure effects begin to subside. This subsistence often coincides with the development of a calm, patronizing, some might even say patrician acceptance of those who still suffer from this disease. In very rare instances, however, the cure leads to a prolific and steady production of anti-neuromania manifestos. Researchers now speculate that this is actually a psychological symptom caused by neuromania itself - something akin to a post-traumatic stress disorder.

In still rarer instances, people contract neuromania again. There is often very little that can be done for these individuals. The best known recommendation is to ask departments of philosophy to offer them distinguished visiting professorships.

The Decline of Big Science

2012-04-23T08:57:00.002-04:00

In an essay in the New York Review of Books, Stephen Weinberg ends The Decline of Big Science with the rare observation:

We had better not try to defend science by attacking spending on these other needs. We would lose, and would deserve to lose. Some years ago I found myself at dinner with a member of the Appropriations Committee of the Texas House of Representatives. I was impressed when she spoke eloquently about the need to spend money to improve higher education in Texas. What professor at a state university wouldn’t want to hear that? I naively asked what new source of revenue she would propose to tap. She answered, “Oh, no, I don’t want to raise taxes. We can take the money from health care.” This is not a position we should be in.

It seems to me that what is really needed is not more special pleading for one or another particular public good, but for all the people who care about these things to unite in restoring higher and more progressive tax rates, especially on investment income. I am not an economist, but I talk to economists, and I gather that dollar for dollar, government spending stimulates the economy more than tax cuts. It is simply a fallacy to say that we cannot afford increased government spending. But given the anti-tax mania that seems to be gripping the public, views like these are political poison. This is the real crisis, and not just for science.

Yet more on "Hardwired" Politics

2012-04-23T08:40:00.000-04:00

Yet another book review in The Guardian repeats that oft made conjecture that our political values are "wired" into our brains. And so we learn:

Although [Jonathan] Haidt [author of The Righteous Mind] glosses over the uncomfortable conclusions of what he is saying on issues such as race and human rights, his core point is simple and well-made: our morality, much of it wired into brains from birth, at the same time binds us together and blinds us to different configurations of morality. Gut feelings drive strategic reasoning, which can make it difficult to connect with those across the gulf, especially for liberals.

In other words, liberals are naturally incapable of understanding "patriotism" and that's because - as the author so ably describes - liberals lack the "taste-buds" for understanding loyalty, authority, and patriotism. I should know better than to respond to such drivel on Monday morning, but really?

Let me offer a modest proposal: any psychologist, neurologist, moral philosopher, or psychiatrist wishing to neurologize Left-wing misgivings about patriotism, loyalty, and authority must give three public lectures on politics in Bismarck's Germany to an audience of strict conservatives.

The Neuro End Times

2012-04-18T15:40:00.001-04:00

Living in the End Times from Studiocanoe on Vimeo.

Giant Leaps in Autism Research

2012-04-14T15:10:00.000-04:00

By Dr. Bonnie Evans

Heterocephalus glaber - the naked mole

I recently came across some research on naked mole rats which may help to cure autism. Whilst on one level it may seem implausible that such disparate things can be linked together, on another level it all makes perfect sense. The link is oxytocin, or the ‘love hormone’ as it was referred to in the 1970s, which also acts as a neurotransmitter.

Oxytocin is produced in large amounts during labour and has been associated with bonding, maternal care and the formation of attachments. Naked mole rats (right) are renowned for their collective organisation as they live in large colonies supporting the offspring of a single female. Research published in the Journal of Comparative Neurology in 2010 showed that oxytocin is abundantly available in the nucleus accumbens of this species. In contrast, cape mole rats (below) live solitary lives with fleeting bouts of copulation and short periods of support for their offspring. The researchers found that oxytocin and its receptors are absent from the nucleus accumbens of cape mole rats and suggested that oxytocin influences the formation of pro-social behaviours (Kalamatianos et al., 2010).

Georychus capensis - cape mole rat

An article published in Nature in 2005 claimed that intranasal administration of oxytocin increased trust and social co-operation in humans (Kosfeld et al., 2005). This stimulated both scientific and public interest into the role of this hormone in the treatment of psychiatric disorders in which it is believed that social abilities are lacking.

Autism is currently classed as a disorder characterised by problems with relationships and social interactions as well as repetitive and obsessive behaviours. Eric Hollander, based in New York, has conducted a series of studies on the effects of oxytocin on people diagnosed with autism and autism spectrum disorders and has found that the intranasal and intravenous administration of this hormone provided ‘therapeutic benefits for the treatment of repetitive behaviours and social deficits’ (Bartz and Hollander, 2008).

Similar studies have shown that oxytocin helps autistic individuals to recognise emotions in the tone of voice and facial expressions of others thus enabling them to build relationships. More recently, researchers in North Carolina have been giving young autistic children, some as young as three-years-old, oxytocin to see whether this encourages social interaction (http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01308749). This research is still in its early days.

The use of hormones to alter psychiatric conditions is not new. In a forthcoming article in the Journal of the History of Behavioural Sciences, I show how hormonal treatments were used to treat psychiatric conditions in Britain in the 1920s (in press – due out Summer/Fall 2012). The psychiatric use of oxytocin can be traced back to the 1990s but it is only recently that it has been specifically linked to social problems. Hopes have since grown for the development of new drugs to treat social disorders.

When neuroscientists talk about society, it is normal that we should prick up our ears and listen to what they say. ‘The social’ is an amorphous term that encompasses countless variations yet neuroscientists focus on the brain. In research proposals for neuroscientific research, as in press reports, it is common that giant leaps are made between large concepts such as ‘the social’ and unique neurotransmitters such as oxytocin. Such giant leaps are also often made between the behaviour of humans and other species. These leaps encourage intellectual curiosity and research in the neurosciences but they should also encourage similar curiosity amongst social scientists, historians and the general public. There may just be as much work to do in analyzing our ideas about autism and ‘the social’ as there is work to do in analyzing the effects of oxytocin on the brain.

Dr Bonnie Evans is interested in the development of psychology, psychoanalysis and psychiatry in the twentieth century. Her work examines the impact of demographic shifts on the formation of new psychological theories and treatment practices. She has a particular interest in the development of child psychology and psychiatry and in the treatment of female patients.

BARTZ, J. A. & HOLLANDER, E. 2008. Oxytocin and experimental therapeutics in autism spectrum disorders. In: INGA, D. N. & RAINER, L. (eds.) Progress in Brain Research. Elsevier.

KALAMATIANOS, T., FAULKES, C. G., OOSTHUIZEN, M. K., POORUN, R., BENNETT, N. C. & COEN, C. W. 2010. Telencephalic binding sites for oxytocin and social organization: A comparative study of eusocial naked mole-rats and solitary cape mole-rats. The Journal of Comparative Neurology, 518, 1792-1813.

KOSFELD, M., HEINRICHS, M., ZAK, P. J., FISCHBACHER, U. & FEHR, E. 2005. Oxytocin increases trust in humans. Nature, 435, 673-676.

E. O. Wilson's Advice to Young Students

2012-04-13T09:24:00.002-04:00

The Atlantic has a nice little piece on what E. O. Wilson thinks young scientists should do. I especially like this proposal:

Step away from the blackboard.
"In science and all its applications, what is crucial is not technical ability, but it is imagination -- the ability to form concepts with images of entities and processes pictured by intuition. I found out that advances in science rarely come upstream, from an ability to stand at a blackboard and conjure images from unfolding mathematical propositions and equations. They are instead the product of downstream imagination leading to hard work, during which mathematical reasoning may or may not prove to be relevant."

I Don't Have a Jennifer Aniston Neuron...But You Do

2012-04-12T07:06:00.000-04:00

NPR describes studies that argue that single neurons store information about famous people.

A few years ago, a UCLA neurosurgeon named Itzhak Fried, while operating on patients who suffer from debilitating epileptic seizures, discovered what he now calls the "Jennifer Aniston Neuron."

The Problem with Medical Journals

2012-04-10T09:17:00.000-04:00

Richard Smith, formerly an editor of the BMJ, is like a human howitzer rightly aimed at medical journals:

The premise for my book was that medical journals were over-influenced by the pharmaceutical industry, too fond of the mass media, and yet neglectful of patients. The research they contained was hard to interpret and prone to bias, while peer review, the process at the heart of journals and all of science, was deeply flawed. Many of the studies journals contained were fraudulent, and yet the scientific community had not responded adequately to the problem of fraud. Editors themselves also misbehaved. The authors of the studies in journals often had little to do with the work they were reporting and many had conflicts of interest that were not declared. And the whole business of medical journals was corrupt because owners were making money from restricting access to important research, most of it funded by public money. All this matters to everybody because medical journals have a strong influence on their healthcare and lives.

Technique, Technology, & Therapy in the Brain and Mind Sciences, 1850-2012

2012-04-08T10:24:00.002-04:00

Clarkson University, 4-5 May 2012. Scholars wishing to attend this event should send inquires to Stephen T. Casper.

Invited Speakers

Jesse F. Ballenger (The Penn State University) “The Development of Transgenic Mouse Models of Alzheimer's Disease”

Jeremy Blatter (Harvard University) “Psychotherapy Before the Age of Freud”

Brian Casey (Office of NIH History) “Somatizing the Psyche: the National Institute of Mental Health and the shift towards Biological Psychiatry”

Joseph Duemer (Clarkson University) “Affect & Character: The Emergence of the Modernist Self”

Rachel Fulton (Clarkson University) “What is Technique?”

Justin Garson (Hunter College, CUNY) “The Rise and Fall of the Dopamine Hypothesis of Schizophrenia”

Katja Guenther (Princeton University) “Paul Schilder and the Body Image, Or How to Do Psychoanalysis without the Unconscious”

Heidi Knoblaugh (Yale University) “The Paris School, Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Stereoscope”

Kenton Kroker & Francesco Rodriguez (York University) “Configuring Epidemic Encephalitis at the Transnational, International, and Local Levels, 1917-39”

Susan Lamb (McGill University) ”Psychoanalytic Techniques at the Phipps Clinic in Baltimore”

Scott Phelps (Harvard University) “Dream Images of Agnosia in the Poetzl Phenomenon (or How to See with Mind-Blindness)”

Rebecca Schilling & Stephen T. Casper (Clarkson University) “Of Psychometric Means: Starke R. Hathaway and the Popularization of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory”

Tobias Rees (McGill University) “Developmental Diseases – an Introduction to the Neurological Human (in Motion)”

Nicholas Whitfield (McGill University) “Minding Donors: Vasomotor Phenomena and the Search for the Altruistic Spirit”

Always Together: Neuroscience & Philosophy

2012-03-10T07:07:00.001-05:00

Barry Smith on why neuroscience and philosophy must work together (here):-

Wittgenstein once said that no one could have an experience and wonder whose experience it was. An experience I feel has to be my experience and it is conceptually impossible to think otherwise. However, when something goes awry in the injured brain the conceptually impossible becomes possible for certain patients. So the nature of consciousness and how we experience it depends on the proper functioning of the brain. We can be aware in moving our bodies that it is our own body we are moving, and we may still have a feeling of being the agent of that movement, but it may not be our conscious decisions that initiate those movements.

Teaching Fellowships in History of Medicine at UCL

2012-03-07T11:46:00.002-05:00

UCL Centre for the History of Medicine wishes to appoint two Teaching Fellows to teach modules on the intercalated BSc in History of Medicine (a one year degree course for third year medical students) and the MA in History of Medicine (job description here). Programme modules currently include Medicine in Literature, Disease in History, Madness and Society, Medicine and Modern Society, and Early Modern English Medicine. We also encourage applicants with expertise in other areas to apply. The teaching will include two / three modules (20 student contact hours per module), small-group and one-to-one tutorials, marking essays, examinations and dissertations.

The posts are available from September 2012 and are funded for one year in the first instance.

Post holders must have a PhD in History of Medicine and prior teaching experience. The post of teaching fellow is intended for early careerists who will be expected to apply for post-doctoral funding during the year of appointment. An ability to develop programme content is essential and experience with virtual learning environments such as Moodle would be an advantage.

Chart of the Day: Educational Outcomes and Socioeconomic Status in the USA

2012-03-06T08:58:00.000-05:00

Hat-tip: Paul Krugman.

Call for Papers: Technique, Technology and Therapy in the Medicine of Mind and Brain, 1850-2011

2012-03-05T08:11:00.000-05:00

We invite abstract submissions for an interdisciplinary workshop, which will be held at Clarkson University on May 4th and 5th, 2012.

Handling the brain; examining the body; preparing capillary tubes; dissecting a rat hippocampus; sectioning and staining tissue samples; stereoscopy; freezing microtomes; electroencephalography; cinematography; psychometric tests; fMRI; psychoactive drugs – these are but a few examples of techniques, technologies and therapies that have had enormous import in the medicine of the mind and brain. While receiving increasing attention over the past several decades, the clinical specialties that deal with the brain and the mind – psychiatry, psychology, neurology, neurosurgery – have mostly been discussed in isolation of one another. We therefore propose a workshop that brings together scholars who are interested in these medical specialties to address the complicated relationship between medical practice and the techniques, technologies, and therapies that inform it.

From talk therapy to stem cell therapy, from X-rays to fMRIs, from subtemporal decompression to deep-brain stimulation, over the past century and a half different kinds of techniques and technologies have shaped clinical practice and medical epistemology, while at the same time staging an intervention in the doctor-patient relationship and buttressing the cultural authority of the medical specialties of the mind and brain. Such techniques, technologies, and therapies open puzzling historical, sociological, and anthropological questions: What is the relationship between technique, technology and therapy? How have each separately constructed the medicine of the mind and brain? In what ways have they informed scientific knowledge and clinical practice? How are they circulated, exchanged, moved, and commodified? Is there an easy translation among them; are there evident disruptions and slippages between them? By inviting scholars to discuss case studies that address specific techniques and technologies, we seek to train an analytic spotlight on therapy and to shed light on the ways in which therapy played a similar or different role in the history of each of the specialties that focused on mind and brain medicine. We invite papers that explore these questions empirically or theoretically from any disciplinary perspective.

Located in Potsdam, NY, Clarkson University is a small engineering university just north of the Adirondack Mountains. Potsdam can be easily reached by car from Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal or by first flying to Ottawa, Montreal, Albany, or Syracuse and then renting a car and driving from those locations.

Please send a 300-word abstract by March 16th, 2012 to Stephen Casper and Delia Gavrus (StephenTCasper@gmail.com)

Stephen T Casper (Humanities & Social Sciences, Clarkson University)
Delia Gavrus (Social Studies of Medicine, McGill University)

Obviously everyone is interested in how brains work!

2012-03-04T15:07:00.001-05:00

A medical student reflects on five weeks in neurology training:-

This is my last week of neurology attachment. As a student, over the past five weeks I have been exposed to general neurology, the branch of medicine that deals with diseases of the brain, spinal cord, nerves and muscles. I think a major part of my enjoyment in doing this placement is because of my great interest in how the brain works (who isn't interested in how the brain works anyway?).

Does Red Bull Give You Wings?

2012-03-04T10:47:00.000-05:00

Not so much, according to an essay at Le Physiologiste:

The authors suggest that the caffeine content in the energy drink may have not been enough to enhance performance.

Brains and Zombies: A 5 Second Film

2012-03-04T07:23:00.001-05:00

Brains!!! from 5-Second Films on Vimeo.

What brain science gave one neuroeconomist...

2012-03-04T06:42:00.000-05:00

In an interview in the LA Times, neuroeconomist Paul Zak says brain science let him embrace "love" and "morality":

I think we're taking a real shot at understanding moral philosophy and social organization. Neuroeconomics gives us a new lens to understand how we've organized our world. It lets me embrace words like "morality" or "love" or "compassion" in a non-squishy way. It says, "These are real things, this is really part of our human nature, and we should embrace that."

CURE FOR ALL NERVOUS DISEASES: 1857 New York State

2012-03-03T13:10:00.000-05:00

From: The Daily Journal Ogdensburgh NY, Oct. 8, 1857