Smooth Pebbles

Why I've Gone Back to Seed - or 'Why I Blog More Happily Now'

CHANGE OF VENUE - THIS BLOG HAS MOVED ...

back to Seed's Scienceblogs, and is now under a new name;

NEURON CULTURE

The post below, which is at the new site, explains a bit more about why I moved back into that higher-profile (and higher-traffic) location.

Please change your bookmarks and RSS feaders accordingly:

Bookmark: http://scienceblogs.com/neuronculture
RSS/Atom: http://scienceblogs.com/neuronculture/index.xml

Thanks, and see you at Neuron Culture.

With this post, and with pleasure, I bring the blog formerly known as Smooth Pebbles -- now Neuron Culture (mark your RSS readers!) -- back to Scienceblogs.

Seventeen months ago I said farewell to this Scienceblogs home, at least for a time, because I had not found blogging a comfortable fit. Since then, however, as I blogged off in the hinterland, I've come to better see how this slippery but flexible form can hold a valuable place in both my own writing and in the changing world of journalism.

I've been particularly swayed by the work of bloggers innovatively exploiting the immediacy, constancy, and scalability of this weird form, both in science writing and elsewhere -- among them Carl Zmmer, Jonah Lehrer, Vaughn Bell, Tyler Cohen, Cory Doctorow, Philip Dawdy, the people at Wall Street Journal Health Blog, and Alex Ross, to name a few.

Of all, however, the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan, through both his example and his treatises on blogging, has been foremost in helping me see how I might blog more happily and productively,. There's an irony in Sullivan's influence: The biggest page hit I ever got while at Scienceblogs before was when Sullivan blogged my farewell post. It was his post that got me reading him more regularly and closely and thinking about just what he's really doing at the Daily Dish: not just reporting, explaining, and opining -- the reach of most blogs -- but both stimulating and (co-)curating a set of discussions.

Sullivan's blog and others have also shown me that blogging (for which, truly, I wish there were a prettier word) lets you track changing issues in a way that longer-form and more traditional journalism does not. As someone fond of the long form -- of immersing myself in a story and then working it till it's just so before sending it out -- I had (and still have) some trouble getting comfortable with the idea of writing more quickly on subjects I care about. Yet the blog form -- more quickly launched, more scaleable -- lets you examine issues more steadily, repeatedly, and collaboratively than traditional journalism does, and these advantages hold an increasing attraction to me.. Some my key subjects seem especially ripe for this approach.

Consider, for instance, the almost operatic crisis growing within psychiatry right now, as scandals embarrass the discipline and the drug-dominated monoamine hypothesis of depression is transformed from a badge of empiricism to a contradiction of it. I could write a book on the convolutions psychiatry is undergoing right now, and may yet do so. Yet the blogosphere is already shaping public discussion of this issue as much as more traditional newspaper and magazine stories do -- partly because blogs can visit the issue(s) more steadily and (over time) more thoroughly, and partly because the blogosphere can mix both the first-rate, invaluable mainstream reporting of people like Gardiner Harris and the digging, personal perspectives, and inside dish from people like Daniel Carlat, Philip Dawdy, Liz Spikol, and the folks at Pharmalot.

Same thing can be said for the growing momemtum for school reform, health care reform, and universal health care; the conflict in medicine between empiricism and research driven by commercial interests; and the revision of psychiatry's Diagnostic Statistical Manual.

I hope to use this space to track and contribute to all those discussions and also to track the less complicated and laden puzzles pleasures of science and medicine, like how the brain works -- not to mention music, sports, literature, and odd bits of culture.

Enough treatise. You actually came here for links? Okay: Below the fold, a few things I might have blogged on this past week had I not been enjoying the holidays, doing the drudge techy work of transferring this blog over from Typepad, and writing this:

A highly interesting review of Gladwell's "Outliers"

Micheal Nielsen gets swiftly to a problem many scientists (and not a few writers) have with Gladwell's books -- and highlights their redeeming factors as well:

All three of Malcolm Gladwell's books pose a conundrum for the would-be reviewer. The conundrum is this: while the books have many virtues, none of the books make a watertight argument for their central claims. Many scientists, trained to respect standards of proof above all else, don't like this style. A colleague I greatly respect told me he thought Gladwell's previous book, Blink , was "terrible"; it didn't meet his standards of proof. Judge Richard Posner wrote a scathing review criticizing Blink on the same grounds.

Gladwell's gift as a writer is not for justification and proof of his claims. What Gladwell does have is an extraordinary gift to use stories to explain abstract ideas in a way that is vivid and memorable, a way that brings those abstract ideas quickly to mind at later need. This shamanic gift is dangerous, for if you read his books credulously, it leaves you open to believing ideas that may be false. It%u2019s also incredibly valuable, for what you learn you internalize deeply. In my opinion, this more than makes up for whatever Gladwell's books lack in rigorous justification.

Hat tip: Neuronarrative

Technorati Tags:
Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers

WIll Smith schools Rubik's Cube

One more reason to like Will Smith.

Hat tip to kottke, who links to some other amazing Rubikiean feats.

Carl Zimmer faces the wrath

Carl Zimmer faces the wrath with cheerful good humor.

The source of his troubles:

More pebbles: items I (wanted to but) didn't get to

Boing boing spots Virgin Mary in MRI

Bird flu round-up, from Great Beyond touches a few stories reporting some unsettling human deaths from bird flu. I think people are scared to cover bird flu these days: There was so much about it 2-3 years ago, then the epidemic didn't come (we're so impatient!), and now a lot of journalists feel they were out shouting wolf. Maybe wolf is still out there.

Jonah Lehrer on Governor "Show Me the Money" Blagojevich, greed, and a version of the ultimatum game called -- I love this -- the dictator game. "When the dictator cannot see the responder - they are isolated - the dictator begins acting with the kind of unfettered greed expected by economists." (Special bonus: Andrew Sullivan's Quote of the Day is also about Blagojevich.)

Daniel Carlat on "It's not about Goodwin. It's about disclosure."

The Extensible Obama: How the POTUS-elect will use web tools to power his next presidency. From MIT's Technology Review.

The Great Beyond: Far East top in science subjects

From The Great Beyond

Far East top in science subjects

Researchers in the US have released the latest figures comparing the maths and science abilities of 4th- and 8th-grade students in countries across the globe.

Far Eastern countries dominate the top tens, with Singapore top for science in both 4th and 8th grade. In maths, Hong Kong tops the 4th grade scores, with ‘Chinese Taipei’ leading the 8th. (Image right shows the percentage of fourth-grade students who reached the TIMSS advanced international benchmark in science in the top ten countries. See full graph.)

As the New York Times points out, this should worry the US as these subjects “are crucial to economic competitiveness and research”.

“It was good to see that the United States has made some progress in math, but I was surprised by the magnitude of the gap between us and the highest performing Asian countries, and that should cause us some concern,” Ina Mullis, of the International Study Center at Boston College that directs the study, told the paper.

Say that again.

More at the Great Beyond

Get your doughboys here (aka Vegetarian dilemma)

Looks like a special effects lab, but it's a bakery that makes bread in the shape (and look) of body parts. Via Biomedicine on Display, where you can find more photos as well as a link to this YouTube video of the baked goods.

My wife is an ace baker as well as a vegetarian. Not sure what she's going to think of this.

Survey the Slippery Slope of Cognitive Enhancement

There's been a lot of buzz on the Net* about the Nature commentary on cognitive enhancement I blogged about yesterday, in which I noted that you need only think about coffee to realize what a slippery slope the cog enhancement issue presents.

If you want to experience first-hand just how slippery, take this survey, which reader Michael Lanthier kindly drew my attention to. It starts with a question about coffee and pulls you inexorably, um, downhill from there.

It's hard to take that survey without concluding the issue of enhancement offers no bright lines. if someone knows of a rigorous argument to the contrary, please chime in.

*NB this one from a chess site.

Some heavyweights vote Yes on cognitive-enhancing drugs for the healthy

This time had to come: A group that includes some serious neuro-heavyweights, such as neuroscientists Michael Gazzaniga and Ronald Kessler and the highly prominent and influential neuroethicists Hank Greely and Martha Farah, has published in Nature an essay "Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy."

In this article, we propose actions that will help society accept the benefits of enhancement, given appropriate research and evolved regulation. Prescription drugs are regulated as such not for their enhancing properties but primarily for considerations of safety and potential abuse. Still, cognitive enhancement has much to offer individuals and society, and a proper societal response will involve making enhancements available while managing their risks.

This will make uneasy many who feel our society is already overprescribed, that we have medicalized the normal, and that the drug industry has pushed a lot of this expansion of diagnostic categories and prescribed drug use. Yet Greely et alia here are not proposing we medicalize normality; they're proposing we make it okay to upgrade the normal. This is the difference between treatment and enhancement.

That difference is not as clear as it might be, of course, for it ultimately depends on what we agree to call normal. My own powers of memory and focus, for instance, probably fall within the normal range ; yet they're not as good as those possessed by some of my peers who can therefore perhaps outwork me. Taking some modafinil can close some of that gap -- and, more to the point, help me work at my own best capacity. And it's not hard to rationalize or justify: I already drink (too much) coffee to boost my energy and cognitive performance, and modafinil essentially provides a more complete coffee-achiever boost without producing jittery hands or irritability; in fact, many people find it has a nice antidepressive effect rather than producing the anxiety that too much coffee can.

And virtually no one, of course, suggests it's unfair to drink coffee -- even though I clearly drink it not to cure an ill but to enhance my already existing powers and attentiveness (such as they aren't).

So let's say I switch from coffee to modafinil. Have I done wrong? Greely et alia are saying I have not, and that I should be free to if my doctor and I agree that it's safe to do so. (Modafinial so far has not been shown to have significant ill-effects, either in clinical trials or the more robust test that wide use provides.) This is what the authors mean when they say that "cognitive-enhancing drugs seem morally equivalent to other, more familiar, enhancements."*

This is an important essay, methinks, in which some undeniably influential players make a pretty clear assertion and distinction. And it is, I'm delighted to say, free to read, unlike many things posted at the Nature site.

Update: Here are a few posts and reports on the Nature commentary:

Nature's Great Beyond blog does a bit of a roundup. Technology Review has an interview with co-author Michael Gazzniga. Commentary, meanwhile, includes posts by Nicholas Carr, who explores what I call the crucial coffee question (i.e., as above: Why not use an enhancer if its benefit-cost ratio is better than coffee's?):

I can come up with plenty of thought experiments that shake me up: imagine that the risks are better known, and that they're as much as, say, caffeine (but with more benefits). What then? What if such things turn out, many years in the future, to be necessary to work at any reasonably high level in science, since everyone else will be taking them, too? Is part of my problem with drugs that alter brain function a streak of Puritanism - would I feel better about using such things if I knew that they were guaranteed not to be enjoyable? And so on. . .I have to confess, I found such issues a lot easier to deal with inside the confines of old science fiction stories.

Bernadette Tansey, of the SF Chronicle, ask a good question: Are these drugs fair to those who simply want to live natural? (Hat tip: Knight Science Journalism Tracker) And Maia Szalavitz at HuffPost asks whether this is the beginning of the end of the drug wars.

And Benedict Carey of the Times had a good piece on this back in March.

There will be many more, and I'll try to keep up among other work.

*(I wish someone at Nature had taken some modafinil before reviewing those commas.)

Technorati Tags:
Neuroethics

Pebble Collection

A few that rolled away with the tide ...

PsychCentral not impressed with Outliers

Look Who's in the Operating Room

From the Deutches Museum, tractors as core culture

And from Boing Boing, a Studley tool chest. And I was all excited to get my little canvas toolbag yesterday.

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Technorati Tags:
Malcolm Gladwell, Medtronics, Deutsches Museum, Wildlife