It’s not that i’m not sympathetic to the idea we spend too much time in front of a screen. It’s levying the weight of that argument around some BS neurobabble. The brain, and it’s astounding capacity for change, need not enter this debate in an alarmist fashion. If we want to discuss how our society spends its time, let’s not cling onto poorly understood scientific phenomena to do so. Let’s talk about radical capitalism and the 40 hour work week. I spend 38+ hours a week online, programming, and generally living on a computer as do many contemporary workers. Talking about the brain won’t change that- but it will sell books. And I think it puts a clear perspective on the 3-4 hours a week I might spend playing games. The problem isn’t brains, games, or anything in between. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise wants to make a fast buck off you.

Susan is hoping to use her high-standing to kick off some kind of alarmist movement akin to the global warming debate. She’s even been so cheeky as to give her cause a similar sounding name “Mindchange”, so that her would be activists might have some nice banner around which to rally. Plus, it makes for some pretty obvious best-selling book titles. Maybe even a series of self-help audiobooks filled to the brim with half-truisms, folksy inspiration, and plenty of badly misunderstood science.

And that’s just the problem. Beneath the seemingly innocent wish to make a legacy and buck for herself, Susan has denigrated one big problem (global warming), disrespected the science, and mis-educated her audience. Not only that but I believe she’s obscuring the real problem. Call me radical, but if we don’t start to take serious the cultural-systemic problems that threaten our world, we’re fucked. By capitalizing on sensation, the Baroness has obscured a legitimate debate about the way we spend our lives.

I can’t imagine the extreme patience that goes into these studies! I’d love to hear more about how researchers in this area control for motion artifacts and other noise-elements. The entire data collection processes is really interesting- do let me know if you have any insight! You can read more about this research here:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-to-build-a-better-learner

Results from incon > con, non-meditators vs meditators

In a nutshell, the authors find that meditation-practitioners show faster reaction times with reduced BOLD-signal for the incongruent (compared to congruent and neutral) condition only. The regions found to be more active for non-meditators compared to meditators are the (right) “lentiform nucleus, medial frontal gyrus, and pre-central gyrus” . As this is not accompanied by any difference in accuracy, the authors interpret the finding as demonstrating  that “meditators may have maintained the focus in naming the colour with less interference of reading the word and consequently have to exert less effort to monitor the conflict and less adjustment in the motor control of the impulses to choose the correct colour button.” The authors in the conclusion review related findings and mention that differences in age could have contributed to the effect.

So, what are we to make of these findings? As is my usual style, I’ll give a bulleted review of the problems that immediately stand out, and then some explanation afterwards. I’ll preface my critique by thanking the authors for their hard work; my comments are intended only for the good of our research community.

The good:

• Sensible findings; increases in reaction time and decreases in bold are demonstrated in areas previously implicated in meditation research
• Solid, easy to understand behavioral paradigm
• Relatively strong main findings ( P< .0001)
• A simple replication. We like replications!

I’ll preface my conclusion with something Sara Lazar, a meditation researcher and neuroimaging expert at the Harvard MGH told me last summer; we need to stop going for the “low hanging fruit of meditation research”. There are now over 20 published cross-sectional reaction-time based fMRI studies of “meditators” and “non-meditators”. Compare that to the incredibly sparse number of longitudinal, active controlled studies, and it is clear that we need to stop replicating these findings and start determining what they actually tell us. Why do we need to active control our meditation studies? For one thing, we know that reaction-time based tests are heavily based by the amount of effort one expends on the task. Effort is in turn influenced by task-demands (e.g. how you treat your participants, expectations surrounding the experiment). To give one in-press example, my colleagues Christian Gaden Jensen at the Copenhagen Neurobiology Research recently conducted a study demonstrating just how strong this confounding effect can be.

To briefly summarize, Christian recruited over 150 people for randomization to four experimental groups: mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), non-mindfulness stress reduction (NMSR), wait-listed controls, and financially-motivated wait-listed controls. This last group is the truly interesting one; they were told that if they had top performance on the experimental tasks (a battery of classical reaction-time based and unspeeded perceptual threshold tasks) they’d receive a reward of approximately 100$. When Christian analyzed the data, he found that the financial incentive eliminated all reaction-time based differences between the MBSR, NMSR, and financially motivated groups! It’s important to note that this study, fully randomized and longitudinal, showed something not reflected in the bulk of published studies: that meditation may actually train more basic perceptual sensitivities rather than top-down control. This is exactly why we need to stop pursuing the low-hanging fruit of uncontrolled experimental design; it’s not telling us anything new! Meditation research is no longer exploratory.

In addition to these issues, there is another issue a bit more specific to meditation research. That is the totally sparse description of the practice- less than one sentence total, with no quantitative data! In this study we are not even told what the daily practice actually consists of, or its quality or length. These practitioners report an average of 8 years practice, yet that could be 1 hour per week of mantra meditation or 12 hours a week of non-dual zazen! These are not identical processes and our lack of knowledge for this sample severely limits our ability to assess the meaning of  these findings. For the past two years (and probably longer) of the Mind & Life Summer Research Institute, Richard Davidson and others have repeatedly stated that we must move beyond studying meditation as “a loose practice of FA and OM practices including x, y, z, & and other things”. Willoughby Britton suggested at a panel discussion that all meditation papers need to have at least one contemplative scholar on them or risk rejection. It’s clear that this study was most likely not reviewed by anyone with any serious academic background in meditation research.

My supervisor Antoine Lutz and his colleague John Dunne, authors of the paper that launched the “FA/OM” distinction, have since stated emphatically that we must go beyond these general labels and start investigating effects of specific meditation practices. To quote John, we need to stop treating meditation like a “black box” if we ever want to understand the actual mechanisms behind it. While I thank the authors of this paper for their earnest contribution, we need to take this moment to be seriously skeptical. We can only start to understand processes like meditation from a scientific point of view if we are willing to hold them to the highest of scientific standards. It’s time for us to start opening the black box and looking inside.

I was lucky enough to receive a Varela award for my work in meta-cognition and mental training and so this was my second year attending. I chose to take a slightly different approach from my first visit, when I basically followed the program and did whatever the M&L thought was the best use of my time. This meant lots of meditation- more than two hours per day not including the whole-day, silent “mini-retreat”. While I still practiced this year, I felt less obliged to do the full program, and I’m glad I took this route as it provided me a somewhat more detached, almost outsider view of the spectacle that is the Mind & Life SRI.

When I say spectacle, it’s important to understand how unconventional of a conference setting the SRI really is. Each year dozens of ambitious neuroscientists and clinicians meet with dozens of Buddhist monks and western “mindfulness” instructors. The initial feeling is one of severe culture clash; ambitious young scholars who can hardly wait to mention their Ivy League affiliations meet with the austere and almost ascetic approach of traditional Buddhist philosophy. In some cases it almost feels like a race to “out-mindful” one another, as folks put on a great show of piety in order to fit into the mood of the event. It can be a bit jarring to oscillate between the supposed tranquility and selflessness of mindfulness with the unabashed ambition of these highly talented and motivated folk- at least until things settle down a bit.

Nonetheless, the overall atmosphere of the SRI is one of serenity and scholarship. It’s an extremely fun, stimulating event, rich with amazingly talented yoga and meditation instructors and attended by the top researchers within the field. What follows is thus not meant as any kind of attack on the overall mission of the M&L. Indeed, I’m more than grateful to the institute for carrying on at least some form of Francisco Varela’s vision for cognitive science, and of course for supporting my own meditation research. With that being said, we turn to the question at hand: are monks objectively better at introspection? The answer for nearly everyone at the SRI appear to be “yes”, regardless of the scarcity of data suggesting this to be the case.

Enactivism and Francisco Varela

Before I can really get into this issue, I need to briefly review what exactly “enactivism” is and how it relates to the SRI. The Mind & Life institute was co-founded by Francisco Varela, a Chilean biologist and neuroscientist who is often credited with the birth and success of embodied and enactive cognitive science. Varela had a profound impact on scientists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists and is a central influence in my own theoretical work. Varela’s essential thesis was outlined in his book “The Embodied Mind”, in which Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, attempted to outline a new paradigm for the study of mind. In the book, Varela et al rely on examples from cross-cultural psychology, continental phenomenology, Buddhism, and cognitive science to argue that cognition (and mind) is essentially an embodied, enactive phenomenon. The book has since spawned a generation of researchers dedicated in some way to the idea that cognition is not essentially, or at least foundationally, computational and representational in form.

I don’t here intend to get into the roots of what enactivism is; for the present it suffices to say that enactivism as envisioned by Varela involved a dedication to the “middle way” in which idealism-objectivism duality is collapsed in favor of a dynamical non-representational account of cognition and the world. I very much favor this view and try to use it productively in my own research. Varela argued throughout his life that cognition was not essentially an internal, info-processing kind of phenomenon, but rather an emergent and intricately interwoven entity that arose from our history of structural coupling with the world.  He further argued that cognitive science needed to develop a first-person methodology if it was to fully explain the rich panorama of human consciousness.

A simpler way to put this is to say that Varela argued persuasively that minds are not computers “parachuted into an objective world” and that cognition is not about sucking up impoverished information for representation in a subjective format. While Varela invoked much of Buddhist ontology, including concepts of “emptiness” and “inter-relatedness”, to develop his account continental phenomenologists like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty also heavily inspired his vision of 4^th wave cognitive science.  At the SRI there is little mention of this; most scholars are unaware of the continental literature or that phenomenology is not equal to introspection. Indeed I had to cringe when one to-be-unnamed young scientist declared a particular spinal pathway to be “the central pathway for embodiment”.

This is a stark misunderstanding of just what embodiment means, and I would argue renders it a relatively trivial add-on to the information processing paradigm- something most enactivists would like to strongly resist. I politely pointed the gentleman to the example work of Ulric Neisser, who argued for the ecological embodied self, in which the structure of the face is said to pre-structure human experience in particular ways, i.e. we typically experience ourselves as moving through the world toward a central fovea-centered point. Embodiment is an external, or pre-noetic structuring of the mind; it follows no nervous pathway but rather structures the possibilities of the nervous system and mind. I hope he follows that reference down the rabbit hole of the full possibilities of embodiment- the least of which is body-as-extra-module.

Still, I certainly couldn’t blame this particular scientist for his mis-understanding; nearly everyone at the SRI is totally unfamiliar with externalist/phenomenal perspectives, which is a sad state of affairs for a generation of scientists being supported by grants in Varela’s name. Regardless of Varela’s vision for cognitive science, his thesis regarding introspectionism is certainly running strong: first-person methodologies are the hot topic of the SRI, and nearly everyone agreed that by studying contemplative practitioners’ subjective reports, we’d gain some special insight into the mind.  Bracketing whether introspection is what Varela really meant by neurophenomenology (I don’t think it is- phenomenology is not introspection) we are brought to the central question: are Buddhist practitioners expert introspectionists?

Expertise and Introspectionism

Varela certainly believed this to some degree. It’s not entirely clear to me that the bulk of Varela’s work summates to this maxim, but it’s at least certainly true that in papers such as his seminal “Neurophenomenology: a methodological remedy to the hard problem?” he argued that a careful first-person methodology could reap great benefits in this arena. Varela later followed up this theoretical thesis with his now well-known experiment conducted with then PhD student and my current mentor Antoine Lutz.

While I won’t reproduce the details of this experiment at length here, Lutz and Varela demonstrated that it was in fact possible to inform and constrain electrophysiological measurements through the collection and systemization of first-person reports. It’s worth noting here that the participants in this experiment were every day folks, not meditation practitioners, and that Lutz & Varela developed a special method to integrate the reports rather than taking them simply at face value. In fact, while Varela did often suggest that we might through careful contemplation and collaboration with the Buddhist tradition refine first person methodologies and gain insight into the “hard-problem”, he never did complete these experiments with practitioners, a fact that can likely be attributed to his pre-mature death at the hand of aggressive hepatitis.

Regardless of Varela’s own work, it’s fascinating to me that at today’s SRI, if there is one thing nearly everyone seems to explicitly agree on, it’s that meditation practitioners have some kind of privileged access to experience. I can’t count how many discussions seemed to simply assume the truth of this, regardless of the fact that almost no empirical research has demonstrated any kind of increased meta-cognitive capacity or accuracy in adept contemplatives.

While Antoine and I are in fact running experiments dedicated to answering this question, the fact remains that this research is largely exploratory and without strong empirical leads to work from. While I do believe that some level of meditation practice can provide greater reliability and accuracy in meta-cognitive reports, I don’t see any reason to value the reports of contemplative practitioners above and beyond those of any other particular niche group. If I want to know what it’s like to experience baseball, I’m probably going to ask some professional baseball players and not a Buddhist monk. At several points during the SRI I tried to express just this sentiment; that studying Buddhist monks gives us a greater insight into what-it-is-like to be a monk and not much else. I’m not sure if I succeeded, but I’d like to think I planted a few seeds of doubt.

There are several reasons for this. First, I part with Varela where he assumes that the Buddhist tradition and/or “Buddhist Psychology” have particularly valuable insights (for example, emptiness) that can’t be gleaned from western approaches. It might, but I don’t buy into the idea that the Buddhist tradition is its own kind of scientific approach to the mind; it’s not- it’s religion. For me the middle way means a lifelong commitment to a kind of meta-physical agnosticism, and I refuse to believe that any human tradition has a vast advantage over another. This was never more apparent than during a particularly controversial talk by John Dunne, a Harvard contemplative scholar, whose keynote was dedicated to getting scientists like myself to go beyond the traditional texts and veridical reports of practitioners and to instead engage in what he called “trialogue” in order to discover “what it is practitioners are really doing”. At the end of his talk one of the Dalai Lama’s lead monks actually took great offense, scolding John for “misleading the youth with his western academic approach”. The entire debacle was a perfect case-in-point demonstration of John’s talk; one cannot simply take the word of highly religious practitioners as some kind of veridical statement about the world.

This isn’t to say that we can’t learn a great deal about experience, and the mind, through meditation and careful introspection. I think at an early level it’s enough to just sit with ones breath and suspend beliefs about what exactly experience is. I do believe that in our modern lives; we spend precious little time with the body and our minds, simply observing what arises in a non-partial way.  I agree with Sogyal Rinpoche that we are at times overly dis-embodied and away from ourselves. Yet this practice isn’t unique to Buddhism; the phenomenological reduction comes from Husserl and is a practice developed throughout continental phenomenology. I do think that Buddhism has developed some particularly interesting techniques to aid this process, such as Vipassana and compassion-meditation, that can and will shed insights for the cognitive scientist interested in experience, and I hope that my own work will demonstrate as much.

But this is a very different claim from the one that says monastic Buddhists have a particularly special access to experience. At the end of the day I’m going to hedge my bets with the critical, empirical, and dialectical approach of cognitive science. In fact, I think there may be good reasons to suspect that high-level practitioners are inappropriate participants for “neurophenomenology”. Take for example, the excellent and controversial talk given this year by Willoughby Britton, in which she described how contemplative science had been too quick to sweep under the rug a vast array of negative “side-effects” of advanced practice. These effects included hallucination, de-personalization, pain, and extreme terror. This makes a good deal of sense; advanced meditation practice is less impartial phenomenology and more a rigorous ritualized mental practice embedded in a strong religious context. I believe that across cultures many religions share techniques, often utilizing rhythmic breathing, body postures, and intense belief priming to engender an almost psychedelic state in the practitioner.

What does this mean for cognitive science and enactivism? First, it means we need to respect cultural boundaries and not rush to put one cultural practice on top of the explanatory totem pole. This doesn’t mean cognitive scientists shouldn’t be paying attention to experience, or even practicing and studying meditation, but we have to be careful not to ignore the normativity inherent in any ritualized culture. Embracing this basic realization takes seriously individual and cultural differences in consciousness, something I’ve argued for and believe is essential for the future of 4^th wave cognitive science. Neurophenomenology, among other things, should be about recognizing and describing the normativity in our own practices, not importing those of another culture wholesale. I think that this is in line with much of what Varela wrote, and luckily, the tools to do just this are richly provided by the continental phenomenological tradition.

I believe that by carefully bracketing meta-physical and normative concepts, and investigating the vast multitude of phenomenal experience in its full multi-cultural variety, we can begin to shed light on the mind-brain relationship in a meaningful and not strictly reductive fashion. Indeed, in answering the question “are monks expert introspectionists” I think we should carefully question the normative thesis underlying that hypothesis- what exactly constitutes “good” experiential reports? Perhaps by taking a long view on Buddhism and cognitive science, we can begin to truly take the middle way to experience, where we view all experiential reports as equally valid statements regarding some kind of subjective state. The question then becomes primarily longitudinal, i.e. do experiential reports demonstrate a kind of stability or consistency over time, how do trends in experiential reports relate to neural traits and states, and how do these phenomena interact with the particular cultural practices within which they are embedded. For me, this is the central contribution of enactive cognitive science and the best way forward for neurophenomenology.

Disclaimer: I am in no way suggesting enactivists cannot or should not study advanced buddhism if that is what they find interesting and useful. I of course realize that the M&L SRI is a very particular kind of meeting, and that many enactive cognitive scientists can and do work along the lines I am suggesting. My claim is regarding best practices for the core of 4th wave cognitive science, not the fringe. I greatly value the work done by the M&L and found the SRI to be an amazingly fruitful experience.

Here are the slides from the talk:

And the resulting video:

In this short film, specially commissioned as part of the Royal Society’s 350th anniversary celebrations in 2010, Professor Uta Frith FRS and her young companion, Amalie Heath-Born, find out just what goes on inside our brains when we view the treasures on display at London’s world-famous Victoria and Albert Museum.

“The human mind/brain is exquisitely social and automatically responds to signals sent by other people. These signals can be artfully designed objects, and these can come from people long in the past. The art and design that is embodied in the object can evoke in the brain different streams of imagination: how it was made, the value it represents, and the meaning it conveys. The human mind/brain has ancient reward systems, which respond to, say, stimuli signaling food to the hungry, but also respond to social stimuli signaling relevance to the curious. This makes for a never ending well spring of spontaneous teaching and learning. Education in the museum environment is perfectly attuned to the curious mind.”  Uta Frith (2010)

You can read more about the event and the film on the Royal Society page.

While these studies are interesting, they are of course limited in their scope by several factors. My supervisor Antoine Lutz emphasizes that in addition to our active-controlled research here in Århus, his group at Wisconsin-Madison and others are actively preparing such datasets. Active controls are simply ‘mock’ interventions (or real ones) designed to control for every possible aspect of being involved in an intervention (placebo, community, motivation) in order to isolate the variables specific to that treatment (in this case, meditation, but not sitting, breathing, or feeling special).  Active controls are important as there is a great deal of research demonstrating that cognition itself is susceptible to placebo-like motivational effects. All and all, I’ve seen several active-controlled, cognitive-behavioral studies in review that suggest we should be strongly skeptical of any non-active controlled findings. While I can’t discuss these in detail, I will mention some of these issues in my review of the neuroimage manuscript. It suffices to say however, that if you are working on a passive-controlled study in this area, you had better get it out fast as you can expect reviewers to be greatly tightening their expectations in the coming months, as more and more rigorous papers appear. As Sara Lazar put it during my visit to her lab last summer “the low-hanging fruit of MBSR brain research are rapidly vanishing”. Overall this is a good thing for the community and we’ll see why in a moment.

Now let us turn to the paper at hand. Kilpatrick et al start with a standard summary of MBSR and rsfMRI research, focusing on findings indicating MBSR trains focused attention, sensory introspection/interception and perception. They briefly review now well-established findings indicating that rsfMRI is sensitive to training related changes, including studies that demonstrate the sensitivity of the resting state to conditions such as fatigue, eyes-open vs eyes-closed, and recent sleep. This is all pretty well and good, but I think it’s a bit odd when we see just how they collect their data.

Briefly, they recruited 32 healthy adults for randomization to MBSR and waitlist controls. Controls then complete the Mindfulness Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS) and receive 8 weeks of diary-logged standard MBSR training. After training, participants are recalled for the rsfMRI scan. An important detail here is that participants are not scanned before and after training, rendering the fMRI portion of the experiment closer to a cross-section than true longitudinal design. At the time of scan, the researchers then give two ‘task-free states’, with and without auditory white noise. The authors indicate that the noise condition is included “to enable new analysis methods not conducted here”, presumably to average out scanner-noise related affects. They later indicate no differences between the two conditions, which causes me to ask how much here is meditation vs focusing-on-scanner-noise specific. Finally, they administer the ‘task free’ states with a slight twist:

“”During this baseline scan of about 5 min, we would like you to again stay as still as possible and be mindfully aware of your surroundings. Please keep your eyes closed during this procedure. Continue to be mindfully aware of whatever you notice in your surroundings and your own sensations. Mindful awareness means that you pay attention to your present moment experience, in this case the changing sounds of the scanner/changing background sounds played through the headphones, and to bring interest and curiosity to how you are responding to them.”

While the manipulation makes sense given the experimenter’s hypothesis concerning sensory processing, an ongoing controversy in resting-state research is just what it is that constitutes ‘rest’. Research here suggests that functional connectivity is sensitive to task-instructions and variations in visual stimulation, and many complain about the lack of specificity within different rest conditions. Kilpatrick et al’s manipulation makes sense given that what they really want to see is meditation-related alterations, but it’s a dangerous leap without first establishing the relationship between ‘true rest’ and their ‘auditory meditation’ condition. Research on the impact of scanner-noise indicates some degree of noise-related nuisance effects, and also some functionally significant effects. If you’ve never been in an MR experiment, the scanner is LOUD. During my first scan I actually started feeling claustrophobic due to the oppressive machine-gun like noise of the gradient coil. Anyway, it’s really troubling that Kilpatrick et al don’t include a totally task-free set for comparison, and I’m hesitant to call this a resting-state finding without further clarification.

The study is extremely interesting, but it’s important to note it’s limitations:

1. Lack of active control- groups are not controlled for motivation.
2. No pre/post scan.
3. Novel resting state without comparison condition.
4. Findings are discussed as ‘training related’ without report of correlation with reported practice hours.
5. Anti-correlations reported with global-signal nuisance regression. No discussion of possible regression related inducement (see edit).
6. Discussion of findings is unclear; reported as greater DMN x Auditory correlation, but the independent component includes large portions of the salience network.

Ultimately they identify a “auditory/salience” independent component network (ICN) (primary auditory, STG, posterior Insula, ACC, and lateral frontal cortex) and then conduct seed-regression analyses of the network with areas of the DMN and Dorsal Attention Network (DAN). I find it highly strange that they pick up a network that seems to conflate primary sensory and salience regions, as do the researchers who state “Therefore, the ICN was labeled as “auditory/salience”. It is unclear why the components split differently in our sample, perhaps the instructions that brought attention to auditory input altered the covariance structure somewhat.” Given the lack of motivational control in the study, the issues in this study begin to pile onto one another and I am not sure what we can really conclude. They further find that the MBSR group demonstrates greater “auditory/salience x DMN connectivity”, “greater visual and auditory functional connectivity” (see image below). They also report several increased anti-correlations, between the aud/sal network, dMPFC and visual regions. I find this to be an extremely tantalizing finding as it would reflect a decrease in processing automaticity amongst the SAL, CEN, and DMN networks. There are some serious problems with these kinds of analysis that the authors don’t address, and so we again must reserve any strong conclusions. Here is what Kilpatrick et al conclude:

“The current findings extend the results of prior studies that showed meditation-related changes in specific brain regions active during attention and sensory processing by providing evidence that MBSR trained compared to untrained subjects, during a focused attention instruction, have increased connectivity within sensory networks and between regions associated with attentional processes and those in the attended sensory cortex. In addition they show greater differentiation between regions associated with attentional processes and the unattended sensory cortex as well as greater differentiation between attended and unattended sensory networks”

As is typical, the list of findings is quite long and I won’t bother re-stating it all here. Given the resting instructions it seems clear that the freshly post-MBSR participants are likely to have engaged a pretty dedicated set of cognitive operations during the scan. Yet it’s totally unclear what the control group would do given these contemplative instructions. Presumably they’d just lie in the scanner and try not to tune out the noise- but you can see here how it’s not clear that these conditions are really that comparable without having some idea of what’s going on. In essence what you (might) have here is one group actually doing something (meditation) and the other group not doing much at all. Ideally you want to see how training impacts the underlying process in a comparable way. Motivation has been repeatedly linked to BOLD signal intensity and in this case, it could very well be that these findings are simple artifacts of motivation to perform. If one group is actually practicing mindfulness and the other isn’t, you have not isolated the variable of interest. The authors could have somewhat alleviated this by including data from the additional pain task (“not reported here”) and/or at least giving us a correlation of the findings with the MAAS scale. I emphasize that I do find the findings of this paper interesting- they map extremely well onto my own hypotheses about how RSNs interact with mindfulness training, but that we must interpret them with caution.

Overall I think this was a project with a strong theoretical motivation and some very interesting ideas. One problem with looking at state-mindfulness in the scanner is the cramped, noisy environment. I think Kilpatrick et al had a great idea in their attempt to use the noise itself as a manipulation. Further, the findings make a good deal of sense. Still, given the above limitation, it’s important to be really careful with our conclusions. At best, this study warrants an extremely rigorous follow-up, and I wish neuroimage had published it with a bit more information, such as the status of any rest-MAAS correlations. Anyway, this post has gotten quite long and I think I’d best get back to work- for my next post I think I’ll go into more detail about some of the issues confront resting state (what is “rest”?) and mindfulness (role of active controls for community, motivation, and placebo effects) and what they mean for resting-state research.

edit: just realized I never explained limitation #5. See my “beautiful noise” slides (previous post) regarding the controversy of global signal regression and anti-correlation. Simply put, there is somewhat convincing evidence that this procedure (designed to eliminate low-frequency nuisance co-variates) may actually mathematically induce anti-correlations where none exist, probably due to regression to the mean. While it’s not a slam-dunk (see response by Fox et al), it’s an extremely controversial area and all anti-correlative findings should be interpreted in light of this possibility.

If you like this post please let me know in the comments! If I can get away with rambling about this kind of stuff, I’ll do so more frequently.

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is on fire!.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 4,400 times in 2010. That’s about 11 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 13 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 17 posts. There were 13 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 2mb. That’s about a picture per month.

The busiest day of the year was July 1st with 182 views. The most popular post that day was My response to Carr and Pinker on Media Plasticity.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were neuroskeptic.blogspot.com, twitter.com, healthfitnesstherapy.com, facebook.com, and Google Reader.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for neuroconscience, micah allen, inferior parietal lobule, dlpfc, and neurological basis of development.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

My response to Carr and Pinker on Media Plasticity June 2010
4 comments

Snorkeling ’the shallows’: what’s the cognitive trade-off in internet behavior? June 2010
9 comments and 2 Likes on WordPress.com

The Author October 2009
1 comment

Brain Plasticity, Distributed Social Cognition, and the Luddite Notion. February 2010
5 comments

Switching between executive and default mode networks in posttraumatic stress disorder [excerpts and notes] August 2010

Daniels et al, 2010

We decided to use global scaling because we were not analyzing anticorrelations in this paradigm and because data presented by Fox and colleagues66 and Weissenbacher and coworkers65 indicate that global scaling enhances the detection of system-specific correlations and doubles connection specificity. Weissenbacher and colleagues65 compared different preprocessing approaches in human and simulated data sets and recommend applying global scaling to maximize the specificity of positive resting-state correlations. We used high-pass filtering with a cut-off at 128 seconds to minimize the impact of serial autocorrelations in the fMRI time series that can result from scanner drift.

Very useful methodological clipping!

The control condition was a simple fixation task, requiring attention either to the response instruction or to a line of 5 asterisks in the centre of the screen. We chose this control task to resemble the activation task as closely as possible; it therefore differed considerably from previous resting state analyses because it was relatively short in duration and thus necessitated fast switches between the control condition and the activation task. It also prompted the participants to keep their eyes open and fixated on the stimulus, which has been shown to result in stronger default mode network activations than the closed-eyes condition.⁶⁰

Good to remember: closed-eyed resting states result in weaker default mode activity.

To ensure frequent switching between an idling state and task-induced activation, we used a block design, presenting the activation task (8 volumes) twice interspersed with the fixation task (4 volumes) within each of 16 imaging runs. Each task was preceded by an instruction block (4 volumes duration), amounting to a total acquisition of 512 volumes per participant. The order of the working memory tasks was counterbalanced between runs and across participants. Full details of this working memory paradigm are provided in the study by Moores and colleagues.⁶ There were 2 variations of this task in each run concerning the elicited button press response; however, because we were interested in the effects of cognitive effort on default network connectivity, rather than specific effects associated with a particular variation of the task, we combined the response variations to model a single “task” condition for this study. The control condition consisted of periods of viewing either 5 asterisks in the centre of the screen or a notice of which variation of the task would be performed next.

Psychophysiological interaction analyses are designed to measure context-sensitive changes in effective connectivity between one or more brain regions⁶⁷ by comparing connectivity in one context (in the current study, a working memory updating task) with connectivity during another context (in this case, a fixation condition). We used seed regions in the mPFC and PCC because both these nodes of the default mode network act independently across different cognitive tasks, might subserve different subsystems within the default mode network and have both been associated with alterations in PTSD.⁸

This paradigm is very interesting. The authors have basically administered a battery of working memory tasks with interspersed rest periods, and carried out ROI inter-correlation, or seed analysis. Using this simple approach, a wide variety of experimenters could investigate task-rest interactions using their existing data sets.

Limitations

The limitations of our results predominantly relate to the PTSD sample studied. To investigate the long-lasting symptoms that accompany a significant reduction of the general level of functioning, we studied alterations in severe, chronic PTSD, which did not allow us to exclude patients taking medications. In addition, the small sample size might have limited the power of our analyses. To avoid multiple testing in a small sample, we only used 2 seed regions for our analyses. Future studies should add a resting state scan without any visual input to allow for comparison of default mode network connectivity during the short control condition and a longer resting state.

The different patterns of connectivity imply significant group differences with task-induced switches (i.e., engaging and disengaging the default mode network and the central-executive network).

Excerpt from Carr’s Blog:

Steven Pinker and the Internet

And then there’s this: “It’s not as if habits of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning ever came naturally to people.” Exactly. And that’s another cause for concern. Our most valuable mental habits – the habits of deep and focused thought – must be learned, and the way we learn them is by practicing them, regularly and attentively. And that’s what our continuously connected, constantly distracted lives are stealing from us: the encouragement and the opportunity to practice reflection, introspection, and other contemplative modes of thought. Even formal research is increasingly taking the form of “power browsing,” according to a 2008 University College London study, rather than attentive and thorough study. Patricia Greenfield, a professor of developmental psychology at UCLA, warned in a Science article last year that our growing use of screen-based media appears to be weakening our “higher-order cognitive processes,” including “abstract vocabulary, mindfulness, reflection, inductive problem solving, critical thinking, and imagination.”

As someone who has enjoyed and learned a lot from Steven Pinker’s books about language and cognition, I was disappointed to see the Harvard psychologist write, in Friday’s New York Times, a cursory op-ed column about people’s very real concerns over the Internet’s influence on their minds and their intellectual lives. Pinker seems to dismiss out of hand the evidence indicating that our intensifying use of the Net and related digital media may be reducing the depth and rigor of our thoughts. He goes so far as to assert that such media “are the only things that will keep us smart.” And yet the evidence he offers to support his sweeping claim consists largely of opinions and anecdotes, along with one very good Woody Allen joke.

Right here I would like to point out the kind of leap Carr is making. I’d really like a closer look at the supposed evidence demonstrating  “our intensifying use of the Net and related digital media may be reducing the depth and rigor of our thoughts.” This is a huge claim! How does one define the ‘depth’ and ‘rigor’ of our thoughts? I know of exactly one peer-reviewed high impact paper demonstrating a loss of specifically executive function in heavy-media multi-taskers. While there is evidence that generally speaking, multi-tasking can interfere with some forms of goal-directed activity, I am aware of no papers directly linking specific forms of internet behavior to a drop in executive function. Furthermore, the HMM paper included in it’s measure of multi-tasking ‘watching tv’, ‘viewing funny videos’, and ‘playing videogames’. I don’t know about you, but for me there is definitely a difference between ‘work’ multitasking, in which I focus and work through multiple streams, and ‘play’ multitasking, in which I might casually surf the net while watching TV. The second claim is worse- what exactly is ‘depth’? And how do we link it to executive functioning?

Is Carr claiming people with executive function deficits are incapable or impaired in thinking creatively? If it takes me 10 years to publish a magnum opus, have I thought less deeply than the author that cranks out a feature length popular novel every 2 years? Depth involves a normative judgment of what separates ‘good’ thinking from ‘bad’ thinking, and to imply there is some kind of peer-reviewed consensus here is patently false. In fact, here is a recent review paper on fmri creativity research (is this depth?) indicating that the existing research is so incredibly disparate and poorly defined as to be untenable. That’s the problem with Carr’s claims- he oversimplifies both the diversity of internet usage and the existing research on executive and creative function. To be fair to Carr, he does go on to do a fair job of dismantling Pinker’s frighteningly dogmatic rejection of generalizable brain plasticity research:

One thing that didn’t surprise me was Pinker’s attempt to downplay the importance of neuroplasticity. While he acknowledges that our brains adapt to shifts in the environment, including (one infers) our use of media and other tools, he implies that we need not concern ourselves with the effects of those adaptations. Because all sorts of things influence the brain, he oddly argues, we don’t have to care about how any one thing influences the brain. Pinker, it’s important to point out, has an axe to grind here. The growing body of research on the adult brain’s remarkable ability to adapt, even at the cellular level, to changing circumstances and new experiences poses a challenge to Pinker’s faith in evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics. The more adaptable the brain is, the less we’re merely playing out ancient patterns of behavior imposed on us by our genetic heritage.

Here is my response, posted on Nick’s blog:

Hi Nick,

As you know from our discussion at my blog, I’m not really a fan of the extreme views given by either you or Pinker. However, I applaud the thorough rebuttal you’ve given here to Stephen’s poorly researched response. As someone doing my PhD in neuroplasticity and cognitive technology, it absolutely infuriated me to see Stephen completely handwave away a decade of solid research showing generalizable cognitive gains from various forms of media-practice. To simply ignore findings from, for example the Bavalier lab, that demonstrate reliable and highly generalizable cognitive and visual gains and plasticity is to border on the unethically dogmatic.

Pinker isn’t well known for being flexible within cognitive science however; he’s probably the only person even more dogmatic about nativist modularism than Fodor. Unfortunately, Stephen enjoys a large public following and his work has really been embraced by the anti-religion ‘brights’ movement. While on some levels I appreciate this movement’s desire to promote rationality, I cringe at how great scholars like Dennett and Pinker seem totally unwilling to engage with the expanding body of research that casts a great deal of doubt on the 1980′s era cogsci they built their careers on.

So I give you kudos there. I close as usual, by saying that you’re presenting a ‘sexy’ and somewhat sensationalistic account that while sure to sell books and generate controversy, is probably based more in moral panic than sound theory. I have no doubt that the evidence you’ve marshaled demonstrates the cognitive potency of new media. Further, I’m sure you are aware of the heavy-media multitasking paper demonstrating a drop in executive functioning in HMMs.

However, you neglect in the posts I’ve seen to emphasize what those authors clearly did: that these findings are not likely to represent a true loss of function but rather are indicators of a shift in cognitive style. Your unwillingness to declare the normative element in your thesis regarding ‘deep thought’ is almost as chilling as Pinker’s total refusal to acknowledge the growing body of plasticity research. Simply put, I think you are aware that you’ve conflated executive processing with ‘deep thinking’, and are not really making the case that we know to be true.

Media is a tool like any other. It’s outcome measures are completely dependent on how we use it and our individual differences. You could make this case quite well with your evidence, but you seem to embrace the moral panic surrounding your work. It’s obvious that certain patterns, including the ones probably driving your collected research, will play on our plasticity to create cognitive differences. Plasticity is limited however, and you really don’t play on the most common theme in mental training literature: balance and trade-off. Your failure to acknowledge the economical and often conservative nature of the brain forces me to lump your work in with the decade that preceded your book, in which it was proclaimed that violent video games and heavy metal music would rot our collective minds. These things didn’t happen, except in those who where already at high risk, and furthermore they produced unanticipated cognitive gains. I think if you want to be on the ‘not wrong’ side of history, you may want to introduce a little flexibility to your argument. I guess if it makes you feel better, for many in the next generation of cognition researchers, it’s already too late for a dogmatic thinker like Pinker.

Final thoughts?