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2.20: Human Enterprises with Deborah Blum

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After 20 episodes and 23 guests we've finally reached the end of season two! But, before we go on sabbatical, we've got one more episode-featuring an interview with fantastic science writer and Pulitzer Prize winning science journalist Deborah Blum. In our interview we discuss literally burning out of a career in chemistry, structuring narratives about science, and about the taxonomy of professions and activities that fall under the term "science communication".

Want more info about Deborah and Undark?

Deborah’s Website | Deborah on Twitter

KSJ@MIT | Undark Magazine

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Links and Show Notes

The cover art from this episode depicts Pierre and Marie Curie in the lab. The Curies discovered radium, the key ingredient in a horrifically dangerous radioluminescent paint marketed under the name Undark.

The James-Lange theory of emotion, one of the oldest and most influential theory in modern psychology, states that the physiological arousal instigates the experience of emotion. Interpreted broadly, this could mean that smiling causes happiness. The “facial feedback” paradigm is literally a textbook finding in social psychology. It was also central to a certain podcast host’s undergraduate honors thesis. Unfortunately, as described in this paper and this article from Slate, it does not stand up to replication.

Quick hint, if you’re thinking of writing a writing an obnoxious article ostensibly about making science better for young investigators, maybe don’t throw in a bunch of nonsense about “professional selfies”.

To paraphrase Carl Zimmer, John Ioannidis- probably the most feared and influential statistician in science- recently turned his statistical death ray towards psychology and cognitive neuroscience. The results were not pretty.

Yes. The University of Chicago really did send a letter to students condemning trigger warnings and safe spaces. Yes. There were think pieces. Here’s a nice one from author and University of Chicago grad John Scalzi.

The University of Kentucky is suing it’s student newspaper in an attempt to prevent them from releasing documents detailing a scientist alleged sexual assault against two students.

From riparian ecology to Pulitzer Prize winning science journalism, we covered lots of ground in season two. The podcast switched coasts, its host changed jobs, and we chatted with a lot of neat folks about a lot of neat things.

Deborah’s father, Murray Blum, was an entomologist and chemical ecologist. Beyond convincing Bryant Gumbel to eat a breakfast of sauteed grubs, he is probably best known for literally writing the book on insect physiology and chemical defenses.

E. O. Wilson is probably the world’s most known myrmecologist. In addition to his work with ants, Wilson is well known for his jumpstarting the field of sociobology with his influential and immensely controversial book “Sociobiology: The New Synthesis”.

Deborah’s book “Monkey Wars” is based on her homonymous Pulitzer Prize winning work investigating issues around the use of non-human primates in scientific research.

Rebecca Skloot is best known for her book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” about the life a legacy of the woman whose cells- harvested without her knowledge or consent in 1951- were cloned after her death and continue to be used in scientific research.

“The Poisoner’s Handbook” is Deborah’s book about murder, Charles Norris, Alexander Gettler, the birth of modern toxicology, and the history of chemistry.

Deborah wrote the “Elemental” blog for Wired. “Your Daughter Died” is her second person piece about a chain of suspected poisonings in Thailand. “How to read a scientific paper” is her piece about Jon Allen’s nematode research.

Ed Yong is a well-known science journalist, currently writing for The Atlantic. He also had a very nice thing to say about the last episode of this podcast.

Noam Chomsky is widely regarded as one of the principal architects of the “cognitive revolution” in the social sciences. Though his research has profoundly shaped the field of linguistics, he is perhaps best known these days for his political activism and writing.

Deborah’s essay in which she discusses the origins and goals of Undark can be found here.

But no seriously, Undark’s advisory board includes quite a heavy hitters from the worlds of science, journalism, and science journalism.

The results of Anthony Dudo and John C. Besley’s survey into scientists’ motivations for communicating with the public can be found here.

This Undark piece provides a good overview of the growing professional divide within science communication.

The final edition of the Bold Signals Book Club covers “Dangerous Visions”, edited by Harlan Ellison.

When we initially set forth to build up the book club list, we tried to pick an interestingly diverse list of books by an interestingly diverse group of writers. We wanted to push the boundaries a little. With that in mind, it made sense to conclude with a volume full “dangerous” fiction.

With an introduction by Isaac Asimov and stories from authors including Fritz Lieber, Philip K Dick, John Brunner, Philip José Farmer, Roger Zelazny, J. G. Ballard, Samuel Delany, and Ellison himself- “Dangerous Visions” is a fascinating snapshot of a particular type of fiction at a particular moment in time. Unfortunately it was so influential that, 40 years later, most of the stories feel far more pedestrian than dangerous. Perhaps these stories changed science fiction so much that, to readers who only consumed science fiction only through the lense of what came after, they seem very much like artifacts of before.

If you’d like to support the podcast while purchasing any of the books discussed in the book club, take a gander at our Amazon store. The podcast also has an Amazon wishlist if you’d like to donate a book.

Music in this Episode:

“Enterprise 1” by Languis "Still" by Skipless "You Don't Know it Yet" by Moosefrog "You and Me" by Gone X3

DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.3793080

2.19: Pain Management with Sandra Kamping

Season two is winding down, but production on season three will begin in a few months. So if you’re interested in being a guest on a future episode, drop us an e-mail, shoot us a tweet, or check out this page.

Thanks in advance!

This week on Bold Signals it's all about pain and the brain with an episode featuring Sandra Kamping- a neuroscientist and psychotherapist working in the field of chronic pain. In our interview we discuss about the (few) upsides and (many) downsides of applying to graduate school because of an interest in blobs, how studying pain brought her to some rather unexpected places, and about the unique challenges of doing research with placebos.

Want more info about Sandra?

Sandra’s Website | Sandra on Twitter | Sandra on ResearchGate | Sandra on Google Scholar

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Links and Show Notes

The over art for this episode is “Testa Anatomica” by Filippo Balbi.

Ostensibly to treat the later’s intractable epilepsy, Dr. Henry Scoville resected Henry Molaison’s bilateral hippocampus, amygdala, and entorhinal cortex on September 1st, 1953. Following surgery, Molaison developed severe anterograde amnesia. Able to remember some events before his surgery, he exhibited massive deficits in making memories for events that happened afterwards- though his ability to do tasks dependent on working memory, motor learning, and implicit (non-conscious) memory remained somewhat preserved.

Research involving “Patient HM”, first by Brenda Milner and subsequently by Sue Corkin, would go on to be immensely influential to the study of memory in the second half of the 20th century (for some perspective, see these review papers). After his death in 2008, Molaison’s brain was subject to an intense amount of study. A whole brain atlas has recently been made freely available.

The controversy around Luke Dittrich’s book “Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets” is still ongoing. In response to an excerpt published in The New York Times Magazine, a group of several hundred neuroscientists and MIT have both submitted letters disputing allegations that Sue Corkin destroyed data, suppressed research findings, and mistreated H.M. Dittrich has himself responded by releasing the audio of his interview with Corkin and has expanded his position on Corkin and the controversy in several interviews.

Aphasia is an inability to comprehend and/or formulate language. If Henry Molaison’s brain can be said to have changed how neuroscientists and psychologists study memory, than the brain of an aphasic man named Louis Victor Leborgne changed how they study language.

When we’re talking about “blobs” in fMRI, we’re actually talking about bold signals.

As shown in this Times Higher Education piece, things remain quite precarious for junior academics in Germany.

This review provides a nicely comprehensive rundown of the research linking emotional state and pain perception.

Though the mechanisms underlying the placebo effect are still not fully understood, placebos have been used in medicinal contexts for centuries. Beyond sugar pills and inert injections, the placebos have been shown to be effective in conditioning the immune system and even addressing Parkinson’s disease.

Deception has been used to varying degrees throughout the history of psychology, but has been highly debated since Stanley Milgram’s infamous study of obedience. The American Psychological Association’s code of conduct for psychologists states that “Psychologists do not deceive prospective participants about research that is reasonably expected to cause physical pain or severe emotional distress.” How this should be applied in research involves pain and placebos remains something of an open question.

In the most recent revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, masochism and other kinks are listed as paraphelias. Though the language around paraphelias in the DSM-5 was intended to be less stigmatizing than in previous editions, the inclusion of any form of consensual and noncriminal form of “atypical” sexuality remains highly controversial.

The paper describing Sandra’s study of pain in masochists can be found here. The “Subject Characteristics” section is quite a read.

Much has been written about the overprescription of painkillers in the U.S. and the ensuing heroin epidemic, but it’s also worth pointing out that, though it takes a few months to get an appointment with a therapist in Germany, the mental health system in the United States is objectively a total mess.

Fun fact: The t-statistic, which is still widely used by psychology researchers, was initially developed by William Sealy Gosset- a chemist working for the Guinness brewery. Similarly, Ronald Fisher’s initial exposition of the null hypothesis involved a lady tasting tea.

As the legal bills for this year alone pass the ten million dollar mark, the fight over CRISPR continues to escalate. The patent battle between the University of California and the Broad Institute essentially comes down to who invented the technique- the group that initially described the use of CRISPR to edit DNA in a test tube or the group that first described using the technique to edit human and mouse genes.

This week’s Bold Signals Book Club selection is Binti by Nnedi Okorafor. For such a short book, the structure of Binti is really surprising. It starts out with the titular character, the first of the insular but technologically advanced Himba people traveling to Oomza University- the finest institution of higher learning in the galaxy. At first it seems like variant on the ever popular genre of scifi/fantasy that takes place at a school. But then, spoiler alert, everyone but Binti dies in an attack from a jellyfish-like alien race called the meduse. What follows is a discourse on imperialism, acculturation, ethics within science and academia, appropriation, and personal identity.

Also, it turns out there are two sequels coming out. If there anything like Binti, there going to be well worth your time.

Music in this episode

“Enterprise 1” by Languis "Atmospheres" by Lee Rosevere "Floating Cities" by Kevin MacLeod "The Story Ends (Credits)" by Jupiter-8 "User Friendly" by Lee Rosevere

DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.3581430

Special thanks this week to previous podcast guest Jens Foell for the e-introduction to Sandra. Thanks Jens!

2.18: Stories Behind Stories with Siri Carpenter

If you are interested in being a guest for an upcoming episode of Bold Signals, drop us an e-mail or check out this page. Thanks in advance!

This week we look at some writing about science writing in an episode featuring Siri Carpenter, the editor and chief of The Open Notebook. In our interview we discuss learning about the world about science writing by e-mailing science writers, starting projects as a means to ask interesting people interesting questions, and about what it actually means to edit an article about science.

Want more info about The Open Notebook and Siri?

Siri on Twitter | Siri's Website

The Open Notebook

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Links and Show Notes

The cover art for this episode is "Head of a Nun" by Alfredo Ramos Martinez.

The synthwave soundtrack to this episode was inspired, of course, by the fantastic Stranger Things.

This week’s intro and outro segments were recorded in Bryn Mawr Pennsylvania between sessions at the CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship Summer Seminar (aka Library Bootcamp). If you’re finishing a PhD and thinking of pivoting towards a career in data curation, preservation, or management, take a look at the CLIR fellowships.

Yes, a certain podcast host made many “Going Clear” jokes at library bootcamp. No, nobody laughed.

Founded by Siri and Jeanne Erdmann, The Open Notebook is an essential resource for anyone doing any kind of science writing. If you like the kind of day-to-day perspective we strive for on the podcast, check out the Day in the Life, Natural Habitat, and Office Hours features.

Mahzarin Banaji is now the Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard University. Though her research focuses broadly on the intersection of social and cognitive psychology, she is probably best known for developing the constructs underlying the implicit association test- a widely used and not uncontroversial method of examining unconscious belief.

To take a version of the IAT, head over to Project Implicit.

Founded in 1934, the National Association of Science Writers (NASW) is one of the United States’s oldest professional journalism organizations. Though they no longer maintain a directory of science journalists, their website continues to feature resources for new and experienced science journalists. Recently the NASW has been at the center of a heated controversy related to the status of public information officers (PIOs) within science journalism.

Charles Seife is currently a professor of journalism at NYU. Writing expansively about topics related to math and science, Seife’s best known work is probably Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea. For The Open Notebook, he’s also penned a guide for writing opinion.

Follow this link for more information about the AAAS Mass Media Fellowship.

Earlier this season we talked to Tina Saey about the difference between science writing and science journalism, writing for Science News, prions, transgenic crops, and lots more.

Beyond his research on implicit social cognition, Brian Nosek is best known for operating the Center for Open Science, the Open Science Framework, and the Reproducibility Project: Psychology- which found that a staggering amount of psychology findings do not consistently replicate.

“The Ketchup Conundrum”, Malcolm Gladwell’s essay on the gustatory qualities of ketchup, was published in The New Yorker in 2004.

Without revealing too much, we’ll talk a lot more about the Knight Science Journalism Program (aka KSJ@MIT) in a the last episode of this season.

Buzzfeed Science has published fantastic work over the last few years- most notably investigative pieces related to science’s sexual harassment problem. One of the most popular science-related posts on Buzzfeed actually quotes a certain science podcast host.

This week’s Bold Signals Book Club book is, in yet another example of speculative fiction intersecting with current events, Woman at the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy. The reading order for this book club was chosen months ago, with no thought that parts of this episode would be recorded less than 20 miles from the Democratic National Convention and a week after a positively apocalyptic Republican National Convention.

If you’d like to purchase any of the books discussed in the book club and support the podcast at the same time, take a gander at our Amazon store. The podcast also has an Amazon wishlist if you’d like to donate a book.

Music in this episode

"Enterprise 1” by Languis "System Shutdown“ by Airglow "Neon Skies“ by Lee Rosevere “Escape from Germany” by Lazerhawk

DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.3507128.v1

2.17: Of Identity and Diversity with Devon Collins & Molly Liu

If you are interested in being a guest for an upcoming episode of Bold Signals, drop us an e-mail or check out this page. Thanks in advance!

This week we look at science through the lens of identity and diversity in an interview with neuroscientists Devon Collins and Molly Liu. In our interview we discuss working at the intersection of neuroscience and social justice, the formation and mission of PRISM (People at Rockefeller Identifying as Sexual Minorities), and the personal and social realities wrapped up in self-identifying as a scientist.

Want more info about Devon, Molly, and PRISM?

Devon on Twitter | Molly on Twitter | PRISM on Twitter | PRISM’s Website

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Links and Show Notes

The cover art for this episode is “Electric Prisms, 1914” by Sonia Delaunay.

This episode’s title is taken from a chapter of John Locke’s “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” which, when described very broadly, argues that personal identity is derived from consciousness rather than biology.

No really, California Digital Library really is a Poke Stop. This piece from Glen Weldon is probably the best thing to come out of this Pokemon Go business.

The article “A Multi-Level Bayesian Analysis of Racial Bias in Police Shootings at the County-Level in the United States, 2011–2014, which was first published in November of 2015, was widely discussed on social media after the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. The highly contentious article that supposedly shows a lack of bias in police shootings (spoiler alert: It’s a bit more complicated then all that) was widely discussed online after the shooting in Dallas and the publication of an irresponsibly oversimplified piece in the New York Times.

Not to denigrate the value of data, these visualizations of the statistics of gun violence from FiveThirtyEight are absolutely devastating.

Science Soapbox, the podcast Devon hosts alongside Avital Percher and Maryam Zaringhalam was the subject of the previous episode.

No seriously, as evidenced by this now-viral image, members of the the Vosshall lab really do stick their arms into boxes full of mosquitoes for science. If, for some inexplicable reason, you want to know more about this process, it is discussed further in this New Yorker profile.

Devon’s day-to-day lab work involves giving mice oxycodone and looking at their place preferences.

Molly gives a more detailed description of her research midway down this page.

The caudate and the putamen together make up the striatum- an area of the brain that has been widely investigated for its involvement in drug abuse and addiction.

Devon’s advisor, Mary Jeanne Kreek, was part of the team led by Vincent Dole and Marie E. Nyswander that developed methadone maintenance as a treatment for opiate addiction. Almost fifty years later, between the recording and release of this episode, the senate finally approved a bill to address America’s opioid addiction crisis.

For various historical and logistical reasons, the vinegar fly (a.k.a. the fruit fly, a.k.a. Drosophila melanogaster) is among the most widely studied model organism in biology and medicine. For everything you ever wanted to know (and more) about the genetics of the vinegar fly, check out FlyBase.

For obvious reasons, the history of mosquito research is closely tied to the history of malaria. However, the mosquito has also played a non-insignificant role in the history of art. Just days after discovering that the malaria parasite is transmitted by mosquitoes, Ronald Ross wrote a poem on the subject.

With tears and toiling breath I find thy cunning seeds O million-murdering death.

Based on his comic strip on the same subject, Windsor McKay also depicted mosquito feeding in one of the very first modern animated films.

WiSeR stands for Women in Science at Rockefeller. Check out their website and Facebook page. Like PRISM, WiSeR also recently collected some data about life on campus at Rockefeller.

Jokes about scientists deciding to collect data as a first step in starting a new group aside, the PRISM survey results provide a valuable snapshot into what life is like for LGBTQ people at a research university like Rockefeller.

The APS report on the climate for LGBT people working in physics can be read here. Its distressingly unsurprising findings include the facts that many LGBT physicists feel coerced into hiding their identity and over a third of LGBT physicists considered leaving their department or workplace last year. For more information and lots of useful links, see this page.

The blood samples collected by Laboratory on the Biology of Addictive Diseases as part of their work with intravenous drug users was used to trace the initial spread of HIV in New York City.

The most level-headed analyses of the most recent statistical crisis to hit fMRI research come from Wired and Neuroskeptic. The authors of the article detailing the crisis have since unsuccessfully attempted to change some of its most widely misinterpreted statements.

This week’s Bold Signals Book Club book is, in another example of speculative fiction colliding headlong current events, The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead. This is a book about elevators- elevators rising, elevators falling, and elevator inspection. It’s also about race, politics, belief, and about a million other things. Despite the fact that a reified metaphorical elevator is the book’s central McGuffin, The Intuitionist isn’t parody, it’s allegory.

It’s perhaps a terrible comparison, given that one is a piece of fiction about how elevators, politics, and philosophy interact with race in a Crying of Lot 49-esque world while the other is a documentary series about how sports, media, and murder interact with race in America, but The Intuitionist is a bit like OJ: Made in America. Both use a single event to explore a number of systemic social issues. Both are excellent.

For a slightly less incisive exploration of social issues that leans more heavily on the tropes of science fiction, take a look at Zone One, Colson Whitehead’s literary take on the zombie apocalypse.

Music in this Episode

“Enterprise 1” by Languis

“Be Kind" by Kesta

”Starday“ by Podington Bear

”Chromatic Sins" by Th.e n.d.

DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.3490151

Special thanks this week to Phil Borghi for passing along a reminder that impostor syndrome is not unique to science or academia.

2.16: Advocacy and Diplomacy with Science Soapbox

If you are interested in being a guest for an upcoming episode of Bold Signals, drop us an e-mail or check out this page. Thanks in advance!

This week we take a look at the big board of science diplomacy with Devon Collins, Avital Percher, and Maryam Zaringhalam- the team behind Science Soapbox, a podcast about the intersection of science, policy, and advocacy. In a freewheeling interview, we discuss everything from researching biology from multiple perspectives, to the semantics of the cancer “moonshot”, to the complex interactions between science and politics.

Want more info about Science Soapbox?

Science Soapbox | Science Soapbox on Twitter | Science Soapbox on Soundcloud | Science Soapbox on Itunes

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Links and Show Notes

The cover art for this episode was taken from the collection of historical maps of New York maintained by the New York Public Library.

This episode was recorded in the Science Outreach Lab at Rockefeller University. If you’re looking at the cover art (derived from this map specifically), the lab is located in the lower lefthand corner. That weird banging sound heard sporadically through the episode can be attributed to either a set of cheap microphones or the lab’s wobbly table.

Now that the podcast is based in California, conversations around science communication and vaccination suddenly feel significantly less abstract.

How Britain’s EU referendum (a.k.a. Brexit) will effect science is really only a small part of a hugely complex, intensely contentious, and developing situation. However, the reaction from many researchers can be summed up with Steve Cowley’s widely quoted “I fear desperately for the future of UK science.” Though published before the referendum, this data from Digital Science is, at the very least, cause for major concern.

Here is the full clip of John Oliver talking about the fallout from Brexit. His segment on the subject produced before the vote is also excellent.

The image of a newspaper with the “Everything Awful” headline is taken from Matt Fraction and David Aja’s fantastic Hawkeye series.The image of a dog proclaiming “This is fine.” as he is engulfed in flames comes from KC Green’s long running webcomic Gunshow.

The sourdough starter discussed in this and last week’s episode was created using this simple protocol. For the record, her name is Jane “Sour” Dough and her ability to make delicious bread comes her colony of microbiota including Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis.

Avital’s research involves studying microbe-host interactions at the level of chemical biology. Think of it like a real-time strategy game, but with infectious agents.

Devon will talk more about his background and research in our next episode, but it’s worth noting upfront exactly how influential his lab has been in the area of drug addiction. His advisor, Mary Jeanne Kreek, was involved in the initial studies examining methadone as a treatment for opiate addiction.

The conditioned place preference paradigm is a standard way to test for the aversive and/or rewarding effects of drugs. Though the details differ between labs, it involves pairing drug administration with a set of spatial or contextual cues and then examining the behavior of an animal in response to those cues. This chapter provides a nice overview of conditioned place preference and it’s relationship to other techniques like in vivo administration. This article provides a more critical look at what the technique provides to addiction-focused research.

Broadly speaking, Maryam’s research examines gene control. More specifically, she uses high-throughput sequencing and her programming knowledge to investigate gene control in the protozoan parasite Trypanosoma brucei.

Infection by Trypanosoma brucei is the cause of African trypanosomiasis (a.k.a. African Sleeping Sickness). Contrary to that one episode of House, T. brucei is transmitted by the bite of an infected tsetse fly.

Tsetse means "fly" in Tswana, a language spoken by roughly five million people in southern Africa.

Devon is not the first to cite Star Trek as a major influence on his path into science on the podcast.

That myth that humans only use 10% of their brains probably causes no shortage of masterpiece eye rolls for scientists trying to enjoy some popular science fiction. Likely based on a misunderstanding of work by William James, the myth is a central plot point in the 2014 film Lucy.

Contrary to how it sounds, Cancer Moonshot 2020 is not a science fiction film from the 1950s. Rather it is the name of a massive initiative to find vaccine-based immunotherapies against cancer. Spearheaded by Joe Biden, the project has been compared to Richard Nixon’s “War on Cancer”.

The Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative is a massive effort to build up the infrastructure and technology necessary to map the human brain. Despite its focus on developing new tools, the BRAIN initiative is often conflated with the Human Brain Project- a highly troubled and widely criticized effort to simulate the human brain.

The National Microbiome Initiative is a recently announced effort to foster the integrated study of microbiomes across different ecosystems. It’s early days, but the project has been lauded for bringing together research efforts from research centers, disease foundations, and private companies.

Liberty Science Center is an interactive science museum and learning center located in Liberty State Park in Jersey City.

Avital is likely not the only person to study immunity because of Starcraft. Immune Defense seeks to bring the worlds of real-time-strategy gaming and molecular biology together.

Not only are Lego widely used to model DNA in the classroom, but Lego-like bricks comprised of DNA can be used to build self-constructing three-dimensional structures. Lego also sells wildly popular sets featuring women scientists.

No seriously, the L train in New York City is about to experience some extraordinarily long delays. Sorry Williamsburg.

Speaking of WIlliamsburg, one of the biggest stories related to Ebola in the United States was when was revealed that Craig Spencer, a doctor who had treated Ebola patients in Guinea, tested positive for the disease.

Fun fact, Rockefeller’s science outreach team were major contributors to the paper indicating the presence of DNA matching the genomes of anthrax and the bubonic plague in the New York City subway (click here for a nifty visualization). Since its initial publication, a correction has been added to the paper to clarify misleading and speculative text. Jeanne Garbarino, director of the science outreach program, discussed the broader Pathomap project way back in the first season.

There’s a lot to be said about the gigantic failures of communication around vaccine safety, but the science is astoundingly clear: Vaccines don’t cause autism.

For more on the socio-economics of immunity, check out this article. The best (and most empathetic) writing on immunity is probably Eula Bliss’s On Immunity.

According to Pew Research, there is a significant difference in how people with different political affiliations view issues like climate change.

Speaking of incorporating personality while talking about science, Maryam was recently featured on an episode of Story Collider.

Maryam’s list of 50 ways to talk about climate change can be found here.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) offers a variety of fellowships for scientists looking to apply their experience on other arena. While this week’s guests are all thinking about applying for the Science and Technology Policy Fellowship a future guest describes her experience with the Mass Media Science & Engineering Fellows Program.

Though the details are still developing, everything about the Michael Katze scandal is absolutely appalling. For a valuable perspective, check out this expertly written piece on science’s “brilliance” problem.

This week’s Bold Signals Book Club selection is Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights by Ryu Mitsuse. This book does not mess around- in 300 pages it covers the birth and death of the universe, a battle between Plato, Siddartha, and Jesus, and all manner of science, philosophy and religion. Think Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics mashed up with Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light filtered through the lense of Japanese science fiction. Unfortunately, the plot is extremely difficult to follow.

For something on the complete opposite end of the spectrum book-wise, maybe check out White Trash by Nancy Isenberg. For some welcome relief from current events, maybe check out the new season of the Great British Bake Off on PBS.

Music in this Episode

“Enterprise 1” by Languis

“Rainy Days" by Erik Jackson

"Leiden Lowlife" by deeB

"Yacht" by deeB

DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.3470093

Special thanks this week to science diplomat Dr. Marga Gual Soler for helping to clarify exactly where the “science” is in science diplomacy. Head over to the fantastic Talk Nerdy podcast to hear her talk about evidence-based diplomacy.

2.15 Science in the Field with Kate Clancy

If you are interested in being a guest for an upcoming episode of Bold Signals Season 2, drop us an e-mail or check out this page. Thanks in advance!

We return to our regularly scheduled programming with an episode featuring a conversation with biological anthropologist Kate Clancy about what anthropology research actually entails, how neuroscience and biological anthropology can share so many methods but vary so greatly in perspective, and about Kate and her colleagues' important research into the pervasiveness and effects of sexual harassment and assault in science.

Want more info about Kate?

Kate on Twitter | Kate’s Website | Kate on Google Scholar | Kate on ResearchGate

Survey of Academic Field Experiences (SAFE): Trainees Report Harassment and Assault

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Links and Show Notes

The cover art for this episode was adapted from “R.M. Kellogg's Great Crops of Strawberries”. To find tons of great images from old scientific texts, head on over to the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s Flickr page.

A lot has already been said and written about the shooting in Orlando so please take this opportunity to seek out more diverse voices than the one that hosts this podcast.

The clip of Barack Obama discussing why the CDC does not research gun violence is from a town hall meeting held in Elkhart Indiana on June 1, 2016, 11 days before the shooting in Orlando.

The CDC does not research gun violence because of the “Dickey Amendment”, which states that “None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.” The amendment was proposed by Jay Dickey- who has since called for its repeal- in response to a 1993 study demonstrating that gun ownership is a risk factor for homicide in the home.

As is made repeatedly clear throughout this episode, sometimes even scientists and science communicators can have hilariously incorrect views on what anthropology actually entails. Luckily, the American Anthropological Association has a whole page devoted to answering the question “What is anthropology?”.

Stated very, very simply, critical race theory (CRT) is a theoretical framework that examines race and racism across dominant cultural modes of expression. Together Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (intro) and Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge (intro) make for a reasonably comprehensive primer on the dynamic and eclectic movement.

Helpfully, the Society for Medical Anthropology has a whole page devoted to answering the question “What is medical anthropology, anyway?”.

Irven DeVore is a gigantic figure in the modern history of anthropology- both for his research into the social lives of baboons and for his early support for the controversial fields of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. This interview (text) conducted by Annual Reviews provides an excellent overview of Devore’s life and work.

Although once well known his work studying cognitive processes in monkeys and for teaching "Human Behavioral Biology," (a.k.a. "Sex") alongside Irven DeVore, Marc Hauser is now known for being indicted on multiple counts of scientific misconduct by both Harvard University and the Office of Research Integrity. This internal report (made public by The Boston Globe) provides a thorough (and depressing) overview of the nature and extent of Hauser’s misconduct and the attempts made by his students and colleagues to blow the whistle.

For more on the medicalization of menstruation and the search for menotoxins throughout history, check out Kate’s excellent piece “Menstruation is just blood and tissue you ended up not using”. The paper describing Kate’s research into iron stores and menstruation can be found here.

Kate’s blog, “Context and Variation”, was hosted by Scientific American until 2014 and now resides on her website.

Established by Grazyna Jasienska, the Mogielica Human Ecology Study Site includes five villages in rural Poland where Kate and other researchers investigate the effects of hard physical work on women’s reproductive physiology. Kate described a visit to the study site in a four part (1, 2, 3, 4) series on her blog.

Authored by Kate, Robin Nelson, Julienne Rutherford, and Katie Hinde, “Survey of Academic Field Experiences (SAFE): Trainees Report Harassment and Assault” provided empirical data about the prevalence and effects of sexual harassment and assault within scientific fieldwork settings.

A discussion of the preliminary findings and presentation given by the SAFE team at AAPA in 2013 can be found here.

There was a lot written about the “SAFE13″ paper when it was published in 2014, but take a listen to this episode of the Breaking Bio podcast to hear from all the study authors.

Though probably the most visible cases have come from astronomy, incidents of sexual harassment have come to light across science. This piece by Hope Jahren provides an additional perspective on this looks like from the other side.

This week’s Bold Signals Book Club selection is Hav by Jan Morris, a combination travelogue and alternate history about a fictitious Mediterranean city-state. If you find you have the cognitive capacity to read about an ostensibly peaceful and diverse society sliding towards violence, you’ll find it an excellent piece of anthropological speculative fiction in the vein of Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. If not, now is an excellent time to call up the people in your life in need of support and invite them over for a marathon of The Great British Bake Off.

Music in this Episode

“Enterprise 1” by Languis

"River Lullaby" by Third Person Lurkin

"Dark Water Jazz" by Jenova 7

"Track" by Aydio

DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.3439784

#season 2 #podcast episode #Kate Clancy #Safe13 #anthropology #biological anthropology #gun control #critical race theory #medical anthropology #Irven DeVore #Marc Hauser #reproductive health #menotoxins #Mogielica Human Ecology Study Site #Breaking Bio #Hav #Jan Morris

On Moving and Secret Origins

Bold Signals officially moves from Brooklyn to Berkeley today. As we move ourselves and our gear across the continental United States, we'd just like to take a second to acknowledge everyone who has helped us get to this far. The idea to do a science podcast that purposely doesn't address scientific and/or academic minutiae actually grew out of listening to a pair of podcasts- Jay and Miles Xplain the X-Men and Journey into Misery- that cover the minutiae of comic books in a systematic and academic fashion. Both are as entertaining as they are informative, and if you flip their premises and throw in some vocal fry, you get something like Bold Signals. From there, Bold Signals was catalyzed by New York's excellent array of outreach groups- most notably the science outreach team at Rockefeller University- and shaped by conversations with the amazing community of scientists, scholars, and students that exists both in the city and on social media. If you've ever read any of my academic writing, you'll know that I have a tendency towards including too much detail and too many citations. At the risk of this devolving into just a list of people, places, and things, I'll say that if you reading this, I owe you a big thanks for helping Bold Signals grow from a tiny harebrained idea to a slightly less tiny series of episodes of which I take great pride. Stay tuned: There's lots of great stuff coming up in the remainder of season 2 and even more coming in season 3. Thanks so, so much everyone. Talk to you from the left coast, -John

#supplementary materials

2.14: Brainy Programming with Chris Madan

You can find every episode of Bold Signals on Soundcloud, iTunes, and Stitcher. If you dig the podcast and have a few seconds to spare, kindly leave a review or star rating in any of those places. Season two episodes are also available for download via Figshare.

If you are interested in being a guest for an upcoming episode of Bold Signals Season 2, drop us an e-mail or check out this page. Thanks in advance!

This week we examine the relationship between emotion and memory with psychology and neuroscience researcher Christopher Madan. In our conversation we discuss everything from computational modeling and machine learning, to learning how to program in grad school, to navigating the uncertain terrain that is scientific jargon.

Want more info about Chris?

Chris on Twitter | Chris’s Website | Chris on ResearchGate

An Introduction to MATLAB for Behavioral Researchers

Want more info about Bold Signals and John?

Bold Signals on SoundCloud | Bold Signals on iTunes | Bold Signals on Twitter | Bold Signals on Facebook

John on About.Me

Links and Show Notes

The cover art for this episode is a compilation of images from the Pictures of Facial Affect (POFA) collection created by Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesman and used in their influential work categorizing facial expressions. This profile of psychology researcher Lisa Barrett includes a general (and nicely critical) review of Ekman’s work.

There is a lot still to be written about the leak of OKCupid user data under the guise of open science, but widely circulated blog posts by Emily Gorcenski, Oliver Keyes, and John Sakaluk have framed the initial conversation. For continuing coverage, watch this post by Micah Allen. Though the lack of de-identification makes this latest release especially egregious, this is not the first time OkCupid user data has been scraped. OkCupid co-founder Christian Rudder even used user data in his popular OkTrends blog and the resulting book Dataclysm.

Beliefs allegedly held by the individual at the center of the OkCupid controversy not withstanding, it would be disingenuous to discuss research ethics without mentioning the historical context of the Nuremberg Code. Together with the Declaration of Helsinki and the controversies surrounding experiments like those conducted by Stanley Milgram and Laud Humphreys, this code is the basis for regulations related to research involving human participants.

Recent developments in interrelated fields including genomics, citizen science, data sharing, and big data have profoundly complicated questions about what it means to consent and participate in a research study. The 2013 study of emotional contagion on Facebook is probably the most widely publicized case of a disconnect between the actions of a regulatory apparatus and the concerns of participants.

To hear more about Chris’s research on emotion and memory, listen to this episode of the excellent neuroscience-oriented podcast Neurocurious.

Chris currently works with Elizabeth Kensinger at Boston College. His other major collaborators include Jeremy Caplan, Esther Fujiwara, and Marcia Spetch at the University of Alberta, and Tobias Sommer at University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf.

In modern psychology/neuroscience parlance, “behavioral” bears no relation to behaviorism- the approach that subsumed psychology for decades. Rather, it means something like “research not involving brain imaging or other biology-based measures”. First season guest Michael Greenstein’s experiments look superficially similar to Chris’s, but are considered “behavioral” because they don’t take place in an MRI scanner.

The relationship between emotion and memory is such a huge research area that it even has its own Wikipedia page. For an introduction to these topics from a cognitive neuroscience perspective, see this widely cited review.

The Center for the Study of Emotion and Attention at the University of Florida has developed and distributed a number of different stimuli sets usful for research involving emotion. Access requires special permission, but both the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) and Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) sets are widely used throughout psychology and neuroscience.

For younger listeners, here’s what a 56k modem sounds like. To capture the full experience of using the internet in the era of dial-up, take the frustration of watching a YouTube video inexplicably fail to load past a certain point and apply it literally everything online.

The SPM suite, which is widely used to analyze brain imaging data, is probably the ur-example of neuroscientists creating and releasing useful pieces of software. Created by the Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience at University College London, SPM is is made freely available to researchers in the brain imaging community. Similarly free software packages include AFNI, Freesurfer, and FSL. To find all manner of brain imaging-related software and resources, visit the Neuroimaging Informatics Tools and Resources Clearinghouse (NITRC).

As demonstrated by this paper by Anders Eklund and colleagues, the different assumptions underlying different brain imaging software packages can have startlingly major consequences when it comes to analyzing data.

When programming experiments, many psychologists and neuroscientists opt to control for order effects through counterbalancing rather than pure randomization.

Chris’s studies of word properties using computational modeling are described here and here. See this paper for a general overview of computational modeling in brain imaging research.

When considering the reality of machine learning, it’s useful to think about data analysis rather than the Terminator franchise. This Wired cover story and this “gentle introduction” provide nice entry points to machine learning, while a much more thorough overview can be found in this free Coursera course from Andrew Ng.

Multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) is a technique for analyzing brain imaging data that involves programming an algorithm to search for patterns of brain activity that differentiate two or more experimental conditions. This paper provides a thorough overview of the principles underlying MVPA and related techniques.

Though Chris provides an excellent general definition, researchers working in neuroscience, psychology, and computer science conceptualize memory very differently. Compare these reviews of memory from the perspective of neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience to the memory in your computer or mobile device.

Object recognition is a mind-numbingly boring, fundamentally fascinating, and endless rabbit hole of heated arguments. Even for researchers ostensibly working in the same field, the precise definition of “object” can vary greatly. Throw in the three pounds of complexity that is the human brain, and defining things gets exponentially more difficult.

Chris curated the Real Scientists Twitter account the week of January 17th to 23rd, 2016. Over the course of the week he led conversations ranging everywhere from the use of brain imaging to memory strategies. Look closely and you might even spot some input from a certain podcast host.

There is an ever increasing number of science-related rotational-curation Twitter accounts including Real Scientists, AstroTweeps, BioTweeps, NeuroTweeps, and I Am SciComm. In the name of interdisciplinary scholarship, also be sure to check out We the Humanities.

Especially in the case of fMRI research, there are A LOT of steps between the actual activity of cells in the brain and the signal analyzed by neuroscientists. Many fMRI researchers use “Regions [x] lit up.” as a shorthand for “After a series processing steps, comparisons of signals related to energy use reached statistical significance in a cluster of three dimensional pixels that, at least according to a standard atlas, correspond to the [x] region of the brain.”. Unless they’re using optogenetic techniques, most neuroscientists aren’t actually lighting up any brains.

Jody Culham’s site fMRI for Newbies (formerly fMRI for Dummies) is an excellent starting point for learning the terminology and methodology of fMRI research.

EurekAlert!, the service that underlies a substantial portion of science reporting, turned 20 years old the week of this episode’s release. Operated by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, EurekAlert! is essentially a giant clearinghouse for science-related press releases.

No seriously, most scientists on social media (including the host of this very podcast) are very happy to answer genuine questions related to their work or field. At the same time, scientists also tend to be extremely busy with their own research and homework. So please don't ask them to do yours for you.

All of Chris’s publications can be found on his website. His papers specifically related to mentorship and getting involved in research can be found here.

Chris’s book An Introduction to MATLAB for Behavioral Researchers is available for purchase via Amazon. If have access to a university or institutional library, you may also be able to read it for free through Sage Research Methods. Similarly, Matlab for Neuroscientists is also available on both Amazon and via ScienceDirect. There are lots of good ways to learn Python, including Codecademy, Google’s Python class, and the book Python Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science.

The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD for Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) is the largest German support organisation in the field of international academic co-operation.

Robert Epstein, research psychologist and author, recently wrote in Aeon that “Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer.” While the “brain as computer” metaphor is certainly problematic, it seems a bit excessive for a critique of taking the metaphor too literally itself takes the metaphor completely literally.

This week’s Bold Signals Book Club selection is Definitely Maybe by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, a science fiction novel that takes place almost entirely in the minds and living rooms of scientists working in the Soviet Union. Both a dark comedy about the process of science and a uniquely claustrophobic take on dystopian science fiction, Definitely Maybe also seemingly predicted one of the most bizarre theories proposed about the Large Hadron Collider.

Subjected to Soviet censorship and poor translations for decades, the work of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky is slowly becoming widely available. Their two most acclaimed novels are probably Hard to be a God and Roadside Picnic, the later of which was the basis for Andrei Tarkovsky's classic film Stalker (which, along with Tarkovsky's other films, is currently available for free via the official Mosfilm Youtube channel).

Music in this Episode

“Enterprise 1” by Languis “Twilight Days” by Skipless “Time Doesn’t Exist, Clocks Exist″ by Mizontiq “XHD” by Aydio

DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.3394081

This is what we talk about when we talk about the academic research crisis.

From: Taylor, J. Q., Kovacik, P., Traer, J., Zakahi, P., Oslowski, C., Widge, A. S., & Glorioso, C. A. (2016). Avoiding a lost generation of scientists. eLife, 5, e17393. doi: 10.7554/eLife.17393

#supplementary materials #elife #Academics for the Future of Science #Save Science #Funding #phd crisis

2.13: Academic Intersections with Liz Wayne & Xine Yao

If you are interested in being a guest for an upcoming episode of Bold Signals Season 2, drop us an e-mail or check out this page. Thanks in advance!

This week it’s a podcast two for one as we cross the STEM/humanities divide with cancer scientist Liz Wayne and literary critic Xine Yao. Together they host of PhDivas, a podcast about academia, culture, and social justice. In our conversation we discuss how people across the scholarly spectrum perceive one another, the locus and character of research in the humanities, and the necessity of being interdisciplinary. Also: Drake, headaches, scholarly privilege, friendship, and ruminations on the word “rumination”.

Want more info about PhDivas, Xine, and Liz?

PhDivas on SoundCloud | PhDivas on iTunes | PhDivas on Twitter | PhDivas on Facebook

Xine on Twitter | Xine’s Website | Liz on Twitter | Liz’s Website

Want more info about Bold Signals and John?

Bold Signals on SoundCloud | Bold Signals on iTunes | Bold Signals on Twitter | Bold Signals on Facebook

John on About.Me

Links and Show Notes:

The cover art for this week’s episode is taken from the “Colonies” series by artist Vik Munzi and synthetic biologist Tal Danino. Emerging from the creative combination of contemporary art and biotechnology known as bioart, this particular image was created using rat liver cells. Check out this blog post for a description of the artistic and scientific process underlying “Colonies” then maybe peruse this article for a scholarly review of the ethics of bioart.

Yes, neuroscientist Jack Gallant and colleagues really did ask people to listen to The Moth while in an MRI. The result is a study that tells us some neat things about what is happening in our brains as we listen to narratives.

The study comparing activity within the brains of mathematicians and mathematicians was recently described in this paper and this (significantly less jargony) article. Similar studies have also been conduced with opera singers, expert dancers, professional writers, expert board game players, trained artists, and many other groups.

After his death in 1955, Albert Einstein’s brain was removed and dissected by pathologist Thomas Harvey. From there, the story gets rather garish. Recent analyses of Harvey’s unpublished photographs can be found here and here.

Xine and Liz covered how they came to do the work they do now over on PhDivas.

For those somehow unaware, Drake is so Canadian that his entertainment career started with a role on Degrassi: The Next Generation. Yes, he is also from Toronto.

Hans Bethe was awarded the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. Though perhaps best known for his involvement in the Manhattan Project and subsequent advocacy against nuclear weapons, he also made significant contributions to astrophysics, quantum electrodynamics and solid-state physics during a scholarly career that lasted over 70 years.

Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit features a scene centered around “Letters to a Young Poet”, a collection of letters written by poet Rainer Rilke to Franz Kappus.

Xine and Liz’s discussion about graduate student labor in higher education can be heard here. Their episodes focused on mentorship and leaves of absence can be heard here and here.

The discussion about how many hours academics should work per week is as ubiquitous as it is contentious. The most recent catelyst of conversation is probably this blog post by bioinformatician Mick Watson.

Some neuroscientists actually do spend time slicing brains. The sectioning of the brain of Henry Molaison (aka Patient H.M.) was even streamed live online.

Oliver Smithies (along with Mario Capecchi and Martin Evans) was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of homologous recombination- the the technique underlying gene targeting and knockout mice. Still working in the lab at the age of 90, Smithies is also well known for his work advancing gel electrophoresis.

Xine and Liz discuss what the research process looks on either side of the STEM/Humanities divide in this episode of PhDivas.

Remedies to treat headaches are found in the earliest known medical texts, though our current understanding is mostly informed by the (decidedly chauvinistic) medical tradition of early scientific era. This paper provides a nicely concise summary of the history of headaches.

Judith Butler is perhaps best known for her 1990 book “Gender Trouble”, in which she outlined her theory of gender perfomativity. Because her prose is notoriously difficult, here is Judith Butler explained with cats. Butler’s definition of rumination is described in this essay on criticism.

Speaking of difficulties with language, the word “bibliography” has two distinct meanings relevant to this podcast: 1. The organized listing of referenced books (a.k.a. enumerative bibliography) and 2. The systematic description of books as physical, historical or cultural objects (a.k.a. analytical bibliography).

Derived from the Latin rūminātio (“chewing the cud”), the word “ruminate” is most often defined as something akin to “deep, careful consideration”. In the context of clinical psychology, “rumination” refers specifically to a mode of responding to distress that involves repetitively and passively focusing on the symptoms of distress and on the possible causes and consequences of those symptoms. In general, research into this type of rumination has focused on its link with the symptomology of major depressive disorder and its possible link to a deficit in controlling the contents of short term memory.

“A Room of One’s Own”, Virginia Woolf’s exploration of women as writers of and characters in fiction, can be read in full via eBooks@Adelaide.

In episodes of PhDivas that directly address perceptions across the STEM/humanities divide head on, Xine and Liz describe their visits to a biomedical engineering and the Mütter Museum.

The most comprehensive statistics about the health of the humanities is given by the Humanities Indicators project undertaken by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Spoiler alert for the 2015 report (and a trend that’s been noted for decades), things could be better. Since this episode is all about interdisciplinary scholarship, it’s probably worth noting that, despite some recent increases in the U.S., trends in STEM funding worldwide are also not encouraging.

Among its many, many epistemological problems, the pseuedoscience of phrenology was both steeped in and used to justify all manner of institutional racism. Martin Delany was admitted to Harvard Medical School in 1850, but saw his admittance rescinded due to the objections of a group of white students.

It’s perhaps not most precise metric, but if you want to compare the value universities place on their academic departments compared to their sports programs, just take a look at this breakdown of average salaries. Data on graduate stipends across institutions and disciplines can be found here.

The current minimum stipends for graduate students and post-docs funded through NIH grants can be found here. If these salaries seem egregiously discordant with the levels of expertise required, keep in mind that people funded through other mechanisms are often paid significantly less.

Thomas Kuhn outlined the notion of paradigm shifts in scientific knowledge in his his hugely influential book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. In very broad terms, Kuhn’s thesis was that scientific theories do not emerge simply from falsification or the straightforward accumulation of facts, but rather from a complex set of evolving intellectual circumstances and possibilities.

Maybe scientists forget that rhetoric is a thing because it literally preceded the modern conception of science by millennia? No seriously, Aristotle’s “Rhetoric” was published almost 2,000 years before Copernicus first described the heliocentric solar system in “De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium” and Thomas Hooke catalyzed cell biology with “Micrographia”.

Johannes Haushofer, professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University, recently published a CV listing his career failures to encourage others to keep trying in the face of disappointment. Reaction to the CV going viral was decidedly mixed. As noted by Haushofer himself, several other academics previously published similar documents.

The Week's Bold Signals Book Club selection in “Synners” by Pat Cadigan. Originally published in 1991, Synners is a classic cyberpunk novel. There are hackers battling mega-corporations, there is a dystopian urban landscape and a rich virtual, there are lots of big ideas about the intersection of humanity and technology. As with most cyberpunk, most of the superficial elements haven’t aged very well. This is a novel where the creation and distribution of music videos is a central plot point. But this is also a novel that has a lot prescient things to say about the reciprocal relationship between communication and culture in the digital landscape.

Most of Pat Cadigan’s work is currently out of print, but her “Mindplayers” trilogy is currently available in omnibus form. If you enjoy “Synners”, Melissa Scott’s “Trouble and Her Friends” has a similar milieu.

Music in this Episode

“Enterprise 1” by Languis "Cosa Preluda” by dmyra “Latin Electro #10″ by dmyra “Too Far Gone” by Ryan Lit “People in Colours” by Superpoze

DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.3323602

“Dr. Penfield, I smell burnt toast!”

Wilder Penfield, instigator of the cortical homunculus and one-time “greatest living Canadian”, was the subject of this fantastically cheesy Canadian Heritage Minute.

#supplementary materials #Neuroscience #neuroanatomy #Wilder Penfield

2.12: Sensation and Perception with Jens Foell

If you are interested in being a guest for an upcoming episode of Bold Signals Season 2, drop us an e-mail or check out this page. Thanks in advance!

This week we dive headfirst into the complexities of the brain and behavior with post-doctoral fellow and self described "fMRI Guy" Jens Foell. In our conversation we discuss studying phantom limbs and psychopaths, the portrayal of neuroimaging in TV and film, and the (neuro)ethics of applying neuroscience research to (neuro)law.

Want more info about Jens?

Jens on Twitter | Jens on ResearchGate

Want more info about Bold Signals and John?

Bold Signals on SoundCloud | Bold Signals on iTunes | Bold Signals on Twitter | Bold Signals on Facebook

John on About.Me

Links and Show Notes:

The cover art for this week’s episode is taken from a poster created by Hungarian painter and printmaker Istvan Orosz for the International Poster and Graphic Design Festival of Chaumont (2009).

The sixth (and presumed final) White House Science Fair took place on April 13th, 2016. The 130 student participants showcased projects involving everything from theoretical astrophysics to ebola prevention.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s full description of quantum computing can be viewed here. According to experts in the field, his response was generally (if not entirely) accurate.

Hana Schank and Carl Zimmer’s excellent pieces on the history, politics, and privilege of science fairs can be found at The Atlantic and Stat respectively.

Roland Emmerich attended film school at University of Television and Film Munich. His thesis project, The Noah's Ark Principle (trailer) is among the most expensive student films ever made.

Though film clips are often used as experimental stimuli in social psychology and neuroscience, research into how film affects the brain can be traced back to the montage experiments of Sergei Eisenstein and Lev Kuleshov. For a nice introduction to “neurocinematics”, check out this article.

It’s an easy assumption to make, but forensic psychology generally does not resemble the type of “profiling” displayed on programs like The Profiler and Criminal Minds. Instead, the term refers to work at the intersection of the biology, behavior, and the legal system. Think Elizabeth Loftus not Will Graham.

An early episode of Radiolab covered the history and experience of phantom limbs and phantom limb pain. More scholarly overviews of this topic can be found in these articles.

The relationship between phantom limb pain and cortical organization was first described by Herta Flor and colleagues in 1995. For more information about Jens’s project investigating how mirror therapy affects this organization iin patients with phantom limb pain, see this paper.

The topological representation of different parts of the body to different parts of motor and somatosensory cortices is known as the cortical homunculus. There is a long tradition of research in this area, catalyzed by the (frankly really horrifying) experiments of Gustav Fritz and Eduard Hitzig in 1870. The homunculus diagram studied by students of the brain and behavior everywhere is based on the work of Canadian neurologist Wilder Penfield and is generally attributed to him, but was actually first drawn by his secretary.

Mirror therapy as a treatment for phantom limb pain was first described by Vilayanur S. Ramachandran in 1996. This clip from House shows the technique in action. Though, as Jens alluded to, it is still being evaluated experimentally.

Participants moving during brain imaging experiments also came up in our last episode. The difference was that the cause of the motion in that case was children being children, rather than the research question.

No lie, fMRI is unlikely to become a reliable method for detecting deception.

Though modern research into psychopathy can be traced back to Hervey M. Cleckley’s “The Mask of Sanity”, Chris Patrick and colleagues only unveiled the influential triarchic model of psychopathy in 2009. According to this model, different conceptions of psychopathy emphasize three observable characteristics- boldness, meanness, and disinhibition- to varying degrees.

Psychology researcher Kent Keil uses a portable MRI scanner to, among other things, study the neurobiology of psychopathy in prison populations. These two articles provide a nice introduction to his work from a scholarly perspective, while this piece in The New Yorker provides a more general view.

Depending on context, “disinibition” can actually mean quite different things. In conditioning research, disinhibition refers to something like “A temporary increase in strength of an extinguished response due to an unrelated stimulus effect”. In the study of online bullying and trolling, disinhibition is described as “The tendency for people to say and do things online that they wouldn’t ordinarily say or do face-to-face.” In psychopathy research (and social and cognitive psychology research more generally), has historically been defined as “A deficit in impulse control.”

NIMH’s Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) is intended to provide a research framework for studying mental disorders. Essentially, it is intended as a replacement for symptom-based methods of classification. As you might expect, this is extremely controversial in clinical psychology circles.

This episode of Sawbones provides a terrific overview of the history of homeopathy. Given that it’s based on demonstrably incorrect assumptions including “like cures like” and “the memory of water”, it should be of no surprise that it is completely ineffective for treating any health condition. Really, the only surprise is that it’s continued to flourish despite centuries of on-point criticism. Don’t buy it, not even a little bit.

Yes. There really are people claiming that studying LSD’s affect on the brain is akin to the discovery of the Higgs boson. These people, as respected and influential as they may be, are incorrect.

This week’s Bold Signals Book Club selection is Motorman by David Ohle. Originally published in 1972 and circulated as photocopies for decades after falling out of print, the novel heavily influenced the “New Weird” fiction of authors like Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, Ben Marcus, and China Miéville. The plot, such as it is, is idiosyncratic and absurd. It’s an extremely difficult read, but Ohle’s inventive use of language makes the effort well worth it.

For a myriad of book recommendations, check out this Twitter thread. For easier viewing, see this Storify by Carina Gsottbauer. Thanks Carina!

Music in this Episode

"Enterprise 1" by Languis "Man Without a Head" by Nick Jaina "Tortoise Rudimentary" by Máscaras "Telephone Poles For Sale" Velella Velella

DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.3189640

Purple rain, purple rain.

Brains? Brains! An excellent guide to being a savvy consumer of neuroscience.

Created by Rosa Li, based on this post by Russ Poldrack.

#Neuroscience #Supplementary Materials #Rosa Li #russ poldrack #fMRI #brain imaging #science communication #science #science literacy #neuroimaging #Cerebrum #Dana Foundation

2.11: Adolescent Brain Stuff with Rosa Li

If you are interested in being a guest for an upcoming episode of Bold Signals Season 2, drop us an e-mail or check out this page. Thanks in advance!

This week on the podcast we decide to jump into the developing brain with PhD student Rosa Li. In our conversation we discuss the difficulty of scanning the brains of children (and adolescents, and adults, everyone really), the extended negotiation that is a dissertation proposal, and the organizational side of science communication. Also: Nonsensical neuroscience, behavioral economics, and the most ridiculous RA position of all time.

Want more info about Rosa?

Rosa on Twitter | Rosa’s Website | Rosa on ResearchGate

Science Beyond the Abstract | Useful Science

Want more info about Bold Signals and John?

Bold Signals on SoundCloud | Bold Signals on iTunes | Bold Signals on Twitter | Bold Signals on Facebook

John on About.Me

Show Notes

The retrofuturistic cover art for this week’s episode comes from a series of postcards drawn by Jean-Marc Côté and others in the early twentieth century. The students in this particular image are diligently learning the history of France.

The complete and utter nonsense masquerading as actual neuroscience discussed in this week’s introduction was first discussed in this article. With a little help from a familiar source, it was quickly dissected by the fine folks at The Science of Us.

Vaughn Bell’s excellent essay about mental health, stigma, and the brain was published at Mind Hacks.

For a nicely broad overview of Rosa’s field of research, check out this article she wrote for Slate.

For an empirical take on the question of when adulthood begins, check out this recent paper from an interdisciplinary team led by Alexandra O. Cohen. Further muddying the waters is the theory of “emerging adulthood” posited by Jeffrey Jensen Arnett and others.

Having a 100% chance of earning five dollars or a 50% chance of earning ten dollars is the the simplest iteration of the classic risk aversion paradigm outlined by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in their seminal 1979 article on decision making. That paper, along with a similarly influential article by Richard Thaler, are widely regarded as the the foundational texts of behavioral economics. Along with Vernon L. Smith, Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002.

Paul Bloom is a professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University where he leads the Mind and Development Lab. When he isn’t writing about the development of language in academic publications, he writes on similarly simple topics like morality and religion. Thanks to the Open Yale Courses project, you can attend his introductory psychology course for free via YouTube.

Visual area MT (Medial Temporal) (also sometimes called Visual area V5) is a region of visual cortex that, since the early 1970s, has been thought to play a major role in the perception of motion.

Disruption of the MT can cause akinetopsia, a neuropsychological disorder in which a patient cannot perceive motion. Probably the most famous case of akinetopsia is Subject L.M. who began having difficulty with motion perception following a severe case of sinus vein thrombosis. A series of follow-up brain imaging studies demonstrated significant damage to her bilateral MT and disrupted activity throughout her visual system.

Laurie Santos is the director of Yale’s Comparative Cognition Lab. For more on her work studying the evolutionary roots of decision making, check out her Ted talk on “monkeynomics”. You can also read the academic paper on the topic here.

Rosa is actually the second guest this season who got into cognitive psychology/neuroscience research because of little monkeys.

Until recently, the Talairach Atlas (specifically the 1988 edition, developed by Jean Talairach and Pierre Tourneaux) was the de facto standard for precisely describing locations in the human brain. To conduct comparisons in human brain imaging studies, individual brains are generally mapped to a standard space. However, because the Talairach Atlas is based on a single postmortem brain (that of a 60 year old alcoholic French woman), it has largely fallen out of favor in comparison to those created by the Montreal Neurological Institute which better reflect “average” neuroanatomy. This article presents a nicely rigorous comparison of the Talairach and MNI systems.

From its tools to its underlying philosophy, cognitive neuroscience is basically built on the premise of researchers looking at the same complex systems in different ways.

No seriously, a research group affiliated with Stanford’s Graduate School of Business really did ask people drink wine in an MRI. For a thorough (though rather uncritical) review of consumer neuroscience, check out this article.

For over sixty years, the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) has provided support for students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Though it has always been extremely competitive, it was announced earlier this year that graduate students will now only have a single opportunity to apply to the GRFP. Because graduate stipends are distressingly variable between different disciplines, universities, and academic departments, an NSF fellowship can represent a (comparatively) major windfall for hungry graduate students.

Eveline Crone is full professor in the unit Developmental and Educational Psychology of the Institute of Psychology at Leiden University. Most of the literature on Brain Time is in Dutch, but this paper provides a nice overview.

Switching things up and doing science in different lab environments was the subject of several previous episodes and (spoiler alert) will come up again soon.

Aside from his work researching decision making, Scott Huettel is probably best known for literally writing the book on functional magnetic resonance imaging.

If you follow Bold Signals on Facebook, you’d already have seen this nicely readable explanation of the algorithm used to match med students to residency programs from FiveThirtyEight.

ComSciCon is a series of workshops focused on the communication of complex and technical concepts organized by graduate students, for graduate students. Initially organized by graduate students at Harvard University and MIT, ComSciCon now encompasses a number of local workshops and a K12 outreach program.

When it comes critically evaluating neuroscientific information, Rosa recently transfigured this post by neuroscientist Russ Poldrack into a handy infographic.

The “Democrats and Republicans have different brains” and “People really love their iPhones” examples of nonsensical neuroscience were both drawn from pieces published in the New York Times Opinion Pages. Russ Poldrack and a number of other neuroscientists signed letters to the editor in response to both pieces.

This week’s Bold Signals Book Club selection is Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree Jr. Collecting stories published before Tiptree was revealed to be a pen name of Alice B. Sheldon, this volume includes an eclectic mix of “hard” and “soft” science fiction. Lost in the (admittedly fascinating) story of Tiptree’s true identity is the fact that her stories are really, really good. Portending the cyberpunk genre and the stories of George Saunders, the stories in this collection are as thought provoking as they are darkly humorous.

Music in this Episode

“Enterprise 1“ by Languis

“Molasses” by Podington Bear

“That’s a Terrible Name for a Song” by Velella Velella

“Something” by Kai Engel

DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.3160828

Reflections On Making A Free Podcast

Over the weekend Bethany Brookshire (aka SciCurious) posted “Why Won’t You Pay To Read” an extremely articulate commentary on the economics of science journalism and communication. If you haven’t already, I urge you to give it a read and then join the ongoing conversation on social media.

There are very few financial costs of creating Bold Signals. Except for the hosting costs over at SoundCloud, the podcast is essentially built on a patchwork of free platforms and MacGyvered hardware. This is not to say it’s all free. Believe it or not, each episode requires a huge investment of time and energy to put together. Though it varies depending on the length of the interview and the ambition put into the intro and outro segments, an average episode can take 20 hours or more to put together. A recent episode actually took at least twice that long times because of various technical difficulties.

Here’s the first open secret of Bold Signals, it’s all done by one person.

I do all the writing, editing, producing, and recording myself. The first person to download and listen to a new episode is very likely the second person to ever hear it. I like to joke that Bold Signals is a small-batch science podcast, but it’s really more sketchy corner bodega than artisonal fromagerie. I am consistently amazed by the quality of the guests I get and proud of the work I put in, but I constantly wish the production were better.

Here’s the second open secret of Bold Signals, it’s about professional development.

As I've discussed elsewhere, the podcast initially grew out of my desire to communicate the lived experience of doing science. Looking over the science-related podcast landscape at the time, I saw lots of good stuff discussing the results of scientific investigation but significantly less about the people who call themselves scientists. After looking around for a podcast about the experience and craft of being a scientist, I decided to just make one myself.

If that sounds a little ostentatious, that’s because it was. Prior to starting Bold Signals I had never done any kind of interviewing or audio production. Listen to the earliest episodes and this will be glaringly obvious. Producing the podcast over the last year has been an exercise in fretting over grammar and syntax, learning the ins and outs of GarageBand, and scrambling to keep to a regular release schedule while working full time. While the desire to fill a gap in the science communication landscape continues to be the principle driving force behind Bold Signals and while I greatly enjoy making the podcast, I do have to justify its costs to both myself and the podcast’s guests.

For myself, especially when I’m struggling with a particularly difficult episode, I frame the time and effort that goes into the podcast as the cost of developing a particular set of skills. Hopefully, if you listen to the first and then the most recent episodes, you’ll notice some improvement in both my interviewing and the overall production. As someone with a professional interest in science and science communication, these are skills I’m very keen to develop and it works out nicely that I can do so while making Bold Signals.

A few months ago I started using Figshare to assign DOI numbers to each episode. I did this for two reasons. First, I had just interviewed a fellow science informationist and thought it would be an interesting way to leverage a data management platform. Second, I wanted to provide podcast guests with a simple and stable way to cite their participation under “Outreach” on their resumes or CVs.

All of this is to say that, at the moment, I am comfortable absorbing the costs of making Bold Signals. The financial overhead is low (though I certainly wouldn’t complain if you make a habit of buying stuff after clicking through these Amazon links) and the time and effort I put into the podcast can easily be framed as professional development. But I am in a very unique position, I don’t make my living making the podcast and it’s small enough that I can do all the production myself. If you enjoy other sciency podcasts or value good science writing and journalism, I encourage you to find a way to support them. It can be as easy as pausing your adblocker or clicking on some sponsored links. Deep down, I think most people involved in science communication would like their content to be open and accessible. Unfortunately, it’s hard to pay the bills with iTunes reviews, star ratings, and Twitter analytics.

#Podcasting #Science Communication #science journalism #process #figshare #digital object identifiers #DOI #Science

A CNNMoney segment made it sound like “neural engagement” could explain Donald Trump. Nope.

Host John Borghi was quoted in a Science of Us piece about some particularly ludicrous neuro-nonsense involving Donald Trump and EEG. It all started with a simple quote, “Literally everything about this is terrible.”

#neuroscience #bad science #debunking #Science of Us #Neuromarketing #EEG #donald trump

A selection of works by Gwen Raverat, famed English engraver and the granddaughter of Charles Darwin.

#Gwen Raverat #Charles Darwin

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