Donovan's Brain

Donovan's Brain (1953), directed by Felix E. Feist. Based on the 1942 science fiction novel of the same name, written by Curt Siodmak.

The story revolves around an attempt to keep alive the brain of millionaire megalomaniac W.H. Donovan after an otherwise fatal plane crash. Donovan, who has been pioneering the method of keeping the brain alive in electrically charged saline solution, becomes the first recipient of his treatment. Gradually, the increasingly evil brain develops telepathic abilities and becomes able to control the mind of Dr. Patrick Cory, the character who is keeping the brain alive.

The movie features Nancy Davis (better known as Nancy Reagan) as Janice Corey, wife of Dr. Patrick Corey. In an amazing find, Wikipedia links to the 1944 radio version with Orson Welles, available at archive.org (Orson Welles on Suspense). You can even download Welles' parody of Donovan's Brain!

You can also buy the book from Amazon.com, which presents this understated description (presumably from Pulpless, the publisher that reissued the book in 1999):

...Donovan's Brain is one of the most influential novels of our times.

Dr. Patrick Cory is a scientist who, unable to save the life of W.H. Donovan after a plane crash, keeps his brain alive through an illegal experiment.

The story provides an examination of human evil that is impossible to forget. W.H. Donovan is much more than one of the world's richest men. He is a megalomaniac even before Cory keeps his brain alive in the tank. Once freed of the distractions of the flesh, the will to power is all that drives the brain. It is able to communicate with Dr. Cory through telepathy, but that is only the beginning. Soon it begins to take over the scientist who keeps it alive. Possessed by the mind of Donovan, Cory finds himself helpless to fight the plans of the tycoon. Cory remains aware as he follows orders, becoming more and more like Donovan. His wife is helpless, his assistant is helpless, to stop Donovan's Brain!

A word of warning:Don't start reading this novel unless you have the time to finish it in one sitting! This is a true page turner.

The Indignity of Ice Cream Cones

AP Photo by Charles Dharapak

Jason Rosenhouse of EvolutionBlog linked to an article by Steven Pinker in The New Republic:

The Stupidity of Dignity

Conservative bioethics' latest, most dangerous ploy.

This spring, the President's Council on Bioethics released a 555-page report, titled Human Dignity and Bioethics. The Council, created in 2001 by George W. Bush, is a panel of scholars charged with advising the president and exploring policy issues related to the ethics of biomedical innovation...

Many people are vaguely disquieted by developments (real or imagined) that could alter minds and bodies in novel ways. ... Traditionalists and conservatives by temperament distrust radical change. Egalitarians worry about an arms race in enhancement techniques. And anyone is likely to have a "yuck" response when contemplating unprecedented manipulations of our biology. The President's Council has become a forum for the airing of this disquiet, and the concept of "dignity" a rubric for expounding on it. This collection of essays is the culmination of a long effort by the Council to place dignity at the center of bioethics. The general feeling is that, even if a new technology would improve life and health and decrease suffering and waste, it might have to be rejected, or even outlawed, if it affronted human dignity.

Although the Council includes two heavy hitters of neuroscience...

Floyd E. Bloom, M.D.
Professor Emeritus in the Molecular and Integrative Neurosciences at The Scripps Research Institute, and the founding CEO and board chairman of Neurome, Inc.

Michael S. Gazzaniga, Ph.D.
Director of Sage Center for the Study of Mind, University of California, Santa Barbara.

...and the report includes articles by atheist neurophilosophers Patricia S. Churchland and Daniel C. Dennett, and (even more surprisingly) transhumanist Nick Bostrom, their influence is vastly outweighed by the inclusion of 15 religious conservatives:

Although the Dignity report presents itself as a scholarly deliberation of universal moral concerns, it springs from a movement to impose a radical political agenda, fed by fervent religious impulses, onto American biomedicine.

The report's oddness begins with its list of contributors. Two (Adam Schulman and Daniel Davis) are Council staffers, and wrote superb introductory pieces. Of the remaining 21, four (Leon R. Kass, David Gelernter, Robert George, and Robert Kraynak) are vociferous advocates of a central role for religion in morality and public life, and another eleven work for Christian institutions (all but two of the institutions Catholic). Of course, institutional affiliation does not entail partiality, but, with three-quarters of the invited contributors having religious entanglements, one gets a sense that the fix is in. A deeper look confirms it.

But why are ice cream cones undignified?? Because that's the view of Leon Kass, the former chair of the Council. As Pinker explains:

Kass has a problem not just with longevity and health but with the modern conception of freedom. There is a "mortal danger," he writes, in the notion "that a person has a right over his body, a right that allows him to do whatever he wants to do with it." He is troubled by cosmetic surgery, by gender reassignment, and by women who postpone motherhood or choose to remain single in their twenties. Sometimes his fixation on dignity takes him right off the deep end:

from: The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature
By Leon Kass, M.D., Ph.D.
Published 1999 (new edition, University of Chicago Press)
original published in 1994, now out of print: (New York: The Free Press)

Kass couldn't even bring himself to say what really bugs him about people eating ice cream cones in public.

-ibid

Even a book review in Studies in Christian Ethics found Kass's squeamishness to be excessive (Clark, 1996):

Much that he has to say is significant, and even cogent. But it is one thing to draw attention to such neglected topics as the duty of hospitality, or good table manners, and another to spend such energy denouncing minor shifts in public appetites: ’the walking street eater ... is a being led by his appetite ... this doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view’. So eating a hamburger ’on the run’ is really wicked: not - we must presume-because it’s bad food badly cooked, not because its purchase finances bad farming practices, but because it’s too impatient, too ’uncivilised’, because it imposes our ’ingestions and chewings’ on others.

But everyone knows that ice cream cones are all-American...


With ice cream in hand, President George W. Bush departs Manning's Ice Cream and Milk in Clarks Summit, Pa., Thursday, Oct. 19, 2006. White House photo by Paul Morse.

The 2008 World Telekinesis Competition...

...is nearly upon us!



DESCRIPTION

This is a game of competitive telekinesis in which two teams compete over a distance to psychically influence the behavior of a candle. The match is played by lighting a candle at the centre of the game board, signalling the beginning of the game. When the candle is extinguished the match is over. The object of the game is to have the wax from the candle drip onto the opposing team's side of the board. This objective is accomplished by remote telekinetic influence.

Hosted by Noxious Sector,

an ongoing collaborative endeavor by Canadian artists Ted Hiebert, Doug Jarvis and Jackson 2Bears, dedicated to the exploration of alternative cognitive function, the paranormal and the absurd. Conceived as a formalized forum for informal inquiry, Noxious Sector projects take the form of performances, curatorial initiatives and artistic collaborations.

Deluge Contemporary Art

Victoria (BC) Canada. May 16 - June 14, 2008

Opening Friday, May 16, 7 to 10 pm

Encephalon 45 Will Possess Your Heart

Today! At PodBlack Blog: Encephalon #45 - Life Is Good, Brains Are Better. The Neurocritic's musings on Death Cab for Cutie and stalking were included, along with a related post on Domestic Violence and Executive Dysfunction from Brain Blogger. Among the many other excellent submissions: a student post on Stress and Addiction at Neuroanthropology and Ghrelin and the Omnipresence of Food at Neuroscientifically Challenged.

Encephalon #46 will be hosted right here in two weeks, on May 26. Please send your submissions to

encephalon.host --at-- gmail --dot-- com

by May 25. Thanks!

The Meaning of Life

by Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie

. . .

The single on our record is a work of fiction that was inspired by things that happened to some people close to me. It’s called “I Will Possess Your Heart,” and it’s eight-and-a-half minutes long. It’s five minutes of build and then a three-minute song. The song is basically about a stalker. It’s about this nice guy who wants this girl he can’t have, and he believes they’ll be together once she realizes how great he is—he just has to wait it out. That’s the part that makes the song really creepy, the delusion of thinking that they were meant to be together. It’s a really dark song. A lot of the material is about the inevitable disappointment people feel as they move through life, and things don’t feel the way they expect. No experience will ever match up to the idealized version in your mind.

Trends in SFN Abstracts

A new paper in PLoS ONE (Lin et al., 2008) applied the methods of computational linguistics¹ to analyze the database of abstracts presented at the 2001 to 2006 meetings of the Society for Neuroscience. The results provide an overview of the current state of the field.

Figure 8. (A) Visualization of topic map for all SFN meeting abstracts from 2001 to 2006. Abstracts assigned to different clusters appear in different colors (see legend). (B) Zooming in at the center of the topic map reveals more detailed clusters [click on the figure for a larger view].

Among the interesting findings:

• The majority of the authors (~60%) had only one abstract over the span of six years. This number may reflect a large group of “transients” comprising mostly undergraduates, graduate students, and perhaps post-docs who entered and exited the neuroscience field in a short period of time.
• The phenomena of a high transient rate, reflecting a sort of “infant mortality rate” for first time authors was first analyzed by Price [20], who estimated a 22% transient rate for paper authorship from a database consisting of a statistical sample of papers published between 1964 and 1970.

The authors applied graph theory to essentially demonstrate the Six Degrees of Steve Petersen:

• A fundamental measure used in graph theory is the shortest path between a pair of connected vertices. In the context of the network under study, this measures the number of steps it takes to go from one author to another through intermediate collaborators. From the multi-year SFN database, the lengths of shortest paths between all pairs of authors for whom a connection exists were calculated exhaustively using a breadth-first search algorithm. These numbers were then averaged to yield the mean distance between authors in the entire network.

• Table 4 shows that the authors in the SFN community are separated from one another by an average distance of 6.09. A similar observation of “six degree of separation” has been reported previously for abstracts in the MEDLINE database [10]...

The authors used Latent Semantic Analysis to reduce the dimensionality of the topics covered in the abstract database.

• The reduced dimensionality vector space captures most of the important underlying structure in the association of terms and documents, while at the same time removing the noise or variability in word usage [29]. In the reduced vector space, terms that occur in similar documents are located near one another even if they never co-occur in the same document, and topically related documents are grouped near one another based on their semantic relatedness.

This was followed by application of the Normalized Cuts (NCuts) algorithm [30] to partition the results into 10 different topic clusters, shown in Table 5 below (also see Figure 8, at the top of this post):



Finally, changes in topic areas across time revealed the following trends:

• Among the 10 topic clusters, Cluster 9, which corresponds to visual and motor systems, is shown to have consistently increased in representation over the six year span. On the other hand, Cluster 2, which corresponds to cellular neuroscience, exhibits the most significant decrease in representation over the same period.
• These results suggest that there is a shift in general scientific interest from cellular-level work such as ion channel, synapse, and membrane physiology, towards more system level research incorporating such topics as vision, kinematics, motor processing, and imaging.

The abstract submission deadline for the 2008 SFN meeting is May 15, 5 p.m. EDT.

Footnote

¹ Oh, OK, here's the Wikipedia page for computational linguistics.

Reference

Lin JM, Bohland JW, Andrews P, Burns GA, Allen CB, Mitra PP, Bajic VB. (2008). An Analysis of the Abstracts Presented at the Annual Meetings of the Society for Neuroscience from 2001 to 2006. PLoS ONE, 3(4), e2052. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0002052

Annual meeting abstracts published by scientific societies often contain rich arrays of information that can be computationally mined and distilled to elucidate the state and dynamics of the subject field. We extracted and processed abstract data from the Society for Neuroscience (SFN) annual meeting abstracts during the period 2001–2006 in order to gain an objective view of contemporary neuroscience. An important first step in the process was the application of data cleaning and disambiguation methods to construct a unified database, since the data were too noisy to be of full utility in the raw form initially available. Using natural language processing, text mining, and other data analysis techniques, we then examined the demographics and structure of the scientific collaboration network, the dynamics of the field over time, major research trends, and the structure of the sources of research funding. Some interesting findings include a high geographical concentration of neuroscience research in the north eastern United States, a surprisingly large transient population (66% of the authors appear in only one out of the six studied years), the central role played by the study of neurodegenerative disorders in the neuroscience community, and an apparent growth of behavioral/systems neuroscience with a corresponding shrinkage of cellular/molecular neuroscience over the six year period. The results from this work will prove useful for scientists, policy makers, and funding agencies seeking to gain a complete and unbiased picture of the community structure and body of knowledge encapsulated by a specific scientific domain.

I Will Possess Your Heart

How I wish you could see the potential,
The potential of you and me,
It's like a book, elegantly bound but,
In a language that you can't read (just yet).

I Will Possess Your Heart
------Death Cab For Cutie

The latest single from Death Cab for Cutie describes a stalker's obsession with his distant and unattainable object of desire. As singer Ben Gibbard explains:

"Writing songs of unrequited love and 'stalker-type tunes' isn't exactly breaking new ground or anything like that, but with 'Heart' I feel like it's the sentiments that make it so creepy," Gibbard said. "And this is a work of fiction — it's not something I'm guilty of, hopefully — but to me the narrator in the song doesn't see anything wrong with what he or she is doing. It's more, 'I just happen to walk by your house all the time, and I think how great it would be if I were inside your house looking out at the world.'

"What makes it so unsettling is that one party doesn't understand that what's happening is not appropriate. And they may have pure intentions, but the way it comes off is not the case at all."

The narrator can be categorized as a stalker who is an "unwanted pursuer" (as opposed to a former partner). In a recent study (Spitzberg & Veksler, 2007),

Unwanted pursuers were perceived as less socially competent, more histrionic, more borderline, and less obsessive-compulsive [surprisingly], with discrimination of "normals" from unwanted pursuers of approximately 75% to 80% accuracy. These attributions also significantly predicted a continuous measure of unwanted pursuit victimization (R = .406).

What (if anything) do we know about the neurobiology of stalking? Soliman et al. (2007) reported on the case of a patient with Huntington's disease who stalked her therapist:

The patient developed recurrent thoughts [and] amorous feelings towards her therapist. She engaged in stalking behavior including unwelcome gifts, multiple telephone calls to the therapist's office and home, and making threats towards the therapist. The patient continued to contact the therapist after [she] filed a Personal Protection Order. The patient was successfully treated with risperidone [an atypical antipsychotic] and fluvoxamine [a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor].

Since these unwelcome and intrusive actions were correlated with the onset of the patient's HD, the authors suggested that the stalking behavior could be early manifestation of basal ganglia pathology (Soliman et al., 2007). Her pattern of stalking does appear to have a substantial obsessive-compulsive component:

Ms. A exhibited two symptoms related to her stalking behavior that are probably linked to the basal ganglia lesions associated with HD. Namely, she exhibited obsessive thoughts about her therapist and amorous feelings towards her therapist.

The relationship between disorders of the basal ganglia and symptoms of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) has been previously established.

They also cited the work of Meloy and Fisher (2005), who

hypothesized that the obsessive thoughts and amorous feelings related to stalking are caused in part by low activity of the central serotonergic pathways and increased dopaminergic activity. ... These hypotheses are consistent with the observation that Ms. A’s obsessive thoughts and stalking behavior remitted with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor and antipsychotic treatment, which increases serotonergic drive and suppresses dopaminergic activity, respectively.

Risperidone and fluvoxamine for our creepy narrator, then.

You gotta spend some time, love.
You gotta spend some time with me.
And I know that you'll find love.
I will possess your heart.

------ibid

References

Meloy JR, Fisher H. (2005). Some thoughts on the neurobiology of stalking. J Forensic Sci. 50:1472-80.

Soliman S, Haque S, George E. (2007). Stalking and Huntington's disease: a neurobiological link? J Forensic Sci. 52:1202-4.

Spitzberg BH, Veksler AE. (2007). The personality of pursuit: personality attributions of unwanted pursuers and stalkers. Violence Vict. 22:275-89.

You reject my advances and desperate pleas
I won't let you let me down so easily
So easily.

I Will Possess Your Heart
------Death Cab For Cutie

Watch the full-length video (8:31).

Neuro-Gov

From The Social Cognitive Neuroscience of Organizations (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 1118) comes this new hyphenated neuroword from David John Farmer:

Neuro-Gov

Neuroscience as Catalyst

Abstract: Neuroscience promises to act as a catalyst, in the longer run, in seeking re-unification of the fragmented social sciences (e.g., political science and economics) and social action subjects (e.g., public administration and business administration) that concern governance. Neuroscience can achieve this because it reveals that taken-for-granted concepts, and the language used to express them, should be challenged. What should be sought is a language called in this paper Neuro-Gov.

So Neuro-Gov is a language, not a neuroscientific approach to governance à la the recently maligned¹ microfield of neurolitcrit (see Neuroaesthetics and Post-Structuralism for a summary).

A choice quote: ²

Does Neuro-Gov, among others, have the substance and the momentum to release the coming generation from the traditional, common-sensical languages speaking about governance? Substance is taken to mean catalytic power to generate, and momentum means "muscle" power to induce, to seduce—such compelling power as is exerted by hard science on the upswing. Reading neuroscience seems to highlight the undesirability of the social mis-construction of common sense—and to emphasize the desirability of deconstructing such misleading constructions.

Deconstructing! Yay! That misleading construction harks back to the unforgettable 1997 article,

Derrida, Deconstruction, and Public Administration

Derridean deconstruction is a significant resource for public administration thinking and practice. It facilitates antiadministration,³ for example. This article recognizes the severe difficulties that deconstruction presents. Yet, it supports the claim that deconstruction can help public administration. It does so by exploring the nature of deconstruction, by illustrating how bureaucratic deconstruction can be used in public administration and how it is useful, and by analyzing the most significant of deconstruction's difficulties.

But back to Neuro-Gov. The author mentions the emerging mini-fields of neuro-economics⁴ and neuropolitics, with the former being "further along" than the latter:

First, some neuro-political-scientists want to shape the choice of research questions, e.g., focusing on the political aspects, rather than leaving the neuro-field to economists. Second, some work directly with fMRI functional magnetic resonance imaging (imaging the workings of the living brain), and are not limited to passive using. This is mentioned only because it is suggestive of the range of interest. In my view, such positivist activity is incidental to the hermeneutic major league action; white coat-ism is not suggested. Neuropolitics is a fringe area of political science activity in terms of quantity, even though it is important at this margin.

Note that the highlighted sentence reveals disdain for the scientific method, which makes the Neuro-Gov project entirely neurrelevant for actual working scientists. Neuro-Gov is, after all, just another language game, as readily acknowledged by the author.

Footnotes

¹ The article, by Raymond Tallis, appeared in The Times Literary Supplement with the provocative title, "The Neuroscience Delusion." Its central theme?

Neuroaesthetics is wrong about our experience of literature – and it is wrong about humanity.

² The language of Neuro-Gov is not universal.

³ Otherwise known as anarchy.

⁴ Among other hyphenated neurowords, such as neuro-afficianados, neuro-psychotherapy, neuro-benefits.

References

FARMER, D.J. (2007). Neuro-Gov: Neuroscience as Catalyst. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1118(1), 74-89. DOI: 10.1196/annals.1412.002

FARMER, D.J. (1997). Derrida, Deconstruction, and Public Administration. American Behavioral Scientist, 41(1), 12-27. DOI: 10.1177/0002764297041001003