Brain imaging is a useful tool, but in the wrong hands it can be little more than hi-tech phrenology. Being able to say that you used single photon emission computed tomography to come to your conclusion sure sounds pretty, and it can seem like you know what you’re doing, but all too often the use of a fancy buzzword is only a ploy to get you noticed, no matter how trivial or even drecky your work is. Here’s a perfect example: a boring paper with almost nothing of interest in it gets published and highlighted in the New York Times, and why? Because the author couples expensive medical gear to religious nonsense, and obviously is very good at self-promotion. He’s a witch doctor in a nice white lab coat.
Andrew Newberg is an author of some rather New Agey popular books, an M.D., and a dualist. He’s the head of the “Center for Spirituality and the Neurosciences” (which is funded in part by the Templeton Foundation, wouldn’t you know it), and he thinks there is something outside the brain responsible for mind. How putting people in fancy gizmos and looking at cerebral blood flow is going to affirm his ideas is a complete mystery to me, but that’s what he does. And then afterwards, he waves his hands around and says the pretty colored pictures that most of his audience don’t understand support his claims.
For instance, this recent paper examined people with glossolalia—”speaking in tongues”. They put themselves into a trance-like state, babbled for a while, Newberg injected them with a compound that would be absorbed in quantities relative to the amount of cerebral blood flow during the episode, and then scanned their brains for the compound. They found a few areas that show differences in activity between singing and “speaking in tongues”, and they show a table of numbers and a pretty picture.
This figure shows two transaxial slices of the singing state (a) and the glossolalia state (b) with rCBF represented as red > yellow > green > blue. These images demonstrate decreased rCBF during glossolalia in the frontal lobes bilaterally. Also, there is a marked decrease in blood flow in the left caudate (as indicated by the arrow) during glossolalia compared with the singing state.
OK, it’s another small piece of data to throw on a growing pile from all of these brain imaging studies; nothing dazzling, nothing particularly bad about it, except maybe that more random studies using gee-whiz techniques are not exactly helpful any more. His conclusion is reasonable, even if it does highlight the triviality of this particular exercise.
The results from this preliminary study have begun to elucidate the neurophysiological correlates of glossolalia. That there were changes in several brain structures suggests that there is complex brain activity during this unusual practice.
Well, duh.
Now, though, look at what happens to this mundane study when it gets into the popular press, and when Newberg talks about it without any critical reviewers peering over his shoulder.
The passionate, sometimes rhythmic, language-like patter that pours forth from religious people who “speak in tongues” reflects a state of mental possession, many of them say. Now they have some neuroscience to back them up.
I’ve read the paper. No, they don’t. This is a paper that reports quite ordinary changes in the level of brain activity during glossolalia; there are no traces of possessing spirits or other extra-cranial meddling entities, and there is no provision in the work for detecting them if there were.
This isn’t just a clueless reporter mangling results he doesn’t comprehend. This is Newberg actively making exaggerated claims.
“The amazing thing was how the images supported people’s interpretation of what was happening,” said Dr. Andrew B. Newberg, leader of the study team, which included Donna Morgan, Nancy Wintering and Mark Waldman. “The way they describe it, and what they believe, is that God is talking through them,” he said.
People believe this is the Holy Ghost taking control of them; the images do not support that interpretation. Look at the image I’ve included. It shows a slight change in the cerebral blood flow to left caudate. Anyone see any ghosts in that picture? Any reason to assume the changes aren’t physiological? Any reason to think the individual’s subjective interpretation of a phenomenon reflects the objective physical causes in any way?
I’m afraid that all I’ve learned from this is that here’s another glad-handing quack on the spirituality bandwagon who is milking attention for some extraordinarily poor, unscientific interpretations of some murky data. If you want to test for mind-brain dualism, go ahead, design an experiment that does that (I can’t imagine one, but then I’m not promoting the existence of spirits); don’t just fling around some impressive-sounding technical jargon and pretend you’ve got evidence. Competent people can see right through that, and can also see that you’re just trying to defraud the rubes. And maybe yourself.
Newberg AG, Wintering NA, Morgan D, Waldman MR (2006) The measurement of regional cerebral blood flow during glossolalia: A preliminary SPECT study. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging 148(1):67-71.
This reminds me of my least favorite woo-woo, Clyde N. Shealy, MD, (he’s on google) once gave a talk at Missouri State … he threw up a slide of electroecephalograms …. comparing one in one building to another in another building (honest — that’s what he said). He said to look at how they were identical. There was no time or date stamp on the slide … nor were any of the axis identified … or any legend. …. But take his word for it … they showed that the two were telecommunicating.
At the same presentation he also gave a 15 minute plug for therapeutic touch. Apparently had never heard of Emily Rosa.
You should hear the fundies in Missouri whining about the stem cell constitutional provision we passed.
This is a classical case of lazy journalism. There’s no way the reporter didn’t know this was a sham, especially if he’s been covering the medical area for any amount of time. But he likely decided that “Brain-scan quack just another quack”, as a headline, had less punch for the average reader than “Infinite Secrets of the Brain Back Up Glossolalia”. In fact, his editor likely thought the same way.
I don’t know what the big thing about speaking in tongues is among these evangelicals. I’m no believer, not even close, and I can speak in tongues at will. I can even make the gibberish sound like various real languages. This is not something I worked at. It just seems that languages have certain rhythms and sounds to them, and it isn’t all that difficult to mimic them. Now evangelicals might claim that these people are actually speaking in some other language but, if memory serves me, that claim has been debunked by researchers who have recorded the “speech” of those in the throes of glossolalia and determined that it was just nonsense syllables.
It’s even worse when you read the imaging literature, or even know a little bit about neuroscience. The frontal lobes are involved in a lot of conscious decision-making, so one interpretation is that there’s less of that going on when people go into a trance and babble. Who’d have thought it?
If there was a hell for dodgy scientists I’d be going to it for what I’m about to do: cite Wikipedia in support of my claims (I don’t know much about the caudate). Wiki states that the caudate is involved in learning and memory, and also in language comprehension:
“The left caudate in particular has been suggested to have a relationship with the thalamus that governs the comprehension and articulation of words as they are switched between languages.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caudate_nucleus#Caudate_Function
From the paper (page 68):
“The phonemic structure was different between the two conditions since the singing was associated with clear grammatical sentences…”
So… there was less blood flow to the caudate when people were reciting nonsense syllables than when they were singing something with actual words? Again, an utter shock.
The claims that are being made are a load of rubbish.
Yeah, this kind of woo is becoming all too common in neuroscience. Another notable example is Jeffrey Schwartz at UCLA who started out and continues to do perfectly sound research in cognitive-therapies for OCD and other disorders. But it’s the additional nonsense that gets me.
Unfortunately, it tends to obscure perfectly valid and potentially useful research along these lines by people like Richard Davidson at Madison, who have been studying how meditative pracices can calm excessive emotionality, for their potential mental health benefits for anyone, even the irreligious.
The researchers also used SPECT, which is hardly state of the art anymore. Functional MRI is.
SPECT is pretty operator-dependent, which makes careful controls, blinding of those reading the scans to which experimental group they were looking at, and multiple people interpreting the exams absolutely critical to obtaining even semivalid results. Anyone want to make a bet about how well was done?
Not sure why that Schwartz link doesn’t work, so just copy and paste this
http://www.iscid.org/jeffrey-schwartz.php
Given widespread advice such as ‘trust your gut’, and all the talk of ‘gut decisions’, I too, am convinced that there is some thing outside of the brain which is responsible for mind … and it’s CO2 producting intestinal bacteria …
This was my favorite part of the NYT article that clearly demonstrates how objective the research team was:
“Ms. Morgan, a co-author of the study, was also a research subject. She is a born-again Christian who says she considers the ability to speak in tongues a gift. “You’re aware of your surroundings,” she said. “You’re not really out of control. But you have no control over what’s happening. You’re just flowing. You’re in a realm of peace and comfort, and it’s a fantastic feeling.”
From the ISCID link that boojieboy posted:
And now a puzzled, pained expression creeps over my face. . . . I can’t say that my opinion of the ISCID can get any lower, but I think it just got confirmed.
There’s one born every minute. Among future reporters, make that two.
Compare Ms. Morgan’s description of the “gift” of tongues with H. L. Mencken’s:
Illuminating, ain’t it?
Debra: I missed that. One of the co-authors was a subject?? That’s pretty dodgy in most cases. Studies on visual psychophysics often away with this because the responses are so consistent, even if you know the purpose of the study. This is why I know people just getting their PhDs who have four published papers already, for which they were the only subjects.
But I digress. Usually it’s frowned upon to have someone who knows about the aim of the experiment as a subject, because the knowledge can skew the results.
Orac: good point. Trouble with using fMRI for this study is that it’s really noisy. Trying to get someone to sing while they’re being scanned is probably really difficult, not to mention artefacts from head movements messing up the image. Having said that, I guess they could have used a PET scan.
Oops, my last post should have read: studies on visual psychophysics often GET away with this.
Sorry.
Nice job, PZ.
Always looking for more stuff for my philosophy of science courses…
What exactly is speaking in tongues all about? What do fundies find meaningful in a stretch of gibberish? If no one can understand it, what’s the point? If everyone speaking in tongues spoke in the same kind of gibberish, that would be a different story. We could set up some codebreakers and try to figure it out. What I see instead are a bunch of people praising what even they admit makes no sense. Why? I’m making a rhetorical point, but I am also quite ignorant about the folkways of speaking in tongues.
Blake:
Yeah, that stuff about “the mind controlling the brain’s chemistry” is a hint of the additional nonsense I was talking about.
What he gets is a perfectly sound, empirical result: having people work on controlling their thinking (cognitive therapy) can change the intrusiveness of obsessions in people with OCD. Fine so far. Then he goes and does some PET studies and starts coming off the rails during media interviews and then public speaking engagements.
The problem it seems to me stems from how the researchers themselves seek to promote their own work in the popular media, which loves it when they make declarations that amount to sweeping generalizations and ultimately are misrepresentations (lies, even?) of the kinds of valid inferences that CAN be made from brain imaging studies.
The public eats this shi*t up, and unfortunately, too many researchers who should know better are happy to cater to their appetites.
Slightly off-topic: may I ask what the objection to the Templeton Foundation is? I have no dog in that fight, but I’d like to know if they have an agenda before I apply for a fellowship partially sponsored by them. Thanks!
PZ said, “he thinks there is something outside the brain responsible for mind.”
Right. And this differs from modern behavior genetics how?
Digressing a bit, a now popular movement among the anti-abortion crowd is to buy an ultrasound machine (I hear one can buy them for around $20,000 now), install it in a van, and cart it around to Planned Parenthood clinics where they can park it in the street and lure PP patients in for a look see at their uteri. Trouble is none of these folks are trained in how to use ultrasound so, when they latch on to a victim, they are likely to expose them to ultrasound for as much as an hour with no therapeutic aim in mind. It’s not the same kind of woo as pairing up brain imaging with glossolalia under the guise of science, but it’s more damaging in that ultrasound, especially long exposures, is not without its downside, especially under the control of the untrained.
Slightly off-topic: may I ask what the objection to the Templeton Foundation is? I have no dog in that fight, but I’d like to know if they have an agenda before I apply for a fellowship partially sponsored by them. Thanks!
I’m amazed that any neuroscientist can not only be a dualist, but make claims that studies of the brain are somehow “confirming” dualism. People go into mystical trances and there are changes in the brain in the expected areas. Well OF COURSE. That’s not somehow giving validity to the existence of a spiritual realm or mystical way of contacting it. Nobody ever thought that when religious people claim to have strong, deep internal experiences they were *lying* for crying out loud.
When people start talking in tongues, having visions, and feeling an interconnectedness to the cosmos and their brain scans show NO CHANGE at all — nothing happening — *then* we’re finding out something interesting and unexpected. As it is, it looks like a lot of True Believers are looking at results which fail to disconfirm materialism, and cooing that — because they also fails to disconfirm immaterialism — the findings are ‘encouraging.’ Yeah. Nice try.
I’m just waiting to see the supernatural explanation for susceptibility of humans to the deleterious effects of rattlesnake venom:
http://www.local6.com/news/10264521/detail.html
@ddt:
As far as I know, people in these parts object to the Templeton Foundation because the Foundation’s mandate is to reconcile science with religion, a goal which PZ among others views as a compromise with mysticism — useless at best and otherwise harmful.
But hey, PZ might like your taking their money, depending on what you’ll spend it on — every pound they send to you is one they don’t spend on something much worse! :-/
What Templeton would really like you to do is prove the existence of God by scientific methods, but they’ll settle for showing that science and religion are entirely consistent.
Agenda? What agenda?
The whole “speaking in tongues” thing to me seems one big exercise in moving the goalposts. In the Biblical reference, supposedly the people in question were all able to understand each other, regardless of their native tongue; now *that* would be handy for modern evangelists, not to mention easily verifiable proof of the power of their religion! However, back in the real world, that doesn’t work. So instead it became just a generic “ecstatic experience”, with no real practical use, and no verifiable results.
Despard, I agree that the MRI is noisy, but too noisy to sing? I just had one, and any moment I was expecting something by Moby or Chemical Brothers to start up.
Having worked in Manhattan a number of years, I’ve passed by many, many people lying about on the street speaking in tongues. I wonder why none of them were picked for this study?
I read one of Newberg’s books a couple of years back. The stuff about the neurological correlates of ecstatic and meditative states was interesting, and there’s some (IIRC superficial, but not unreasonable) speculation on the origins of religion and spirituality. Then in the last few chapters he goes off into la-la-land, arguing based on nothing that this all indicates there really is Something Out There involved in these experiences, instead of just auto-induced manipulations of brain activity.
Thanks for the info. I’ll dig around some. Funny, I wanted to use the fellowship to explore the resurgence of exorcisms in America and what that has to do with the lack of penetration of science education, lack of “faith” in science and so on.
As for MRIs, the last one I had a few years ago was damn relaxing; it was a very hot day, the room was air conditioned, I got to lie down… I remember being annoyed that the technician kept piping in over the P.A., trying to “reassure” me. Just kept waking me up.
ddt: PZ’s objection to the Templeton Foundation is their explicit support for a sciency-god. Check out their website:
http://www.templeton.org/
Basically, they like to give money to people who conduct “research” into psuedoscientific sprituality. They have a big annual prize, the Templeton Prize, valued at 800 000 pounds sterling, and lots of other prizes.
Their favourite type of “finding” is one that directly supports their new-age vision of a loving personal god with lots of spirit friends.
Sorry, PZ for trying to explain what your opinions may be, I’m paraphrasing based on previous posts.
From my point of view, I don’t really have much of an objection to recieving grant money from the Templeton foundation – they’re a bunch of religious nuts, but money is money, and as far as I can tell, if they give you some cash there are few strings attached. If you publish findings contrary to their narrow anti-materialist worldview, the worst they’ll do is probably just not highlight your work and not renew your funding next grant-cycle.
From their website:
If even one-tenth of world research were focused on spiritual realities, could benefits be even more vast than the benefits in the latest two centuries from research in food, travel, medicine or electronics, and cosmology?
The main problem I have with this question (and which I suspect PZ shares) is that “spiritual realities” part – they have skipped the bit about providing evidence that anything spiritual is in any way real.
Beware of drawing any psychological or social conclusions from brain imaging. Whenever the ratio of what is known to what is not known is as low as it is in neuroscience, any such conclusions almost always reflect the bias of the interpreter…it becomes neuro-pseudo-science.
BTW, there is something besides the brain that’s responsible for the mind…the rest of the CNS, the autonomic nervous system, and the rest of the body. But the brain is the main organ.
Judging from the pretty much universal derailment of European culture during the nine or so centuries spent “focus[ing] research on spiritual realities,” I would have to guess the answer would be No.
Unless you count syllogisms, pinhead-dancing angel censuses and long-running ecclesiastical debates about whether or not women possess souls to be “benefits.”
And, BTW, the speaking-in-tongues scene in Borat was worth the whole $8 I spent on the movie ticket.
MJ Memphis wrote:
Well, since the only languages likely to be spoken by people at that scene were Aramaic, Greek and Latin, it wouldn’t mean very much after all.
Kind of a boring example of MRI technology. Has anybody read about this article? This is some cool sh*t, IMO. Here is an example of how fMRI can change society/government/human nature.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/29/AR2006102900895.html?referrer=emailarticlepg
fMRI is gonna blow away a polygraph test. Makes you wonder how Tom Haggert would do on one of these tests :)
Alison, ddt: did you have structural or functional MRI scans? Structural scans are the ‘normal’ scans everyone thinks of when they think of MRI: scans to get a high resolution image of the brain for medical purposes/shits & giggles. They normally take 10 minutes or so and the acoustic noise is minimal and can even be pleasant.
Functional MRI (fMRI) on the other hand is what neuroscientists use to get an idea of what your brain is actually doing. Basically you’re acquiring a whole brain volume over a few seconds, and a ‘slice’ every fraction of a second. There is a very loud and high-pitched noise every time a slice is acquired and the gradient coils which modify the field around the head shift into a new position.
fMRI scans take between 20 minutes and an hour usually, depending on the task. From my experience in functional experiments the noise really is deafening – you have to wear ear plugs and ear defenders before you’re allowed in the scanner. Add to this the low temporal resolution of functional imaging and the fact that moving the head by even a few millimetres can bugger up the image and doing fMRI for singing tasks doesn’t really seem worth it.
RedMolly, there were plenty of great moments in that movie (including the bear), but one of the most disturbing was the ten minute nude wrestling match between Borat and his manager. If you went to Borat expecting it not to be disturbing, though…
Aww come on, PZ, calling this guy a witch doctor gives witches a bad name! How about just calling him a quack? I’m sure the ducks won’t mind.
I’m afraid that all I’ve learned from this is that here’s another glad-handing quack on the spirituality bandwagon who is milking attention for some extraordinarily poor, unscientific interpretations of some murky data.
Not unlike Allen McNeill at Cornell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossolalia#Linguistics
“The syllables that make up instances of glossolalia typically appear to be unpatterned reorganizations of phonemes from the primary language of the person uttering the syllables; thus, the glossolalia of people from Russia, the United Kingdom, and Brazil all sound quite different from each other, but vaguely resemble the Russian, English, and Portuguese languages, respectively. Many linguists generally regard most glossolalia as lacking any identifiable semantics, syntax, or morphology.”
Glossolalia: “It’s a Christian thing, right?” “Pentecostal Christians think so, but they are deluding themselves. Pagan Greeks did it – Plato called it theomania. The Oriental cults of the Roman Empire did it. Hudson Bay Eskimos, Chukchi shamans, Lapps, Yakuts, Semang pygmies, the North Borneo cults, the Trhi-speaking priests of Ghana. The Zulu Amandiki cult and the Chinese religious sect of Shang-ti-hui. Spirit mediums of Tonga and the Brazilian Umbanda cult. The Tungus tribesmen of Siberia… the Sukuma people of Africa…”
– Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash, p. 192
He’s missing the obvious. Clearly that’s Satan’s face on the top half of the bottom left image. Singing is obviously demonic.
A highly amusing quote from the References list of the Wikipedia article mentioned above:
Hey, I think charismatics should be *required* to evangelize in tongues! To do otherwise would appear to undercut the miraculous power of the Lord…
I worked on a publishing project for the Templeton Foundation several years ago, and as far as I could tell, they’re an odd mix of a quaint form of 19th-century quasi-transcendentalist humanism; “power of positive thinking” stuff; the search for the “common ground of all spiritual traditions” (and in the process publishing books whose content looks an awful lot like that quaint quasi-transcendentalist humanist stuff regardless of its source); general cockeyed optimism; and a certain amount of new-age credulity.
From their website, templeton.org:
Their list of areas of interest:
As you might guess from the lists above, they can be pretty fringey at times, but they do support some legitimate science as well. They have a large archive of news releases about their grants and recipients, as well as detailed guidelines for application and the kinds of projects they’re interested in.
Speaking in tongues, real-life experience.
It’s a Saturday morning 1992 or 1993. A large gang of rightists led by Rev. Gordon Peterson are blocking the entrance to the Robinsdale Clinic near Minneapolis, jumping on cars as they enter the parking lot, holding up little plastic dolls an inch high, and screaming, “Don’t kill your baby” while the local law enforcement looks on smiling at this supposedly peaceful exercise of free speech.
After a while the gang masses at the edge of the property, facing a large number of clinic escorts, including myself. Suddenly an eerie noise starts coming from the gang and some of them can be seen looking semi-entranced, mouths open, and tongues tapping against their alveolar ridges (hard bit on the roof of the mouth behind their teeth).
At first I didn’t know what to make of it. Was it a war whoop? Then I realized they were speaking in tongues. No one seemed to be interpreting for them, however, despite the Apostle Paul’s injunction not to do it in public if there was no interpreter. I could have pointed out their departure from a literal reading of the good book, but I didn’t think they would have been very interested in my opinion.
In this context, speaking in tongues was a the way the gang psyched themselves up to block the entrance to the clinic. They put themselves into a semi-trance to prepare to do violence.
I think their point was that if “speaking in tongues” still meant the same thing it did in Acts, it would be pretty easy to prove. Just have the person speak “in tongues” to a variety of people who spoke different languages and see if they could understand it. If they could, well, that really would be a miracle.
I found it rather remarkable that those speaking-in-tongues researchers were willing to do something that reveals something so flatly contrary to mind-body substance dualism.
But then again, I wonder when certain Xian apologists will come out and huff and puff that Xianity does not teach substance dualism.
They should check to see how many of those people speaking in tongues are doing it just to fit in. I did as a teen at an Assembly of God church rally in North Dakota. Everyone around me was speaking in tongues, so I joined in, speaking in some latinate gibberish, making it up as I go. Is there a placebo control group in this study? Is there a way to see the differences in the people who are faking it compared to the ones that really believe?
Inquiring minds want to know!
Despard, my MRI was of my back, in the claustrophobic nightmare tube, with earplugs. Yeah, it was loud, but it had a good beat.
I don’t know if anyone brought this up in a previous comment, but the change in brain activity makes perfect sense to me. When there is a conscious effort to speak in a language that is known to the person, certain synapses will be used. If speaking in tougues is simply the gibberish I suspect it to be, then the same pathways wouldn’t be used because there is no specific message that is trying to be conveyed. It becomes a humming of music, if you will, rather than imparting a notion. Bag science.
A GodStuff segment (produced by The Wittenburg Door and featured on The Daily Show) a while back featured a clip of pentecostal pop-star Paul Crouch on his TV show, talking “normally” (if dementedly as usual) and suddenly lapsing into something that sounded a lot like really bad – I’m talking abominable, even less hip than Pat Boone – “scat singing.” He broke off briefly to say, “I’m speaking in tongues,” and then went right back to the bad scat.
Oy vay.
PZ: If I hadn’t been speaking in tongues while doing data entry in my “full-lotus overnight shift” — to get progressives elected — then I wouldn’t be banned from your website. So maybe aliens will soon be abducting the NeoNazi Bush KKKLan.
PZ’s harmonics analogy of genetics sounds kinda like….”Then we reconstruct the image by applying a Fourier transform to the filtered power spectrum, and voila…we get our epithelial cell back, with the superimposed noise mostly gone. It’s like magic!”
Loren Petrich: Don’t be so sure … all that stuff about “mind directing chemistry” comes close to dualism.
As it happens, the latest issue of Discover magazine just arrived at my house, and it contains an article entitled something like “Five Scientists Look For Evidence For God”. Haven’t have a chance to read it yet, but a quick skim shows that among the Five are Newberg and Persninger (the guy who can induce religious experiences using a helmet apparatus; it didn’t work on Dawkins).
In unrelated news: we’re letting our Discover sub expire this time round.
dear sir, good day.i am a 27 years old cameroonian who is having a problem with my brain now for close to two months.i was at the hospital and the drogs i was asked to take brought no change.i wish to as if i could explain how i feel so you can help me.i will be waiting to read from you while wishing you the best.
my regards