The neuroplasticity bait-and-switch

As long as we’re talking about brains this morning, here’s another topic that irritates me: the abuse of the term neuroplasticity.

devneuro

Way, way back in the late 1970s, my first textbook in neuroscience was this one: Marcus Jacobson’s Developmental Neurobiology. (That link is to a more recent edition; the picture is of the blue-and-black cover I remember very well, having read the whole thing). I came into the field by way of developmental biology, and that means we focused on all the changes that go on in the brain: everything from early tissue formation to senescence, with discussions of synaptogenesis, remodeling, metabolism, transport, and functional responses to activity or inactivity. This is all under the broad umbrella of neuroplasticity, a term that’s at least a century old, and that is well-established as both a phenomenon and a science. That the brain modifies itself in response to experience is so thoroughly taken for granted that you can basically define neuroscience as the study of the responsiveness of neural tissue.

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Memories: trust provisionally, but verify always

Steven Novella makes an important point: memories are fluid. There’s no VCR in your head, and no tape recorder either, and memories are constructs. You remember the framework (sometimes very poorly) of a past event, and your brain builds a plausible set of details around it. When you picture Christmas at your grandmother’s house when you were 12, you don’t have a record in your head of how many logs were in the fireplace or a second by second recording of the flickering of the fire. You remember that Grandma had a fireplace, and sometimes she had logs burning in it, and maybe there was a fire that year, and your brain obligingly assembles an image for you.

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Bill Maher, nevermore

I never watched Oprah, because she was a gullible woo-artist; I don’t watch Dr Oz, because he’s quack; and now all I can say is fuck Bill Maher, because he’s a crank on so many things. On his latest show, he surrounded himself with Marianne Williamson, a “spiritual teacher” and proponent of prayer, Amy Holmes, a news announcer for The Blaze (Glenn Beck’s spinoff), and some guy who didn’t say much, and he went off on a grand tour of kook talk, confident that his panelists wouldn’t disagree with him. Watch. Be embarrased for him.

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But I can understand them all!

This woman does 17 British accents (well, she cheats a bit and jumps over the Irish Sea a couple times). I’m an American, and a Yankee at that, so I’m a poor judge, but a few of them sounded a bit off. Also, I know she isn’t hitting all the variations: there were people all over the UK who’d say something to me in a particularly thick local speech variant, and it just sounded like Dutch being gargled through a misfiring diesel engine, to me, and that was just Alan Moore.

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I hear the Danes don’t much like Lomborg, either

Once again, I am reminded that I’m in the wrong business to make money. Bjorn Lomborg is in the news again, and I learn that the man makes $775,000/year for running the Copenhagen Consensus Center…which is a drop box in Lowell, Massachusetts. I don’t think buying a mailbox is the secret, though — I think you also have to convince the Koch Brothers to deposit checks in it. Apparently the trick behind that is to lie persuasively about science in a way that allows very rich people to become more rich.

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