Thanks to Rafe Coburn for pointing me to this Village Voice piece by Nat Hentoff, causing me, like Rafe, to reconsider my oppositoon to the Bush nomination of Charles Pickering to a federal judgeship on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Hentoff: “…in some 50 years as a reporter, I have seldom seen such reckless, unfair, and repeated attacks on a person—not only by Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee but also by organizations that gather financial contributions because of their proclaimed dedication to civil rights, civil liberties, and honest research. (People for the American Way, Alliance for Justice, et al.)” The arena of judicial nominations is the fiercest seat of partisan politics, where the noun “opposition” can always be prefaced by the adjective “kneejerk.” Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee feel they have alot of payback to do for how the Republicans treated Clinton’s nominees. Hentoff essentially says Schumer, Leahy and the like ought to be ashamed of themselves, and that their reputation hangs in the balance as much as does Pickering’s career. One person whose integrity has always gone unquestioned for me has been Hentoff and, by his rendition, Pickering sounds not only like the best one could expect from the Bush dysadministration but a conscientious nomination under any circumstances. What do you think?

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Welcome to everyone sent here by the linkage at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan website. I am grateful to be pointed to, and to be in such great link company.

“It may be the book that got a new generation reading, but the huge Harry Potter tomes are giving some children headaches, a US doctor says.

Dr Howard J Bennett, of George Washington University Medical Centre, has recently diagnosed ‘Hogwarts headaches’ in three young patients…

The children did not have a history of such symptoms and the only connection appeared to be that all were reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix at the time.” —The Age

This is part of a longstanding tradition in the letters section of the New England Journal of Medicine of tongue-in-cheek case series designating whimsically-named syndromes reflecting the medical consequences of contemporary cultural trends. The lay press often picks up these stories and reports on them in earnest, but, hey, this is medical humor for ya, although sometimes the cases are poignant. It can be read, more profoundly, as a somewhat ironic comment on the human propensity, which reaches its greatest and most tortured fruition with the medical field’s ‘designer diseases’, for endless classification and subdivision of categories.

“Famous clinical psychologists used the Rorschach Inkblot Test to arrive at incredible insights. But were the astounding performances of these Rorschach Wizards merely a variation on astrology and palm reading?” —Skeptical Inquirer

I have previously written about the incredible value of intuitive psychological testing, including the Rorschach, in psychodiagnostics, and the perils of skeptical debunkers lumping it in with paranomal phenomena.

Psychological testing is only a problem if you expect it to conform to scientific standards. Here’s the secret — interpersonal perception and interactive skills do not conform in that way. It is not that the Rorschach is similar to vaudeville performance based on ‘cold reading’; turn it on its head — cold reading is based on the same intuitive depth perception about people, although usually unrefined by clinical training of course. The same parallel exists with hypnosis, where the same skills may be used as stage entertainment or valuable clinical tools. Calling it ‘mere entertainment’ and calling it ‘unscientific’ are two time-honored debunking tools often uttered, as here, in the same breath.

The ability to read others is both revered and reviled, in an unbroken thread from the peculiar marginal position of the shaman through the psychiatrist cartoons that perennially adorn the pages of the New Yorker, revealing the literatis’ fearful fascination. (There’s also that predictable reaction when someone at a dinner party asks me what I do and I decide to reveal to them that I am a psychiatrist. All of a sudden their demeanor changes and they are reviewing their prior banter with me to figure out what they might have revealed inadvertently to my supposedly penetrating gaze. Yet they are too fascinated to simply avoid me thereafter, so what follows are all manner of ‘curbside consult’ and friend-of-a-friend query in displacement.) And most people think of psychics as parlor trick performers or hucksters on late night television. The human propensity to detoxify potent magic by turning it into mere entertainment, protecting ourselves against its impact by putting it up on stage and therefore inside a frame distinguishing it from ‘reality’, is primeval, and reaches its apotheosis in a society that has lost its capacity to experience the sacred and the mysterious.

And the psychotherapist’s role is always performance art, in an important sense — it exists to induce the willing suspension of disbelief in the listener/analysand, to enlist them in building a shared, compelling, but fictive, belief system, spinning yarns which heal by making more usefully coherent and sensible meaning of their life. The lack of falsifiability (the empirical scientific standard) of some of the claims about a person’s life that come from psychotherapy is only a problem if you have not been enlisted in believing, or if the resulting ‘truths’ are put to nefarious uses as they are in ‘recovered memory’ cases, where the level of ‘reality’ they signify is confused. (“The map is not the territory,” as Korzybski said.) CSICOP doesn’t seem to understand that, in which case there is ‘no use arguing about religion’.

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging: The Perfect Imperfect Instrument: “Spatially, it is the gold standard, but poor temporal resolution has researchers looking for something better”:

“According to legend, functional neuroimaging can trace its roots to the stroke of noon on a day in the late 19th century, when Italian physiologist Angelo Mosso observed a sudden increase in brain pulsation in his test subject, Bertino the peasant. Using an elaborate contraption, Mosso had been measuring the pulsations coming from a soft spot in Bertino’s skull, the result of a head injury. Intrigued by the sudden pulsing, Mosso asked Bertino if the chiming of the local church bell had reminded him of his forgotten midday prayers. When Bertino said yes, his brain pulsated again. Then Mosso asked Bertino to multiply 8 by 12. Again, Bertino’s brain pulsated. Thus was borne the notion that blood flow in the brain is related to cognition.

That notion remains the basis of what some neuroscientists consider the most powerful in vivo brain imaging technology in use today, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Since its emergence in 1992, fMRI has dominated the field of human brain mapping and has been featured in thousands of published papers–nearly an order of magnitude more than for any other functional imaging technique.” —The Scientist

FmH readers know of my love affair with this technology, given the psychiatrist’s voyeuristic romance with structure-function correlations in the brain — although more than one observer has referred to this, with all due irreverence, as neo-phrenology. I often point to dramatic fMRI findings here. This article is a good nontechnical overview of the technology, its strengths and limitations. There remains debate about what is actually being measured by fMRI scans, although the consensus is strong that it is an accurate reflection of brain activity during specific tasks.

The temporal resolution problem is not a technical limitation of the scanning methodology but a biological one — the changes in blood flow and metabolism that it visualizes in activated brain regions occur slowly, over 1-2 seconds, in response to task demands (far slower than the speed of thought, if you will). So it becomes impossible to segregate different stages in the brain’s response to a task demand. In many ways, the CNS remains a ‘black box’ with regard to the subtleties of mental events. Yet some think we are not nearing the limitations of the power of fMRI technology but rather near the beginning.

It may take a different kind of analysis of the data, the article suggests. One limitation of fMRI conclusions is that they depend heavily on the assumption that the brain is modular and that the activity of different regions during a mental event may be considered independently. In experimental studies using much more complex multivariate analysis to correlate changes between the voxels of scans, a crude kind of ‘mind reading’ even emerges:

…(T)rained observers first scanned volunteer subjects for several sessions while the volunteers looked at certain objects such as baskets, garden gnomes, and teapots. Cox and Savoy used a multivariate statistical approach–one designed to detect interactions among voxels–to identify brain patterns that corresponded to each object. When the volunteers’ brains were scanned again later, the observers used the patterns, which covered a large region of the cortex, to guess which objects the volunteers were looking at. Their guesses were up to 85% to 90% accurate. The study highlights the significance of coarse-grained neuronal patterns that extend over large areas, patterns that Cox and Savoy would not have found if they had relied on conventional fMRI statistical methodology.

Multivariate approaches to fMRI data are growing; they probably represent around 5% of the data analysis of current studies but will grow to predominate, some observers suggest, and with it will come a fundamental enhancement of our understanding of the interactions between various brain regions in mental activity.

Yet I have always worried about another assumption on which interpretation of the significance of fMRI data depends heavily. If you will allow me an apparent digression, this is a concern that first arose as I began to think about our romance with another technology, television, several decades ago, heavily influenced by Jerry Mander’s* estimable 1977 book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. Along with examinations of the way t.v. mediates experience, colonizes experience, and affects viewers’ physiology, one of Mander’s arguments, perhaps the most compelling for me as a student of human emotion and interaction, is how its inherent biases as a medium (despite anyone’s best intentions about what content it carries or what programming you choose to watch) shape our assumptions about human experience. Television is inherently better at conveying the coarse-grained aspects of emotion and interaction than the subtle; it delineates the exterior at the utter expense of the interior. As an example, because the histrionic outburst or the ugly grimace is resolved much more readily than the flicker of recognition or the momentary tightening of the corner of the mouth, it shapes the depiction of emotion at all levels including the scripting, direction and acting portrayal. More importantly, it directs the attention of consumers of the medium toward the dramatic and external aspects of experience and behavior and shapes their assumptions about what is most significant in human reality. Now you see where I am going; I worry that fMRI has a similar, inherent ‘flair for the dramatic’, and that the understanding of mental events derived from its data will always implicate regions with extensive, easily visualized changes rather than subtle flickers of difference. Gregory Bateson once defined information as a “difference that makes a difference.” We must be careful that the differences we see using fMRI are truly informative; our assumption that a region which undergoes a dramatic change in activation level during a mental event figures more centrally as a mental substrate of that event than another region with a more transient or subtle change in metabolic activity (perhaps because it was already highly active?) may be a questionable one.

*Mander, although less well known, deserves a place in the pantheon of cultural critics alongside, for example, the recently deceased, celebrated, Neil Postman. More recently, Curtis White in his crucial 2002 book The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves, has done Mander one better. While Four Arguments showed why and how the medium of television stops people from the thinking that would interfere with their political obedience and consumption, White argues that this is the effect of both high- and lowbrow popular culture as a whole.

Philosophical scrutiny of paranormal claims by Paul MacDonald, a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia. —Philosophy Now [via Abyssal Mind]

“A plague of locusts is being blamed for an epidemic of allergic attacks in central Sudan. At least 11 people have died and thousands are reported to have been hospitalised, suffering from what Sudanese officials are calling ‘lung eczema’.

The outbreak centres around Sudan’s second largest city of Medani, 180 kilometres south of the capital Khartoum. The annual locust swarm has been particularly ferocious in 2003 and experts believe it has triggered an allergic reaction in the local population, aggravating asthma.” —New Scientist

• from Hawaii
  
• from NYC
  

both from today’s New York Times.

The BBC renders Jakob Nielson’s take on freeing yourselves.

“From: the Peacewatchers at USAF’s Fairford and Welford bases in the UK

Since Saturday, people in the Highlands of Scotland have been witnessing large movements of US warplanes overhead. Experienced observers say the large numbers are reminiscent of those that preceded the bombing of Iraq in 1998 and military strikes on Libya in the1980’s as well as the first Gulf War.

At the weekend warplanes were flying over at a rate of roughly one every 15 minutes. As well as watching them from the ground the plane spotters have also been able to overhear pilots talking by listening to their radio frequencies.

At this rate some 288 warplanes would have passed over Scotland in three days.

It is thought that the planes have flown on a route from the US over the North Pole to bases in Europe and the Mediterranean. The size and scale of the movement suggests that the US may be preparing to strike at a country in the Middle East in the next week to ten days.

Please pass this information on as widely as possible- the US may be planning to use the pretext of “foreign” terrorist attacks on US personnel in Iraq to attack Iran or Syria. Please alert any sympathetic elected representatives, media representatives and other sympathetic organizations.” —Portland Indymedia

Tens of thousands to mobilize for Nov 9th protest: “The day declared by the Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign in Palestine is gathering major momentum as cities across Europe, Canada, the US, Latin America, and Australia are joining in solidarity with the popular Palestinian mobilization that is to take place on November 9, the date of the fall of the Berlin Wall.” —Electronic Intifada Interesting spread of a new meme — Although Israeli treatment of the Palestinians has for a long time been likened to apartheid, it it my sense that there has been a vast increase in this ‘meme’ in the last week or so. Does anyone share that perception?

It could be a thread that unravels the bureau: “Evidence has surfaced recently that the FBI has been spying on foreign nations for years.

The revelation is so sensitive that in the wake of the secret surfacing, the FBI has embarked on a mad scramble to cover up the evidence. The Bureau has gone as far as to pressure a federal judge into sealing previously public court records that open a window on the FBI’s overseas spying mission.

In addition, with the help of the U.S. Attorney’s Office (John Ashcroft’s Justice Department) the FBI also sought, through a proposed court order, to seize any computer anywhere that the Bureau suspected might have contained the sensitive court pleadings.” —Online Journal

“The United States is one of 45 countries that refuses to sign the 1997 Ottawa Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines (APMs) and on their Destruction.” —Online Journal

Clear landmines with one click.

CBS Mulls Canceling Reagan Mini-Series, Sources Say: “Drawing Republican fire over the accuracy of its upcoming mini-series ‘The Reagans,’ CBS appears ready to present a kinder, gentler portrait of the ailing former President Ronald Reagan (news) than originally produced — if the network airs it at all.

Sources close to the production said on Monday CBS is considering canceling the docudrama, slated to air Nov. 16 and 18, under mounting criticism from political conservatives that the two-part series unfairly depicts Reagan and his wife.” —Yahoo! News

“The mainstream media continues to cooperate with the Bush Administration’s policy of giving short shrift to the Muslim psyche, and especially the Iraqi sense of place.

In the West — where the expressions ‘family, national pride, and friend’ are tossed about like so much salad — we are less likely to recognize the importance of diverse cultural perspectives, above all when they are linked to unassailable and even unwise fidelity.

So sayeth not the irresponsible and sometimes non-curious American news media, where nowhere have we heard a word about stunning Arab loyalties, even between those of contradictory opinion, that might be our ‘enlightenment’ answering the question concerning why exactly Saddam Hussein has not been ‘discovered’ — and may never be.

It is the Arab term ‘Dakhil’ which provides the underpinning for the arrangement in which the hunters, namely the US Military, and the hunted, namely former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti, now find themselves.” — Jeff Koopersmith, —American Political Journal

I asked the other day about the senseless illogic of surrounding an Iraqi town with razor wire because of Saddam Hussein’s supposed role in planning the ongoing insurgency against the American occupying forces. Koopersmith knows why it will not succeed. “Tribal vigor is on the rise in Iraq. Make no mistake about that fact — and, therefore, their ability and propensity to protect and hide their own increases each day…One need only think of a mother and child to come close to understanding this fealty.” I also wrote about mistrusting the academic objections to the similarities drawn between Iraq and Vietnam, that this is a matter “too important to be left to the academics.” The role that American ignorance of the cultural underpinnings of the indigenous struggles of these two peoples will play in our failure is one of those generalities worth paying attention to instead of drawing scholarly distinctions. (As Koopersmith concludes, “It is their, our, and our leaders’ almost complete failure to understand the Iraqi ethos that is indefensible, and that which may come to consume us, far more than today.” Substitute Vietnamese for Iraqi in that sentence, and it reads as true.)

Volusia County Memos Disclose Election 2000 Vote Fraud. Voting machine giant Diebold is trying to suppress the web exposure of these leaked internal memos using a dubious application of copyright law. Cease-and-desist orders are going out to sites which reprint them. (The link points to one which, being in New Zealand, is hopefully out of reach of US court jurisdiction.) If you have the means of and the interest in doing so, spread the link to these memos and help get Diebold caught with their pants down before they help steal the 2004 election too.

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s October 31 remarks at the “New American Strategies for Security and Peace” conference:

“…American power worldwide is at its historic zenith. American global political standing is at its nadir. Why? What is the cause of this? These are facts. They’re measurable facts. They’re also felt facts when one talks to one’s friends abroad who like America, who value what we treasure but do not understand our policies, are troubled by our actions and are perplexed by what they perceive to be either demagogy or mendacity.

Maybe the explanation is that we are rich, and we are, and that we are powerful, and we certainly are. But if anyone thinks that this is the full explanation I think he or she is taking the easy way out and engaging in a self-serving justification. I think we have to take into account two troubling conditions.

Since the tragedy of 9-11 which understandably shook and outraged everyone in this country, we have increasingly embraced at the highest official level what I think fairly can be called a paranoiac view of the world. Summarized in a phrase repeatedly used at the highest level, “he who is not with us is against us.” I say repeatedly because actually some months ago I did a computer check to see how often it’s been used at the very highest level in public statements.

The count then quite literally was ninety-nine. So it’s a phrase which obviously reflects a deeply felt perception. I strongly suspect the person who uses that phrase doesn’t know its historical or intellectual origins. It is a phrase popularized by Lenin (Applause) when he attacked the social democrats on the grounds that they were anti-Bolshevik and therefore he who is not with us is against us and can be handled accordingly.

This phrase in a way is part of what might be considered to be the central defining focus that our policy-makers embrace in determining the American position in the world and is summed up by the words “war on terrorism.” War on terrorism defines the central preoccupation of the United States in the world today, and it does reflect in my view a rather narrow and extremist vision of foreign policy of the world’s first superpower, of a great democracy, with genuinely idealistic traditions. ” [more (read the whole thing)]

Recall the peculiar saga of Freud’s friend Wilhelm Fleiss and his notions of the relationship between nasal pathology and psychopathology, about which I have written previously at FmH. Now here is a new twist:

“A University of Melbourne team examined a group of people deemed to be at ultra high risk of developing psychosis and found those that went on to develop schizophrenia, rather than other forms of psychosis, all displayed the inability to identify smells. This deficit was present before the onset of any significant clinical symptoms of psychosis.

The study, the first of its kind, is published in the October 2003 American Journal of Psychiatry…

It has long been known that people suffering schizophrenia and other forms of psychosis are often unable to correctly identify smells. That is, pizza may be mislabelled as orange, or bubblegum as smoke. Before the current findings, however, it was unknown if this difficulty developed later, as a result of the progression of the disorder, or well before any symptoms of psychosis became obvious…

Their results suggest a promising discovery of the first potential marker for schizophrenia, and possibly for other psychoses.

Brewer and Pantelis’ detective work began with the understanding that a person’s sense of smell is intimately linked to the area of your brain that deals with emotions and related non-language functions.

‘It is the only sense that passes straight to this area of the brain, and so any vulnerability involving these neural circuits can affect our labeling of smell,’ says Brewer.

‘This area of the brain deals with the primary emotions. It is the part that processes such things as threat and emotion before transferring this information into the frontal (language) area of the brain,’ he says.

‘It is either the transfer of emotional information to the frontal lobe, or functioning in the frontal lobe itself that appears to be compromised in those suffering from psychosis.'”

There seems to be a sort of progress in awareness, through the stages of which every man—and especially every psychiatrist and every patient—must move, some persons progressing further through these stages than others. One starts by blaming the identified patient for his idiosyncrasies and symptoms. Then one discovers that these symptoms are a response to—or an effect of—what others have done; and the blame shifts from the identified patient to the etiological figure.

Then, one discovers perhaps that these figures feel a guilt for the pain which they have caused, and one realizes that when they claim this guilt they are identifying themselves with God. After all, they did not, in general, know what they were doing, and to claim guilt for their acts would be to claim omniscience. At this point one reaches a more general anger, that what happens to people should not happen to dogs, and that what people do to each other the lower animals could never devise. Beyond this, there is, I think, a stage which I can only dimly envisage, where pessimism and anger are replaced by something else—perhaps humility. And from this stage onward to whatever other stages there may be, there is loneliness.

No one knows the end of that progress which starts from uniting the perceiver and the perceived—the subject and the object—into a single universe.

I love this ‘reference library on demand’. You install a client on your computer that allows you immediate (with a broadband connection) reference information. Clicking on a word or phrase in any Windows program triggers GuruNet and submits the underlying text, returning facts about the topic. The New York Times called it “the best implementation yet of the information at your fingertips promise.” There is a free client that is plenty powerful but you may want to buy a full license after you try it. If you do, write me for a coupon that will give you $5 off. Yes, I know, this is a blatant advertisement for what is essentially a multilevel marketing scheme — after I sell five people on licensing it using the coupon code I provide them, I get my own registration fee refunded to me. Privacy-oriented readers may be concerned that GuruNet tracks your queries and shares aggregate (but not personally identifiable) usage patterns with third parties such as their corporate clients and third-party content providers. Nevertheless, I think the tradeoff is worthwhile if you are a heavy text-based computer user who ever needs to look up a word or a fact.