Minds and/or brains

Friday Sprog Blogging: waking up.

jstemwedel — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 06:57:41 +0000

Friday Sprog Blogging: waking up.

Younger offspring: Mom? I have a question.

Dr. Free-Ride: OK.

Younger offspring: If I got up really early --

Dr. Free-Ride: I hope you won't.

Younger offspring: No, I won't, but if I got up really early, way before it's time to wake up, like, midnight, and I tried to open my eyes and wake up, would I not be able to because my nerves are tired?

Dr. Free-Ride: Hmmm.

Younger offspring: Because I think if I decided to wake up at midnight I wouldn't be able to. I won't be able to open my eyes or get out of bed.

Dr. Free-Ride: I think you might be right about that. If your body needs sleep, it needs sleep. And your sleepy body might not let you disturb that sleep through sheer force of will.

Younger offspring: Would I not be able to open my eyes or get out of bed because my nerves are too tired?

Dr. Free-Ride: I don't know that it would be your nerves specifically. I guess if you're unconscious it's part of your brain that's doing the sleeping. But maybe the purpose of that is as much to do with the rest of your body as your brain.

Younger offspring: But the brain is what lets me dream when I'm asleep, right?

Dr. Free-Ride: Yes.

Younger offspring: So it would be doing stuff when I tried to wake up.

Dr. Free-Ride: You might even be having a dream that you had woken up but didn't have the power to open your eyes or move your arms or legs.

Younger offspring: If it's not that my nerves are too tired, why can't I just wake myself up in the middle of the night?

Dr. Free-Ride: I guess when the body needs down-time, to make repairs or just take a break, it needs the down-time. It might not matter how much you want to be awake -- if your body needs to sleep, it will sleep. Sometimes you can see this happen when people fall asleep in class.

Younger offspring: (shocked) They do?

Dr. Free-Ride: Yes, sometimes. I guess school is interesting enough for you and your classmates that none of you do that.

Younger offspring: Have you?

Dr. Free-Ride: Umm, maybe once or twice I've almost fallen asleep in a class.

Younger offspring: What class?

Dr. Free-Ride: I'm sure it had nothing at all to do with the class, that it was only because I hadn't gotten enough sleep and my body needed rest right away, since all of the classes I took were really interesting.

Younger offspring: You should have gotten more sleep at bedtime.

Dr. Free-Ride: I might say the same thing to you.

Younger offspring: But, do you think this would be a good science question for the sprog blog?

jstemwedel Fri, 07/30/2010 - 02:57

Tags

kids and science

Minds and/or brains

dreams

sleep

kids and science

Awww...budding neuroscientist!! :-)

Playing with the army and sleep deprivation I can't say we ever got to the point where a person absolutely couldn't wake up. Ive seen, been, so tired that it was common to see people asleep leaning against a tree or even asleep while on an extended march. But say their name, and whack them around the head and shoulders, and you always get a reaction and some move in the general direction of 'awake'.

I also note that 'awake' may not always be what we normally see. I've lost hours of time and been told I was functioning quite well but I have no recollection of being awake or of what I was doing.

My speculation, completely unfounded in science, is that you can always 'wake up' in the sense that when asleep you can always make some progress toward wakefulness. In a deep paralytic stage of sleep it is more difficult to start waking up but give sufficient inputs, like the sergeant dumping a bucket of ice-water on you, you do start waking up.

Startled awake that way it may be come time before you come to yourself and in the mean time there is an not entirely unpleasant zombie-like state where you can stand and walk but you have no understanding of what is going on. In such a state you can move the person by dragging them from place to place. They can walk and jog, even run a bit, but they would simply stand there if left alone and didn't show any capacity to reason or avoid obstacles. If you don't manhandle them around trees they tend to walk into them. Such a state can last from a minute or two to perhaps ten.

Coming-to from such a state is quite strange. Imagine running while asleep and while still running slowly becoming aware that your not running in a dream. And finding out that someone forgot to steer you around a few trees and you wake up to your body but worse for wear.

Ah ... good times.

Oh, Dr. Free-Ride, you DO lie to your offspring! Really?! All your classes were interesting?! I can't believe that. I do love that Y.O. is surprised about people falling asleep in class (NOT your classes!).
My own E.O. often wakes up and ignores all messages from nerves/body/brain/dreamland about being tired; it is not unusual for me to notice her light on at 00-dark-thirty-- she is reading, sometimes more than one book at a time. Unfortunately, sometimes even when the body needs sleep, it cannot overcome a struggle with the brain when it needs entertainment and/or enlightenment.
In my own current sleep-deprived state, I can't possibly make any coherent points in this post (but I did finish reading the Funny Times and Flight Explorer Vol. I last night before bed!).

If I want to take a 20 minute nap, I tell myself that and wake up usually right on 20 minutes, but sometimes 5 minutes before. My internal alarm clock works up to 8 hours from the time I tell it to wake me up, and unless I'm truly exhausted, it works reliably. I set the physical alarm clock anyway if I have something important to do (just in case). Although I can't find the blog post, John Scalzi wrote once on Whatever that he can do the same thing.

..and I never (insert: did/used unprotected sex, drugs, too much alcohol, risky behavior) because I was so busy with all of the really interesting classes I took ...

If you don't watch out you'll loose credibility fast

$0.01 @3/et @5: As it happens, I was using what my kids recognize as my "sarcastic" voice when I claimed that all of my classes were interesting.

Although, to be fair, they really were more interesting than many classes of which I've heard reports, and my classroom nodding was nearly always primarily due to too little sleep, rather than too little classroom excitement.

On balance, I'm not sure what it says about my parenting that I have a recognizable "sarcastic" voice. I'm sure my kids will tell me in the next decade or two.

The only time I fell asleep in class (well, in a two-student tutorial actually) was when I'd pulled two consecutive all-nighters to get essays done, then stayed up at a party all night on May Eve. May Morning, gently hung over, after about 75 hours without sleep, I actually dozed off in my tutor's nice, warm office (damn armchairs!).

On an unrelated note, in my own experience it can sometimes be very difficult to wake young children. The scary ones are when you can get them up and going, but they're still dreaming (I've had to dodge fists more times than I care to remember at that point); almost equally alarming are the ones who are ragdoll limp no matter what you do - I tried bugle calls and cold showers on my brother as a toddler, and neither worked reliably (bugle calls on the hung-over teenager were another matter altogether, and utterly hilarious provided I was out of the house by the time he collected himself); we could get him dressed, breakfasted, and into the car, without waking him.

Workplace safety: use your BRAAAINNS!!

jstemwedel — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 12:34:11 +0000

Workplace safety: use your BRAAAINNS!!

I've just gotten back from a conference, and I was blaming the travel and time zones for the fact that I feel like this:

However, from the looks of things, it seems there is some kind of zombie epidemic on ScienceBlogs today. (I suppose this means I need to talk to the IT guys about internet security issues, if I got zombified through my browsing. Assuming they're still taking help tickets from zombies. I wonder if being a zombie with tenure makes a difference ...)

Anyway, in the meantime I thought it might be useful to break out the workplace safety talk for new students. While I can't find the original filmstrip* to link to it, mine skews heavily towards what chemistry students need to know. However, you should feel free to shamble into the comments ~~with that tasty brain of yours~~ and add additional tips for safe conduct in your own field of study.

Proper laboratory attire:

There is stuff in labs that can hurt you. If you are hurt, it interferes with your ability to shamble through the experiments and produce good results. Thus, you should dress in a way that minimizes the chances of harm. This includes:

Wearing closed-toe shoes.
Wearing clothes that cover your arms and legs.
Wearing a lab coat, where appropriate.
Wearing gloves to protect your hands.
Keeping long hair tied back.
Wearing safety goggles (especially if your eye sockets are starting to show wear and tear).
Not wearing contact lenses (especially if your eye sockets are starting to show wear and tear).
Wearing suitable brain protection. (Remember, an open mind is good, but if your brain falls into your experiment it can ruin a whole day's work.)
Ensuring that your gaping wounds and decaying limbs have secondary containment, so they won't contaminate your experimental system or the lab space more generally.
Where appropriate, using a respirator (if you're still breathing).

General safety in the lab:

Everyone is safer in a lab where workers can move freely from their experiments to safety equipment and exit doors. Thus, tripping hazards should be removed from floors. If electrical cords must be on floors, they should be taped down, sequestered in "bridges", or otherwise prevented from becoming tripping hazards.

If lab workers include a mix of zombies and ~~warm bodies with tasty brains~~ living humans, it may be acceptable in certain circumstances to introduce tripping hazards to the environment or to barricade exits. Consult with your lab supervisor.

While some zombified lab workers may have a preference for working at a sprint, it is safer for the whole group if everyone moves through the lab space at a shambling pace.

Avoiding harmful exposures.

Do not pipette by mouth, ever. For one thing, even if you think the material you are pipetting would be safe to accidentally ingest, the glassware it's in might have residues of something that isn't. For another thing, pipetting by mouth introduces the risk of backwash from your mouth into the reagent. That's like putting your whole zombie-contagion-having mouth in the reagent -- which puts your breath-drawing lab mates at risk, and also might introduce an uncontrolled contaminant into your experimental system. The risk of bad data alone is enough to make it a bad idea.

Don't eat in the lab, ever. Cross contamination between your food and your experiment could harm you or your experimental results.

Don't eat your coworkers' brains in the lab, ever. To be an effective part of the experimental team, they need their brains. Besides, you don't want to eat brains contaminated with harmful chemicals from your experiments.

Dispose of chemical waste properly, putting wastes that can not safely be washed down the drain in containers with secondary containment, labeled with contents (writing out the names of the compounds, not just using their formulae) and type of hazard they constitute, and arranging for pick-up. Do not eat the brains of the workers dispatched to pick up and dispose of tagged chemical wastes

Be sure you know how to use the safety shower and eye wash in case of accidental exposure to hazardous chemicals. Stay under the shower for the full duration of its flow, even if this means you lose some of your decaying flesh in the process. Be sure to tag any such flesh for proper disposal. Even if you no longer have eyeballs in your eye sockets, it's a good idea to use the eyewash in the aftermath of chemical exposure of your eye sockets (since the chemical residues in your eye sockets can make their way to your zombie brain).

Safety in the library:

Be careful when locating journals stored in the compact shelving. Before turning the crank to move the shelves, be sure there is no one in the aisle currently opened up. Do not browse in the open aisle while someone else is moving the compact shelving, or you may have to go back to the lab looking like this:

It's hard to do a good literature search without a head.

______
*If you don't know what a filmstrip is, go find an old person to ask.

Zombie images by the awesome Joseph Hewitt of Ataraxia Theatre.

jstemwedel Thu, 07/01/2010 - 08:34

Tags

Teaching and Learning

When using machinery with moving parts, don't wear jewelery. It can cut through decaying flesh with incredible ease!

An utterly shameless plug for my "book store":
http://evilpossum.weebly.com/store.html

Featuring Walking Dead, Walking Dead 2 and Zombie Vegas!

Don't lift beyond your comfortable capabilities (especially if you need to shamble down stairs) - it's embarrassing if your arms fall off, and assorted zombie fluids may damage valuable books and equipment, resulting in delays getting results.

If an instrument can't be turned off for repairs/maintenance, use a GFI plug to prevent shocks.

...SEND...MORE...BLOGGERSSSS....

(If you never saw "Return of the Living Dead" you may not think that's funny.)

Two pipette references in one day for this non-chemist!
From the AHC History Project at UMN's Twitter feed (@ahcarchives) http://twitpic.com/21sgvr
Hey, don't be a sucker.

Is multitasking unethical?

jstemwedel — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 16:50:21 +0000

Is multitasking unethical?

In a recent column at Business Week, Bruce Weinstein (aka "The Ethics Guy") argues that multitasking is unethical. He writes of his own technologically assisted slide into doing too many tasks at once:

I noticed that the more things I could do with ease on my computer, the harder it was to focus on any one activity. My natural inclination to jump from one thing to another prematurely was now aided and abetted by technology--the very thing that was supposed to be helping me. Then, after the PDA and cell phone became a part of my daily life, I found myself, like millions of others, faced with even more interruptions, and it became increasingly difficult to concentrate. The technological advances that once seemed so liberating had become oppressive.

I came to realize that multitasking isn't something to be proud of. In fact, it's unethical, and good managers won't do it themselves and will not require it of those they manage.

Here's why multitasking is unethical.

When you multitask, you're doing a lot of work, but you're not doing most (or any) of it well. A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences revealed that people who fired off e-mails while talking on the phone and watching YouTube videos did each activity less well than those who focused on one thing at a time. Psychiatrist Edward M. Hallowell, author of CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! (Ballantine, 2006), puts it this way: "Multitasking is shifting focus from one task to another in rapid succession. It gives the illusion that we're simultaneously tasking, but we're really not. It's like playing tennis with three balls."

Weinstein's column notes a variety of multitasking that research keeps showing to be a significant danger to our physical well-being, drivers texting, emailing, or talking on cell phones while operating their cars, trucks, trains, or other heavy equipment. In these cases, it seems pretty clear that divided attention has an ethical cost given the harm it can inflict to the multitasker and those around her. But Weinstein's claim extends to other, non-lethal, sorts of multitasking. Moreover, he claims that managers have a special duty not to demand multitasking from those they are managing:

Since multitasking interferes with the ability to do one's job well, the good manager sets an example by focusing on one task at a time. You can't expect the people you lead to resist the urge to multitask if you can't do so yourself.

He follows this with advice that I find completely reasonable and humane about letting your underlings (and yourself) unplug from the internet, the PDA, and the phone during their own time (indeed, recognizing that a good chunk of their time every day is their own time, not the organizations), letting people stay home when they're sick, letting them take a vacation from work (even the emails) when they're on vacation, and discouraging work-driven dived attention when driving.

But I'm not sure I fully agree with Weinstein's strong claim that multitasking is itself unethical.

I'm inclined to think that the ethical status of multitasking may depend on a bunch of considerations:

Is the person multitasking competent to execute the multiple tasks being undertaken in the same time interval (i.e., the quality of each of the tasks, once completed, will meet the necessary standard)?
Does undertaking these tasks simultaneously increase the likelihood of harm (whether to the multitasker or to someone else)?
Does undertaking these tasks simultaneously increase the stress level of the person performing them relative to undertaking them sequentially?
Does undertaking these tasks simultaneously increase the likelihood that the tasks will actually be completed (or completed in a timely fashion) relative to undertaking them sequentially?
Does the person undertaking these tasks have the freedom to decide whether to perform them sequentially or simultaneously?

Actually, some of these considerations are clearly connected to each other -- whether you can decide how to manage the tasks you are charged with completing can certainly have an effect on your stress level, and an increase in your stress level can obviously be a harm worth taking into consideration.

The main point, however, is that there may be some tasks that it is perfectly possible to combine without doing a worse job than you would doing them one by one. Decreeing that multitasking in such a case would be unethical doesn't make sense to me, at least not in the case where such multitasking doesn't produce some other harm to someone.

My own experience is that certain kinds of multitasking are not only doable, but downright necessary. Dinner would not get to the table most nights if I could not simultaneously manage something roasting in the oven and something else simmering on the stovetop while cleaning and preparing components of a salad. I can sort and fold socks while reading spelling words for a sprog's practice test and both jobs get done well. And I'd still be in grad school doing the work for my chemistry dissertation if I hadn't been able to monitor my experiments while reading the literature, grading student papers, writing exams, or preparing solutions for the next round of experiments.

None of this to say is that there aren't tasks which are best done with one's full attention and without interruption. Calibrating pump flow rates before my experimental runs was one such task, and that's exactly why I used to get to the lab by 5:30 AM, to get it done before the phone in the lab started ringing. (I managed, however, to perform these calibrations with the radio tuned to NPR.)

The point, though, is to be able to recognize what conditions are necessary to do a good job with a given task. Then, discharging your obligation to do that task well involves creating (as much as is possible) those conditions. A given person may need to bring different levels of focus to different tasks -- meaning some of them are fine to perform simultaneously and others are not. A given task may require differing levels of focus from different people trying to perform it -- meaning that some people may be fine taking on this task simultaneously with others while other people have no reasonable chance of multitasking it successfully. A given task may be more easily combined with some tasks rather than others. And, arguably, some of the tasks we take on may bring very mild consequences if we screw them up -- so much so that we'd be inclined not to grant those consequences any ethical weight. (What's the worst that happens if, while I'm mentally mapping out a lecture, I manage to put my T-shirt on backwards?)

I do agree with Weinstein that one ought to err on the side of not multitasking when one is operating heavy machinery or engaging in other activities with the potential to do serious harm to oneself or others. Moreover, I suspect that people are not always great at gauging their own ability to multitask successfully; if we're going to multitask, then, we have a responsibility to seek out accurate information about our competence in combining the tasks we intend to combine. And, I think it's unfair to demand that people multitask in instances where they can't do it well and when they can do each of the tasks well when taken one at a time.

Still, unless we can establish that multitasking never works, or that it always puts someone at risk of a significant harm, I'm not ready to endorse the blanket claim that multitasking is unethical.

(Of course, I was doing other things while I thought about my objections to Weinstein's claim, so it's possible I've overlooked something.)

jstemwedel Thu, 09/17/2009 - 12:50

Tags

Ethics 101

Minds and/or brains

The moral thermostat and the problem of cultivating ethical scientists.

jstemwedel — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 10:18:20 +0000

The moral thermostat and the problem of cultivating ethical scientists.

Earlier this week, Ed Yong posted an interesting discussion about psychological research that suggests people have a moral thermostat, keeping them from behaving too badly -- or too well:

Through three psychological experiments, Sonya Sachdeva from Northwestern University found that people who are primed to think well of themselves behave less altruistically than those whose moral identity is threatened. They donate less to charity and they become less likely to make decisions for the good of the environment.
Sachdeva suggests that the choice to behave morally is a balancing act between the desire to do good and the costs of doing so - be they time, effort or (in the case of giving to charities) actual financial costs. The point at which these balance is set by our own sense of self-worth. Tip the scales by threatening our saintly personas and we become more likely to behave selflessly to cleanse our tarnished perception. Do the opposite, and our bolstered moral identity slackens our commitment, giving us a license to act immorally. Having established our persona as a do-gooder, we feel less impetus to bear the costs of future moral actions.

I want to pause here to interject the observation that not all ethical acts are acts of altruism. Altruism is sacrificing one's own interests for the interests of others. And, it's quite possible to have your interests aligned well with the ethical thing to do.

There are, of course, moral philosophers (I'm looking at you, Kant) who will express some skepticism as to whether your act is a truly moral one in cases where your interests align too neatly with your actions. This is the crowd for whom your motive, rather than the impact of your action, determines the moral worth of your act. This crowd will tell you that you ought to be motivated by duty, regardless of what your other interests might be. In other words, an action that happens also to go in the same direction as your interests can still be a moral one, so long as what motivated you to perform the act was not those interests, but rather duty -- so that you would have been motivated to perform the action even if your interests had happened to pull the other way.

Anyway, some moral acts involve self-sacrifice, but it's not the case that every moral act must.

Sachdeva's experiments (which Ed describes in his post) suggest a human tendency to rest on one's moral laurels. Moreover, these results seem consistent with what other researchers report:

Sachdeva also cites several studies which have found that ethical behaviour provides a license for laxer morality. People who can establish their identity as a non-prejudiced person, by contradicting sexist statements or hiring someone from an ethnic minority, become more likely to make prejudiced choices later.

The general attitude that emerges from these studies seems to be that being good is a chore (since it requires effort and sometimes expenditure), but that it's a chore that stays done longer than dishes, laundry, or those other grinding but necessary labors that we understand need attention on a regular basis.

As someone who thinks a lot about the place of ethics in the everyday interactions of scientists, you can imagine I have some thoughts about this attitude.

Sadly, a track record of being ethical isn't sufficient in a world where your fellow scientist is relying on you to honestly report the results of your current study, to refrain from screwing over the author of the manuscript you are currently reviewing, and to make decisions that are not swayed by prejudice on the hiring committee on which you currently serve. But Sachdeva's experiments raise the possibility that your awareness of your past awesomeness, ethically speaking, could undercut your future ethical performance.

How on earth can people maintain the ethical behaviors we hope they will exercise?

As Ed notes, the research does not rule out the possibility that mere mortals could stay the ethical course. It's just a question of how consistently ethical people are setting their moral thermostats:

Sachdeva is also interested in the types of situations where people seem to break free of this self-regulating loop of morality, and where good behaviour clearly begets more good behaviour. For example, many social or political activists drop out of their causes after some cursory participation, but others seem to draw even greater fervour. Why?

Sachdeva has two explanations. The first deals with habits - many selfless actions become more routine with time (recycling, for one). As this happens, the effort involved lessens, the "costs" seem smaller, and the potential for moral licensing fades. The second explanation relates to the standards that people set for themselves. Those who satisfy their moral goals award themselves with a license to disengage more easily, but those who hold themselves to loftier standards are more likely to stay the course.

Within the community of science, there are plenty of habits scientists cultivate, some conscious and some unconscious. From the point of view of fostering more ethical behavior, it seems reasonable to say that cultivating a habit of honesty is a good thing -- giving fair and accurate reports ought to be routine, rather than something that requires a great deal of conscious effort. Cultivating a habit of fairness (in evaluating the ideas and findings of others, in distributing the goods needed to do science, etc.) might also be worthwhile. The point is not to get scientists to display extraordinarily saintly behavior, but to make honesty and fairness a standard part of how scientists roll.

Then there's the strategy of setting lofty goals. The scientific community shares a commitment to objectivity, something that involves both individual effort and coordination of the community of scientists. Objectivity is something that is never achieved perfectly, only by degrees. This sets the bar high enough that scientists' frailties are always pretty evident, which may reduce the potential for backsliding.

At the same time, objectivity is so tightly linked with the scientific goal of building a reliable body of knowledge about the world that it's unlikely that this lofty goal will be jettisoned simply because it's hard to achieve.

I don't think we can overlook the danger in latching onto goals that reveal themselves to be impossible or nearly so. Such goals won't motivate action -- or if they do, they will motivate actions like cheating as the most rational response to a rigged game. Indeed, situations in which the individual feels like her own success might require going against the interests of the community make me think that it's vitally important for individual interests and community interests to be aligned with each other. If what is good for the community of scientists is also good for the individual scientist trying to participate in the scientific discourse and to make a contribution to the shared body of knowledge, then being good feels a lot less like altruism. And, tuning up the institutional contexts in which science is practiced to reduce the real career costs of honesty and cooperation might be the kind of thing that would lead to better behavior, too.

jstemwedel Thu, 04/09/2009 - 06:18

Tags

Ethics 101

Minds and/or brains

tribe of science

A very thoughtful and well-reasond essay, Janet! Say "Hi!" to the sprogs for me...

Altruism is only self-sacrifice if you're foolish enough to keep your entire identity in only one flesh bag.

Can you go home for the holidays?

jstemwedel — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 11:55:01 +0000

Can you go home for the holidays?

Having filed grades and extricated myself from the demands of my job, at least temporarily, I have come with my better half and offspring to the stomping grounds of my better half's youth.

Well, kind of.

The grandparents-who-lurk-but-seldom-comment actually live a couple towns over from where they did when my better half still lived at home. In fact, they only moved from that house a few years ago, so I'm much more familiar with the immediate vicinity of the childhood home than I am with the environs of the current house.

But we do this thing that folks in this part of the country are reputed never to do: we walk. Which means that our familiarity with the area amounts to something like having a good mental map of the place generated by walking around it. The new place and the old place are more or less in the same walking range (although on opposite edges of that range), so lately we've been filling in more of the details of this edge of the range.

As we were walking yesterday, it occurred to me that the mental maps I've generated on foot seem much more robust and reliable than those I've generated by driving a car. I was barely three years out of college when I returned to visit a professor at her home and discovered that the off-campus geography hardly matched my memory at all. Without departing from my planned route at all, I felt hopelessly lost. The sense of place I'd had from driving around the area while still in college just hadn't stuck to my brain. Those memories just couldn't be trusted. (Driving around the New Jersey town where I grew up -- indeed, where I spent the eleven years before I went off to college -- leaves me similarly disoriented.)

Behind the wheel, it's a similar situation in these parts, but I think the difficulty is enhanced by the breakneck rate at which the area has been developed and redeveloped. The landmarks that you might use to orient yourself while driving from one place to another keep changing. The home you might try to come back to turns into a different place while you're away.

The view changes for those of us on foot, too. But there are some parts of the terrain that seems pretty stable. You can build different stuff by the ocean, but the ocean's still there, and the good walking routes near the ocean don't change all that much.

I wonder whether it's the slower rate at which you move past the changing landscape, or the physical activity invested in walking past it (rather than being carried past it by an automobile) that etches the mental map more deeply.

Whatever it is, there's a definite difference I feel between driving around and walking around. In the car, I know that I'm not from here. On foot, at least to a limited extent, I am at home.

jstemwedel Mon, 12/24/2007 - 06:55

Tags

Minds and/or brains

Passing thoughts

personal

Hull did a couple of neat experiments where he carted rats around in a maze instead of them running by themselves. Turns out that the less you have to actively choose yourself, the worse is your spatial learning. I guess that when we're walking, we keep having to do decisions at a small scale a few steps at a time - about where to go next, so we create a fairly dense network of place and feature associations. When you're driving, you're mostly just going along a single enforced route with only the occasional decision point, so your spatial feature network remains sparse and easily disconnected if a few features change.

I never left the home town. Am I a freak?

As a student I lived with my parents (with the obvious nuisances and economic benefits) and bicycled to my University. Today I live closer, I could walk. I could walk to a few others as well. Europe is built for people, not cars.

I still navigate by the landmarks, not the street names. Ask a name, and I tell you to look at your map.

(A joke about Ixtlan was meant to be here, but the dwerfs stole it.)

Hmmm... perhaps my directional impairment has to do with having lived my entire life in a bedroom community. There's nothing to walk to, and you can't even walk to public transportation to get to anything. If one of the landmarks I use to navigate is changed or removed, I wouldn't realize how lost I was until I had gone for the amount of time in which I expected to see my next landmark.
Also, driving around New Jersey in general is disorienting. I've been working in NJ for a few months once a week, and I had yet to figure out how to get in to a certain shopping center on my way home. I can only get in on the way there. I also don't know how to get from the place I work to where my sister lives, which is no more than 15 minutes away.

You really don't get a sense of the land unless you walk it. People these days have no real idea of what a mile is. The length of it, how much ground a square mile covers. We keep hearing that the Earth is this teeny little place, never made aware of just how much smaller we are compared to the world we live on.

I once came up with an exercise people could try to get an idea of just how big a square mile is. What you do is mark out the boundaries of a square mile. Then, starting from the northeast corner, you walk in a straight line to the northwest corner. Then you step one foot south and walk back. Keep doing this until you've walked every square foot of that square mile. A journey of some 5,280 miles. Well before then you'd hope a person would realize something he'd never known before.

But then a smartass came up with a formula, and thought it would do what walking that square mile was supposed to do. Really had no idea of what he was talking about.

My point is, there are times when you do have to do the work. Shortcuts, cheating, being clever won't do it, you have to walk the land.

The ethics of performance enhancing drugs in academe.

jstemwedel — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 12:02:34 +0000

The ethics of performance enhancing drugs in academe.

In the 20/27 December 2007 issue of Nature, there's a fascinating commentary by Cambridge University neuroscientists Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir. Entitled "Professor's little helper," this commentary explores, among other things, how "cognitive-enhancing drugs" are starting to find their way into the lifestyles of professors and students on university campuses, a development which raises some interesting ethical questions.

The questions are sufficiently rich here that this post will just serve as my first attempt to get some of the important issues on the table and to open it up for discussion. (There will also be an ongoing discussion of this commentary on the Nature Network website, in case you're interested.)

Is there something unfair about taking cognitive enhancers in an academic setting?

Sometimes it seems the rules in academe are a lot fuzzier than the rules in baseball or cycling. Sahakian and Morein-Zamir found, in informal discussions with colleagues in the U.S. and the U.K., that academic scientists are already making use of compounds like modafinil (sometimes bought online) "to enhance productivity or mental energy, or to deal with demanding and important intellectual challenges." (1158) They write:

For many, it seems that the immediate and tangible benefits of taking these drugs are more persuasive than concerns about legal status and adverse effects. There are clear trends suggesting that the use of stimulants such as methylphenidate on college campuses is on the rise, and is becoming more commonplace in ever younger students. Universities may have to decide whether to ban drug use altogether, or to tolerate it in some situations (whether to enable all-night study sessions or to boost alertness during lectures).

(1158)

Are cognitive enhancers on a par with steroids in sports?

Or are they simply an alternative for the kids who don't like cola or cappuccino? Verily, the use of caffeine to enhance alertness and concentration is widespread, and you can obtain it legally, with no prescription, on nearly every block around an urban campus.

And really, if we have a worry that other sorts of substances (especially ones that aren't clearly illegal) may be giving our colleagues or classmates an unfair edge, I think we have to dig a little deeper to ask some questions about the nature of the academic endeavor.

Should we think of the activity of students or scholars primarily as a competition to see who is the best?

If people make use of cognitive enhancers, are they significantly advantaged over their peers who do not? Is this the kind of thing that could screw up the curve in courses, make winning tenure easier for the chemically enhanced and harder for those working without the enhancers, and skew awards of grants toward the folks with the magic pills?

Even if cognitive enhancers had the potential to shift the standings in the competitions between students and between scholars to a dramatic degree, should we say that there's a problem with the use of these drugs -- or instead with the way the system is set up? Is it more unfair that some professors use a drug that gives them the mental energy to grade papers until 3 AM, or that the workload on professors is such that they have to stay up grading papers until 3 AM in order to have time to meet the obligations of their job?

I know there are professors who see teaching (and grading) students primarily in terms of weeding out and ranking. I'm not one of those professors. My goal is to help my students understand the material I'm teaching (as well as gain insight into how philosophers approach problems), and to help them hone their skills in critical thinking, reading, writing, and speaking, so they can go out into the world and take on the problems they want or need to solve.

Possibly some of my students would have an easier time achieving what I'd like them to achieve with the help of cognitive enhancers. (Others of my students may already be using cognitive enhancers prescribed for diagnosed disabilities.) I'm not sure I'd want to forbid my students making choices that helped put them in a state where they were better able to learn. Indeed, given how exhausted my students can be, I've sometimes been tempted to bring coffee to class.

But I have worries.

It could be that the demands on todays students are unreasonable (at least in terms of the time required to discharge them). Seventh graders are drinking coffee! High school students are staying up till 2 AM to get their school work done. Maybe giving the kids drugs to make these crazy schedules manageable is not the best response to the problem.

Do we know enough about long-term effects to accept drugs as a route to (possible) short-term improvements?

Do we even know much at this point about who will get an appreciable cognitive boost from these drugs? Some kind of reliable evidence -- about efficacy and safety -- would at least allow people to make informed choices before popping the pill their classmates are taking.

Are cognitive enhancers going to end up in the hands of the people who could most use the enhancement, or in the hands of the people who are already advantaged?

If the drugs are being purchased on the internet for enhancement rather than being prescribed for "legitimate needs" (as construed by doctors and health insurance carriers), it seems likely that more rich kids than poor kids will be using them. These are the same kids who are more likely to show up at university with the benefit of an excellent secondary education (and possibly private tutoring) -- in other words, the kids who were already doing well rather than struggling.

Well, maybe it's up to rich kids to decide how to spend their money. But what kind of impact would increasing the disparities have on our mission to educate all the students who come to us? How much harder will it be for us to bring the under-prepared kids up to where they should be if they are also "under-enhanced"?

Would I take cognitive enhancers?

I don't think that I would.

I confess that I have a serious caffeine dependency right now, and I'd like to try to quit. The cognitive enhancer I'd really like to use is adequate sleep.

But I think I'd take a pass on the other options, even if I had reason to believe that most of my colleagues were using them.

I think I'd worry whether the good work I did was really mine.

Honestly, I'm conflicted about this attitude of mine towards the products of thinking with my "natural" brain. I don't think the work of my colleagues who take medications for their depression or ADHD or anxiety is any less their work. I understand that they need their meds to function in the ways that feel "proper" to them.

But I find myself feeling that my brain ought to function pretty well as it is, and that making it do so is primarily a matter of discipline. I want to know what I can do with what I've got. The competition is a matter of living up to my own potential rather than ranking favorably compared to someone else.

I'm still thinking this through. Maybe more coffee will help, but so will your thoughts on these issues, so lay them on me.

Update: Shelley weighs in here.

jstemwedel Wed, 12/19/2007 - 07:02

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"Would I take cognitive enhancers?

I don't think that I would.

I confess that I have a serious caffeine dependency right now,"

As the old punch line goes, We've already established what you are madam, all we are doing now is negotiating the price.

As far as ethics goes in sports doping vs. academic doping the issues are precisely the same. You think caffeine is a-okay as a doping agent. You wouldn't try and stop students from having a nicotine patch on during class either, would you? Ritalin? Meth? no-no. What's the difference? Why are "natural supplements" which possibly include steroid or 'roid-like actions okay but BALCO-derived products bad? Why are completely artificial performance enhancers like Gatorade, glucose drips (see TdF) and subcutaneous or IV fluid-replacement okay where natural ephedra-containing or THC-containing consumables are banned? What clear and consistent policy can we establish other than "because I said so"?

Actually a prior editorial in Nature raised an even better ethical issue which goes beyond personal choice. It boils down this observation. Wouldn't you maybe agree to become addicted to crack if you were going to be able to cure cancer?

cross to Retrospectacle

The only legal cognitive-enhancing drug with which I'm personally familiar, besides caffeine and nicotine, is modafinil (which Shelley touches on in her post). For several years, starting third year in college and through my fifth year of grad school, I couldn't stay awake when sitting still for long periods of time. As far as I can tell, this was the result of OD'ing on chocolate-covered espresso beans, which ended up trashing my immune system and significantly changing my body's reaction to caffeine for several years afterwards.

Anyway. The falling-asleep bit was a problem, to put it mildly: whether working at a computer, driving a car or sitting in a three-hour seminar with, like, six other people (nowhere to hide!), at some point I started nodding off regardless of how hard I tried not to. That's how I got modafinil prescribed in the first place.

From what I know of it, it doesn't enhance anything so much as prevent the "I'm tired" signal to travel through my body. If I took it when already tired, it had no effect. It had to be taken before the weariness hit, and it helped me both stay awake and concentrate. Too bad there was a side effect: after a month or so of regular use I started having terrible mood swings when coming down from it, so bad that I voluntarily stopped using modafinil unless I really, really needed it.

Oddly enough, the time I spent on it seemed to have re-calibrated my body. I still need coffee on long road trips, but then, I like driving across the U.S. :)

As to ethics: we enhance and diminish our performance all the time with stuff we ingest. In stressful academic situations I function much better when there's lots of protein in my body; is that cheating? Likewise, poorer students tend to get worse nutrition; is this unfair? Ultimately I don't believe that it's an ethical question; the real value of academic research is the results, and if yours aren't good enough, performance enhancing only buys you time, not additional brain. The economic disparity among students is quite real, though; in this academe mirrors the rest of the world.

Yup, it seems like the line between what we think it's OK to put into our body and what we think is out of bounds is pretty darned arbitrary. That's why I'm only speculating about what I would do, given the option.

But given that drugs are just chemicals, and we're ingesting chemicals all the time (in our food and beverages), and that our bodies are making their own chemicals, I wonder how the lines we draw could avoid being tied to our personal and cultural 'druthers.

Mine include generally not wanting to spend money on stuff I can do without, not wanting to incur unknown risks, and not setting too many variables into motion at once in my head.

But I don't think there's a good reason my 'druthers should be normative for anyone but me.

Your coffee analogy is apt.

Is it unethical for a student, a teacher, or any other professional to use a calculator? A computer? Reading glasses? Insulin? Notes? A supportive family?

The role of technology is to provide a tool to exceed our physical or mental limitations. Dependency is a disadvantage of technology, as technology users do not develop the mental habits or physical muscles and calluses that would be appropriate to a non-technological lifestyle.

This is part of the reason that Socrates opposed the use of written language. It's a pretty old conversation, and it's pretty tired when you note the standard pattern:

civilization embracing a technology in the past = a good tradeoff

civilization embracing a technology in the future, or the young 'uns embracing it now = oh noes!

Sure, if these enhancers are significantly detrimental to long-term health, that knowledge should be promoted. Beyond that, it's just another tool in a long line of similar aids.

So, What should I take to improve performance? Has there been research to show what works best? i know that sleep and eating good help but if I could get a little more help I would take it.

"As far as ethics goes in sports doping vs. academic doping the issues are precisely the same."

To me no - in fact almost opposite. Academics, except in narrow cases where competing for grad schools (and even there the high end colleges look at the whole person right...well anyway), are not about competing with each other. As a person who has interviewed my share of graduates for industry, achievement was loosely based on grades, they were more of a hurdle to get over, a baseline. I wouldn't care what the student took, supplement wise - as long as it wasn't illegal, or damaging to the students health in a large degree. In fact, I want to know where these super drugs or supplements are for distribution? Looking at the drugs suggested though, these aren't really enhancing anything much, they are just keeping people awake. Where is the EPO for the brain that jumps you 20% in mental metabolism? Where is the testosterones that let you "recover" from learning one subject quickly and put you in mind for another. I think if these existed they would, if relatively safe, be recommended, not made illegal.

We are not trying to level a playing field in schools, we are trying to get each student to perform at their best, a degree is just that, a level of knowledge and background.

"starting to appear"?

Was i really the only one who recrystallized ephedrine for.....non-recordable experiements?

Somehow i think not. And i know i was the conservative one in my lab.

Also, differential availability of enhancements is at best a digression.

If the goal is to level the academic playing field, then socialized, federally funded education organised via blind meritocracy is the way to go. Also, students should receive all meals in their dorm's cafeterias. Preferably, parental involvement should end with weaning at the very latest.

Then we can talk about how unfair it is that only some of the students will have an extra hundred bucks to spend on some pills.

Seriously, every new technology launches with an income gap. That's not a non-issue, but it's not an argument against a particular technology, nor against technology in general. "If the poor can't have it, no-one will" is not a good mantra for a civilization.

The ethics of sport and academia are completely different. Sport has a set of arbitary rules that are there SPECIFICALLY to make things more difficult to achieve in order to make the sport entertaining to watch and to play. For example, in baseball, you can't use a bat the size of a barn door because it would make the sport too easy. By choosing to play the sport, you sign up to those rules accepting that entertainment of others is the primary purpose of the endeavour. One of those rules in some sports is that you can't take drugs.
Academia is not made up of rules that are speccifically designed to make things harder (it just sometimes seems that way), the aim is to expand the grand total of human knowledge and taking drugs may well help towards that end.

When I was an undergrad there were two guys in our hall who decided to use nodoze to crash study the night the before an exam. They woke up an hour after the exam had started... IIRC the work with the stimulants the airforce uses on its pilots shows that when you borrow energy like this you must pay it back. The brain is a major energy user in the human body, cognition uses energy or fMRI wouldn't work. It's the same with MDMA/Ecstasy use up all those neurotransmitters that intensively and when it wears off you will be deficient.

Multi day endurance event participants know that going without sleep for too long elicits hallucinations. I expect that these things will have similar paybacks and we may find that unless we are very careful (students careful?) we may end up like those two guys, no better off in the long run.

But hey, we are suckers for anything that is perceived to give the faintest advantage, remember all those athletes with those nose plasters on? And here was me thinking that lung function was never limiting in healthy people, that was cardiac output.

But I find myself feeling that my brain ought to function pretty well as it is, and that making it do so is primarily a matter of discipline.

This is why many people are anti-antidepressants.

Some of the above discussion seems to me to be obscured by the tendency to lump in a number of very different things under the label 'academic', which is term indicating a set of institutions, not a unified project. For instance, one of the things done in academia is assessment and certification of students: in effect, this is one of the primary reasons for having degree and specialization programs rather than simply having a system that is more like a large-scale community college continuing education program (which would be more reasonable if, for instance, we put a greater weight on one of the other functions of academic life, like general education of the public, than on giving students authentic credentials for the workplace, which is one of the big academic money-makers). And a potential worry is about how cognitive enhancers might mess up the value of this function if, for instance, the assessment can't distinguish someone who normally meets certain standards from someone who only meets them when hyped up on something.

I agree with some of the commenters who think this worry is not so serious. But it can't be dismissed by handwaving; it isn't immediately obvious why enhancers wouldn't be a problem for assessment in academia given that they are a problem for other sorts of assessment. (I think the commenters who have raised questions about how much these cognitive enhancers are really cognitive enhancers probably have a stronger argument; then the question really does become, 'Well, how does this really differ from things like drinking coffee to wake up or taking ibuprofen to eliminate a headache on the day of a test?')

But if we look at other functions of academic life and institutions (like research and discovery) we might well get a very different view.

Janet posed a series of questions.

****"Is there something unfair about taking cognitive enhancers in an academic setting?"

We already do. It's called caffeine. We also take bright light sometimes. Are these unfair? Because we already employ these. We also employ years of academic instruction where equity of access is a real and enduring problem. I'm not sure that unfair is a term I find useful in this discussion.

****"Should we think of the activity of students or scholars primarily as a competition to see who is the best?"

This is what kids have drilled into them from an early age (it seems especially in America). It was only half way through a PhD when I realised that grades probably didn't matter as much as I was led to beleive. However, that didn't help me get a PhD stipend through the traditional routes -as they were all based on grades and not actual academic output/performance (i.e. papers). But then the question was 'Should we?'. The answer is probably that we shouldn't, but the fact that we do.

****"Do we know enough about long-term effects to accept drugs as a route to (possible) short-term improvements?"

Which drugs specifically? You will need to have sufficient knowledge of each particular chemical agent in order to answer that question for each particular chemical agent. Furthermore, if you don't use the 'drugs' long-term you cannot possibly have information about their long term effects. To have knowledge of long term effects you just have to wait to find out.

****"Are cognitive enhancers going to end up in the hands of the people who could most use the enhancement, or in the hands of the people who are already advantaged?"

I think somebody has already answered this above. New technology usually ends up being used by the best off first. Back in undergrad I couldn't afford a cup of coffee anyway.

****"Would I take cognitive enhancers?"

I already do -every morning and sometimes once more in the day. Coffee. Been around a long time, effective and safe. I also have access to modafinil. It's also been around a while (70s) although it's long term effects have not been well studied. I would use it for continuous operations (i.e. data collection for 24 hours or at 3AM) given it's efficacy. However, I haven't had the need to do it yet. I think that if I had Janet's all night marking session lined up before a hard deadline I probably would employ modafinil.

The best cognitive enhancers are not drugs, they're diet, exercise and adequate sleep. Is optimizing health cheating, in a world of junk food and sleep deprivation? I wonder.

High school students are staying up till 2 AM to get their school work done.

Not new-trig class homework usually took that long. Neither is 3 day marathon to finish college senior research write-up before deadline. Caffeine was the drug of choice, but hard to come down off after the marathon. It took some time to be able to sleep and for stomach to settle. Glad I was not walking into an exam in that condition.

And I remember when you avoided caffeine, because it kept you awake...

So even "legit" choices have at least temporary harmful effects.

Janet, how much coffee do you drink? More than 2 and a half cups is enough to fail a doping test, were you to compete in an official athletic event.

"More than 2 and a half cups is enough to fail a doping test, were you to compete in an official athletic event."

Sure about this LL? The 2007 WADA list has caffeine in the "2007 Monitoring Program" but it is not a "Prohibited Substance". The 2007 US AntiDopingAgency (USADA) list seems to directly quote the WADA list on stimulants, so ditto. It used to be one of the threshold substances (under 12 micrograms/ml of urine and you were OK) but was delisted as of Jan 1, 2004 from what I can tell.

Is it fair? Life isn't fair. Life is can be very unfair, and even when starting conditions are fair, results tend to be unfair.

We are not created equal, we differ in ability, capability, and potential. Often greatly. Most of the readers of this blog also live in a competitive culture. We think in terms of winning and losing, and of gaining whatever advantage we can in our efforts. We can either impose a ban on cognitive enhancement medication, and thus create a new enforcement nightmare; or make the new drugs widely available to everyone at low cost, and thus give all who wish the assistance the chance to obtain those drugs.

Do we ban, tolerate, allow, or encourage? Why?

Here is what I posted at DrugMonkey's joint:

"The ethical issues only become interesting if a drug can actually enhance performance in normal individuals.

I have seen evidence that use of various stimulants can enhance the performance of both regular and naive users in certain very contrived and constrained cognitive tasks. However, I have seen no evidence at all that any drugs can actually improve cognitive performance on real tasks that matter (here, in the context of acadmic science, but analogously in any other field of intellectual pursuit): designing an experiment, writing a grant, delivering a seminar, etc, let alone at long-term goals like obtaining a Ph.D., getting an academic position, getting tenure, etc.

Until there is evidence that any of that stuff can be enhanced, the ethical dimension is completely uninteresting."

I think I'd worry whether the good work I did was really mine.

[...]

I don't think the work of my colleagues who take medications for their depression or ADHD or anxiety is any less their work.

One of these has got to go. I know my position (quick version: the only relevant caveat is side-effects!), but I'd really like to hear you think this through.

I can't get myself too excited about this question; it doesn't seem to me that there are any real ethical issues involved if the "cognitive enhancers" 1) actually work to some degree and 2) don't have negative side effects. (Of course those are two big "if"s.) I don't think the analogy with sports competition is at all valid.

Let's up the ante a little bit...I fully expect that something like the following scenario will occur in my lifetime: Suppose you are planning to conceive a child, and there is a gene manipulation therapy available which will result in your child having an enlarged neocortex with 20% more neurons, and a correspondingly increased cognitive ability. Studies [presumably done by godless atheist scientists in former-east-block countries, or maybe by RaÃ«lians] indicate that the risk of the procedure is similar to standard in-vitro fertilization, and the resulting offspring show no adverse side effects. Would you do it?

I think I'd worry whether the good work I did was really mine.

What makes it "yours"? It came into existence based on your efforts. Sure, you may have needed the drugs, but you needed a lot of other things as well (your education, funding and resources, etc.). None of these dependencies make it any less valuable as a contribution to human knowledge, or any less your contribution. From this perspective, there is no ethical reason not to take the drugs. It will make life harder for people whose goal is to show off their natural abilities, but this is not a goal I'm sympathetic to.

The one ethical issue I can see concerns stopping taking these drugs. Suppose I take performance-enhancing drugs early in life, but stop once I get tenure. (Even assuming the drugs are safe, perhaps I'd rather not spend the money.) Then I'll have used them to compete for my position, but I will be unable to maintain this level of performance for the rest of my career. Considering that most of my career will be post-tenure, this is unfair to the non-drug-using candidates who could have done just as well in the long run.

On the other hand, this ethical issue is no different from the situation we already have with hard work. Someone who works outrageously hard (to an unsustainable degree) to get tenure with no intention of working that hard afterwards is competing unfairly.

Dear all,

I posted my reply as...well, a post! Check it out if you wish - right here

But in brief, I would be wary of allowing the legalization of these drugs for the use by the healthy. And let me ask you something: if healthy people take Ritalin to improve their performance, what drug do we need to make to get unhealthy people to "catch up" again, now that their drugs have been basically hijacked? Not a minor ethical problem...

Are we debating whether there should be an asterisk next to A+'s on certain people's transcripts? I mean, he was a solid B+/A- student until one semester, all of a sudden, he's quoting Seneca...in the original Latin...it just isn't natural. But the profs have to share in the blame because we encouraged it with our curves to the highest score. If you wanted to get into grad school in the 90s, you had little choice since the competition was doing it.

Academia is not made up of rules that are speccifically designed to make things harder (it just sometimes seems that way), the aim is to expand the grand total of human knowledge and taking drugs may well help towards that end.

It seems to me that if you're going to take an 'ends justifies the means' approach, then that should be as valid in a non-academic setting as an academic one. Why should academe enjoy an exemption? Athletes take steroids or HGH or red blood cell injections, all of which are manufactured naturally anyway (except for maybe some weird designer steroids, but then again humans don't naturally manufacture caffeine either). And if they improve performance, doesn't that end also justify the means? If there is nothing unfair about taking cognitive enhancers for students, is there also nothing unfair about say professional chess players from taking the same enhancers?

I'm just rambling here.

Anonymous:On the other hand, this ethical issue is no different from the situation we already have with hard work. Someone who works outrageously hard (to an unsustainable degree) to get tenure with no intention of working that hard afterwards is competing unfairly.

I think the problem comes in when we expect everyone to work to that same degree, especially when we know it is unsustainable. But, I would argue this is pretty much already the case in many milieus.I know a great number of people who are expected to work at an unreasonable rate so they can make some unreasonable goal. Moreover, a big part of this is built into the system. People accept the overwork at an early level because they know they will get to have over people overwork for them later.

Nat:We already do. It's called caffeine.

Most definitely. I get a little tired of caffeine being brought up as an "analogy." It isn't an analogy, it is an enhancer, it just isn't a pharmaceutical enhancer. I remember attending the bio-ethics track at the APA-pacific last year and there was about three papers in a row on just this topic. At each one I mentioned coffee and how it is a neuro-enhancer and the most cogent response I got was "I drink coffee."

I am not addicted to caffeine (I loathe coffee, and mostly drink rooibos). Looking at this issue, I am completely unconcerned. As an experimental scientist, I generate ideas, design experiments to test them, analyze the results, and absorb relevant external material. I produce so many ideas that I generally abandon over half of them simply because I don't physically have time to run the experiments to test them. For someone not doing particle physics or caught up in an -omics fad, data analysis is simply not rate limiting. Further, physical enhancers aren't going to help me because most of my experiments actually require time in order for reality to take its course. And if I were to absorb external material faster, I might generate ideas faster, but if I'm already saturated, what difference does it make?

Anyway, I'm not really sure what these drugs could enhance that would be useful. Brute force and focus isn't the limiting factor in, say, physics class, unless you really didn't understand algebra, much less calculus. Can these enhancers throw my associative net wider so I can find the strand which unsnarls a problem faster?

And what about therapies which rewire your brain to work in more effective ways, such as calculational mathematics? In this sense, the invention of high school algebra is the most potent performance enhancer ever discovered by man.

Interesting post and good comments.

A number of fine things have been said. Although I am certainly not a philosopher, an anecdote springs to mind. Earlier this year, a grad student in the lab where I am working as a postdoc commented that I drink a lot of coffee, which is generally an unhealthy thing to do (is that really true - I don't know). My reply was this, "I'm, up at least twice a night to rock my daughter back to sleep...I need it." It had never before occurred to me that this might be a question of ethics. It seems like there is a lot of hand-wringing in the comments about where to draw the ethical line. Like many things, I suspect that academia is too general a category to draw a specific boundary. Instead, more specific situations should to be discussed...

If you look at the problem from outside the world of academic competition for a moment, it is easy to draw a distinction between academe and sports.

Academics are striving to produce somethat is useful or interesting or valuable to the rest of the world (whether research or teaching). So, ignoring the issue of side-effects for the moment, the rest of the world doesn't care two hoots whether the academic has enhanced her cognitive abilities, it is just pleased with the results.

Sportspeople produce entertainment for the rest of the world (and nothing else; there is no value inherent in running 100m faster than anyone has before, other than the excitment it provides to other people). So, and again ignoring side-effects, to the extent that using performance-enhancing drugs reduces the entertainment value, they should not do so

I am not too impressed with the "maybe it wouldn't really be my work" intuition, probably becasue I have a lot of first-hand experience of how one's cognitive abilities can wax and wane, in my case due to serious disease, so I don't think there is a useful sense of "really me" here. But, allowing for that intuition; Janet, here's a thought experiment for you; if there were a drug which was guaranteed to have no side-effects, and which worked by enormously increasing (perhaps to close to 100%) the proportion of your thinking time at which you could think at your own personal best in terms of cognitive ability, would you take it? It wouldn't make you 'more clever', it would make you 'clever more often'?

And if not, how is it different from coffee?

Good point, there is a big distinction between academia and sports. It seems a little idealistic to me, however, to think the only motivation for taking performance enhancers would be to increase output for the benefit of others. True, academics like to think they're contributing to the advancement of knowledge but what about when that discovery or breakthrough is what wins them research grants? Or higher positions within an institute? The same can be said of athletes, there's nothing like the idea of fame, going down in the records and even commercial deals that can all come from that split-second, skin-of-the-teeth victory. In both cases there's a more self-centred motivation that might drive one to taking these substances.

kururin - no, I wasn't suggesting that the academics would take performance enhancers for the benefit of others (that would indeed be a lot idealistic). I was just pointing out that the outside world, in relation to its own interests, doesn't care if academics take p-es, whereas it does care if sportspeople do.

So the academics could be taking p.es and arguing internally about whether it was fair that should happen or fair that some of them could afford better ones than the others, and the outside world would have no interest in the arguments, because from its point of view, it was getting the best research and teaching possible, and wouldn't mind whether that was achieved "naturally" or "artificially", because it was the end that it was interested in.

Whereas in sport, "the end" has little or no inherent value to the spectators; it's the competition that has the value.

I take modafinil for narcolepsy. It can have some unpleasant side effects, and the results are not that spectacular. Honestly, if I were healthy, I wouldn't even bother with it.

One thing that concerns me is the increasing pressure to work long hours. I would hate to live in a world where the standard work-week keeps increasing to the point that people can't spend time with their families. I'd love a career in research, but I'm pretty concerned about the demands of graduate school and an academic job.

DaveS:
You ask why we dont go down the "ends justifies the means" route in sport as well as academia, well we do. It is just that the ends we have in mind are different. In sport, the aim is entertainment for the spectators and the players. So, building a brick wall across your goal in football would reduce the entertainment because it would make life too easy. Similarly, people feel that their entertainment in competing or watching is diminished if people play whilst on drugs.

Are the effects of these cognitive enhancers so great that they actually do give people an unfair advantage over others, more so than their natural abilities? The effects of steroids on sports performance are noticeable when you have two athletes in peak physical fitness running at speeds within a hundredth of a second of each other, whereas I doubt the fact that I drink gallons more coffee than a classmate would make me a better student.

But what I really have to add to this conversation is...

"My goal is to help my students understand the material I'm teaching (as well as gain insight into how philosophers approach problems), and to help them hone their skills in critical thinking, reading, writing, and speaking, so they can go out into the world and take on the problems they want or need to solve."

...why can't all my professors be like you!!!!

I think Google Maps are bad for me.

jstemwedel — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 16:44:57 +0000

I think Google Maps are bad for me.

Another episode in the continuing saga, "Janet is a tremendous Luddite."

Back when I was "between Ph.D.s" one of the things I did so I could pay rent was work as an SAT-prep tutor. The company I worked for didn't do classroom presentations to a group of students, but rather sent us out on "house calls" to the students' homes for the tutoring. This meant I had clients in many different towns in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, from San Carlos to Fremont to Los Gatos. And I had to figure out, from an address, how to get to each of them.

Of course, this was back in 1994, well before Google Maps (or Yahoo Maps or MapQuest). This meant that I had to invest in a Thomas Brothers Guide, a spiral bound book of road maps for all the towns in each of the counties in the Bay Area. When I got the address of a new client, I'd find it on the map for that town, then work out the best way to get there from my house using the available freeways or surface streets. Given how many clients I was juggling in any given week, I'd also figure out how to get to client A's house from client B's house. And, because unexpected slowdowns tend to stress me out when I'm scheduled to arrive at an address at a particular time, I'd usually work out at least one alternate route to my destination before I even got in the car.

I learned a lot during the nine months during which I was an itinerant tutor. For one thing, being paid $15/hour for your face-time with your students isn't such a great deal when you spend as many hours (or more) overall driving to get to them.

But, on the plus side, my mental maps of the towns where I had clients, and of the connections between these towns, got to be really good. I actually developed a pretty solid intuitive sense of how to get to locations I hadn't visited before because I knew where most of the major roads were and how they connected and intersected with each other. I had a long stretch of time during which I could get pretty much anywhere and never got badly lost.

Now, when I'm going someplace new (or someplace I haven't been in a long time), I generally plug in the termini and let Google Maps set my route. But while this has been a fine strategy for getting me from point A to point B, it has left me feeling increasingly ignorant of the street geography of the areas around points A and B. In my mental mapping of these regions, often all I have is the roads which Google has selected for my trip. The surrounding roads and regions are big blank spaces to me. They could have dragons in them for all I know.

And I've decided that I don't care for that. I'm not satisfied that Google knows its way around the towns I visit. I would like to feel like I understand them, like I have more of a geographical "context" for understanding the places I visit. Bay Area or not, I would like to feel like more of an informed denizen than Google is.

So I'm going to dig under the front seat and see if I can find my Thomas Brothers Guide. I may continue to ask Google for advice, but I will no longer let Google define my driving horizons.

(At Crooked Timber, Eszter points out that Google Maps can now be coaxed into providing alternate routes, but I'm still wanting the big picture I remember having from poring over a bunch of different maps myself.)

jstemwedel Fri, 06/29/2007 - 12:44

Tags

Minds and/or brains

Passing thoughts

personal

Three Cheers for Mental Maps!

I found the same issues with Google and Yahoo maps a few years ago when I worked for a youth services company that provided after-school programming for at risk teens. We used to have to drive a van around, picking up kids from schools and homes and it paid to be VERY familiar with the neighborhoods, traffic patterns, and alternate routes in order to get the kids to the program on time.

That was one of the most challenging and frustrating jobs I ever had! But if you were good at route-planning it paid off. I'd NEVER let mapquest or one of the other online services plan a route for me!

In praise of mental mapping: A taxi driver took me from the courthouse in downtown Los Angeles in midweek rushhour traffic to my home in the northern tip of Alhambra in 19 minutes.

My morning driver took 92 minutes to get me from home to the courthouse. (Not a problem: I'd allotted 2 hours.) (And nothing serious, just jury duty that resulted in people sitting all day for five days straight and then going home Friday evening, having done nothing.)

You can have it both ways. The new Google Maps lets you 'deselect' the route it picked so that you use a road you want. You drag the pre-drawn line over to the road you prefer, and it remaps the remainder of the route.

I am a total map nerd, so I was surprised and chagrined to discover many years ago that my sister operated almost completely on a "Mapquest" view of the world (though back then I would have called it a "trip-tik" view.) It was all just directions to her and I accused her of viewing freeways as basically independent of actual space with portals (exits) which gave access to small areas, which might as well have been disconnected from each other by other means.

However, at some level she was right, limited access roads are a challenge to us "spatials" unless you know all of the exits. And when I later moved to Pittsburgh, I realized that the third-dimension could screw you up as well and at times lead to "follow-your-nose because I know it is close" driving disasters. (For instance I live near one of the bluffs along one of the rivers and my "block" is basically an elongated jagged piece of land "penetrated" by many dead-ends and which is several miles in circumference.)

I will also say that the thing I find most astonishing about the main online maps is that they seem to have rid themselves of many of the "paper" streets that plagued so many paper maps for so long (I grew up next to what was shown on maps as a great little connector if it had only existed, and redirected many a befuddled motorist in my youth. It stayed on maps for years and years.)

I second the absolute requirement for online mapping in Pittsburgh.

Taking a bird's eye view of Pittsburgh is a most costly mental endeavor. You can often see where it is you need to get to. You may even be able to walk it in under 30 minutes (that is, if you're not separated by a river or multi-level freeway). But just pointing your car in the right direction may result in your being further displaced from your desired endpoint by endles miles, hours, and stress. Ah, the bridges, tunnels, rivers, one-ways, mountains...it's too much for a mere mortal. Left to your own devices, you're liable to end up across a bridge or through a tunnel heading in the complete opposite direction you had been attempting to travel. It's better just to plug and chug (the way you're told not to do in undergraduate physics classes). Enter your starting point and destination and let Mapquest do the planning for you.

Oh, for a city on a grid...

I second the absolute requirement for online mapping in Pittsburgh.

Oh, for a city on a grid...

[navigating Pittsburgh = teh hard.]

One of the interesting features of Pittsburgh is the number of steps, many of them legal "streets" - one more thing the online mappers had to identify and remove. Captured nicely in The Steps of Pittsburgh, Portrait of a City.
One city,
712 sets of steps,
44,645 treads
24,108 vertical feet.

I own a copy and it is a great little gem. Of course other cities have steps as well, but...

San Franciscans like to boast about their steps and consider them a top tourist attraction, but they "only" have 350 sets. Cincinnatians do the same, but claim a mere 400.

One "study" I always wanted to do (and it is probably feasible these days) was to define a "hilliness" factor for a city. I have two methods in mind:
1) Overall hilliness. Put a suitably dense grid of points over the city and estimate the slope at each point.
2) Street hilliness. Take a random sample of street locations and measure the gradient along the street (always less than or equal to the slope of the ground.)

Having lived in Houston, I might be close to having experienced the alpha and omega of those metrics within the US. (New Orleans probably has Houston beat ... but not by much.)

I love having Google Maps to suggest route for me, but I still always consult the big spiral-bound map book and bring it with me wherever I go. There are three main reasons I do this: First, if I miss a turn or make some other mistake while following Google directions, I'm doomed if I don't have some access to a map of the area as a backup; I spent half an hour looking for a restaurant one time because I thought, "Well, I've got the Google directions. Why would I need a real map?" Second, getting a view of the entire street map at once really helps cement my understanding of the route and improves my ability to follow it. While Google Maps and portable GPS units and the like can show me the approximate shape of a given route, the number of streets on display for immediate perusal is never as high as it is with paper maps.

What I really want is something with all of the functionality of a portable GPS unit and the resolution and display size of a big spiral-bound map book. Obviously, said device should cost about $300 and be the same size and weight as a map book. I'm not holding my breath.

My strategy is to use Google Maps without its route-choosing capability -- basically just as a paper map with searchability and a good UI. On the road, I use paper maps and have no difficulty translating between the two, and my mental geography hasn't suffered noticeably.

If I were to use a API platform, I certinaly would not use Google as the free one does not include advances Geocoding menaing the accuracy is poor. There is also no sla , support or rights of service.

The directions are poor, the coverage for Ireland and Geocoding is almost childlike and the privacy stinks. No professional business would use a google mapping solution.

They copy everyone else's idea, say they are there own and get loads of press (they only added tube stations in 2006) an dcyclc lanes (2010), viamichelin added these 2006 and Traffic in 2009 !

Any agency or developers looking for an API should stick to Bing or ViaMichelin for better customisation and user experience which is killer !

Resisting scientific ideas.

jstemwedel — Wed, 30 May 2007 15:47:34 +0000

Resisting scientific ideas.

In the May 18th issue of Science, there's a nice review by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg [1] of the literature from developmental psychology that bears on the question of why adults in the U.S. are stubbornly resistant to certain scientific ideas.

Regular readers will guess that part of my interest in this research is connected to my habit of trying to engage my kids in conversations about science. Understanding what will make those conversations productive, in both the short-term and the long-term, would be really useful. Also, I should disclose that I'm pals with Deena (and with her spouse). When a friend coauthors an interesting paper (published in Science), why wouldn't I blog about it?

I'll run through the main points from developmental psychology research that the review identifies as important here, and then I'll weigh in with some thoughts of my own.

Why do American adults have a hard time embracing scientific ideas (like evolution, or the claim that minds are nothing but brains) while simultaneously embracing other ideas that scientists deem pseudo-science or worse (astrology, ESP, those "medical" "treatments" Orac blogs about on Fridays)? At least part of it comes from how people make sense of the world as babies, before they're exposed to science:

Babies know that objects are solid, persist over time (even when out of sight), fall to the ground if unsupported, and do not move unless acted upon. They also understand that people move autonomously in response to social and physical events, act and react in accord with their goals, and respond with appropriate emotions to different situations.

These intuitions give children a head start when it comes to understanding and learning about objects and people. However, they also sometimes clash with scientific discoveries about the nature of the world, making certain scientific facts difficult to learn. (p. 996)

Common sense (about how physical objects behave and how humans behave) is really handy from the point of view of making sense of your experience of the world. If someone makes a claim that doesn't fit with that common sense, it's easy to imagine that rejecting the claim is the response that leaves you in the best position to keep making sense of your world -- especially if the claim isn't connected particularly closely with your experiences. (It's easy to believe that the table is solid, but much harder to believe that the matter of the table is mostly empty space.) The article notes that in some instances where grown-ups make predictions more in accord with an Aristotelian commonsense physics than with what will actually happen, real-world experience of the physical set-ups in question can help the grown-ups refine their intuitions.

The development of young human brains -- and our early sense of what is "unnatural" or "unintuitive" -- is assumed to be pretty much a fact about the human as a critter rather than having a lot of cultural variability. (At least, the article treats this as an uncontroversial assumption, so I'm guessing much of the research in developmental biology so far at least fits with this assumption.) However, by the time you're dealing with adult humans, culture seems to play a big role in common sense:

Some culture-specific information is not associated with any particular source; it is "common knowledge." As such, learning of this information generally bypasses critical analysis. A prototypical example is that of word meanings. Everyone uses the word "dog" to refer to dogs, so children easily learn that this is what they are called. Other examples include belief in germs and electricity. Their existence is generally assumed in day-to-day conversation and is not marked as uncertain; nobody says that they "believe in electricity." (p. 997)

In other words, kids suss out what the community believes in, and they take that as a guide to how things are. (Indeed, the article points to research indicating that this kind of check of consensus, not moral introspection, is how people come to their moral intuitions as well.)

If everyone in our culture carries on as if X is perfectly uncontroversial, we tend not to question X. On the other hand, in cases where X is presented as tentative -- even in cases where we notice that someone is going to the trouble to assert X rather than taking it as give -- we may be less ready to accept X.

What makes X plausible? If we're in a position to test the claim ourselves, that could do the job, but that's not always possible:

Few of us are qualified to assess claims about the merits of string theory, the role of mercury in the etiology of autism, or the existence of repressed memories. So rather than evaluating the asserted claim itself, we instead evaluate the claim's source. If the source is deemed trustworthy, people will believe the claim, often without really understanding it. (p. 997)

A lot rides, then, on what counts as a trustworthy source. For little kids, the research suggests that assessments of trustworthiness take into account whether the source is knowledgeable (a grown-up rather than a peer, a specialist who ought to know something about the subject at hand), whether the claim is made confidently rather than tentatively, and to some extent whether the claim is perceived to go with or against the self-interest of the source (little kids can be cynical!). In case of different sources making conflicting assertions, kids will trust the declarations of the sources they deem must trustworthy.

So, who do you judge most reliable if your science teacher, your parent, your pastor, and your favorite cartoon character or movie star make conflicting claims? And how entrenched will these early decisions become? What happens when you discover that your parents (or your fourth grade science teacher) don't know everything?

Here, I get reflective about my interactions with my kids around science. I'm pretty sure they view me as something like a reliable source -- someone who has more authoritative knowledge than they do (and likely more than their science teachers do about certain subjects). On the one hand, this is fine, given that they are still at ages where they are receptive to the knowledge I'm offering them and I do know some interesting things about the physical and natural world.

On the other hand, part of the appeal of science is that it's not supposed to rest on appeal to authority!

This means that we want to get the kids into the habit of observing what's going on in the world, messing with set-ups to see what happens, and evaluating the logic of various claims and the support offered for them. But there are real limits to what we can do here. We're not likely to build a quantum gravity probe in the garage, or to put radio telescope arrays in the back yard. It's doubtful that we'll be much help in coming up with a clever experimental test of string theory for the school science fair.

Some appeals to expertise in science seem unavoidable.

Still, I think the most important message that kids should absorb about science is that its credibility comes from meeting a particular kind of burden of proof, and that asking to see the proof is just part of the transaction. Sometimes we can do the experiment ourselves, other times we may have to get by with being walked though the chain of inference from someone else's data.

Possibly emphasizing the burden of proof marks scientific ideas as tentative (and thus resistable). However, pretending none of our scientific ideas are shakable seems like a bad idea to me. After all, do we want our kids to be stuck in time scientifically, unable to embrace the new scientific findings yet to come? (Do we want our kids to trust us even less than normal teenagerhood will have them trusting us?)

I suppose what it comes down to, as I see it, is helping kids to see physical reality as an authoritative source of beliefs, too. As well, being able to ask good questions about the human sources of information -- being able to evaluate them critically regardless of how smoothly what they're saying fits with how we're already inclined to see the world -- strikes me as a potentially useful life skill.

I can't guarantee, though, that it will make my kids easier to live with as my authority as a source of information is scrutinized.

_______

[1] Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg (18 May 2007) "Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science," Science, vol. 316, 996-997.

jstemwedel Wed, 05/30/2007 - 11:47

Tags

kids and science

Minds and/or brains

Science and pseudo-science

Social Issues

Teaching and Learning

I can think of one good reason why the sprogs would enjoy doing science with mom. They're doing science with mom. They're at the age when mom is neat and cool and fun to be with. And stuff mom likes to do is stuff that's fun to do.

Well, that and the fact that science at the age is usually about icky things like bugs, and bugs hold an inexhaustible fascination for small children. :)