Neuroscientific Explanations Research Articles

Dissecting neuromyths in education: an analysis of educators, students, and parents in Taiwan

ABSTRACT The seductive allure of neuroscience explanations (SANE) causes individuals tend to believe in information that claims to have support from neuroscience evidence, even when such information does not provide explicit sources of evidence. Consequently, citizens may harbour a significant proportion of neuromyths, which could potentially lead to behavioural biases. The present study explored neuromyths and their origins among preservice teachers, in-service teachers, students, and students’ parents. In addition, this study analyzed correlations among participants’ age, belief in neuromyths, their understanding of neuroscience, attitudes toward neuroscience, and intention toward the choice of educational strategy. Both neuromyths and attitudes toward neuroscience were associated with behavioural intention. Efforts should be made to enhance citizens’ neuroscience literacy, promote positive attitudes toward neuroscience, and foster media literacy through both formal and informal education. This will enable individuals to critically assess information from various media platforms.

Anatomy’s role in mechanistic explanations of organism behaviour

Explanations in behavioural neuroscience are often said to be mechanistic in the sense that they explain an organism’s behaviour by describing the activities and organisation of the organism’s parts that are “constitutively relevant” to organism behaviour. Much has been said about the constitutive relevance of working parts (in debates about the so-called “mutual manipulability criterion”), but relatively little has been said about the constitutive relevance of the organising relations between working parts. Some New Mechanists seem to endorse a simple causal-linking account: organising relations are constitutively relevant to organism behaviour if and only if (and because) they are causal relations that link the working parts that are constitutively relevant to organism behaviour. In this paper, I argue that the causal-linking account is inadequate because it neglects the constitutive relevance of anatomical relations that organise the working parts of a behaving organism. I demonstrate this by considering a case study where the anatomical organisation of the barn owl (Tyto alba) is constitutively relevant to their mechanism for sound localization. The anatomical organisation of this mechanism is best understood as the back-and-forth flow of task information across 7 “levels of anatomy” (a notion that I distinguish from levels of mechanism). A further implication, I conclude, is that at least some of the interlevel structure of neuroscientific explanation is accounted for by levels of anatomy, not levels of mechanism.

Pain Science in Practice (Part 7): How Is Descending Modulation of Pain Measured?

SYNOPSIS: Understanding the descending pain modulatory system allows for a neuroscientific explanation of naturally occurring pain relief. Evidence from basic science and clinical studies on the effectiveness of drugs in certain patient groups led to pharmacological manipulation of the descending pain modulatory system for analgesia. Understanding mechanisms and theories helps clinicians make sense of chronic musculoskeletal pain. This editorial explains how test paradigms, including conditioned pain modulation, offset analgesia, and stress-induced analgesia work, provide an overview of a placebo analgesia circuitry, and discusses how evoking activity in the descending pain modulatory system using specific paradigms can give new insights into how specific treatments work to reduce pain. J Orthop Sports Phys Ther 2024;54(2):1-6. doi:10.2519/jospt.2024.12113.

Bergson and the Aesthetics of Early Childhood Education and Care

Aesthetics has always been a fundamental dimension of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), and it has been treated as a relation between matter and mind in a non-dualist and integrated way. Today, however, this dimension and relation is neglected. Abstract and formalist ideas of education, expressed in generalized standards, accountability and neuroscientific explanations, are forced upon educational practice and theory. To counter such neglect, one of Bergson’s major works, Matter and Memory (1988), is in this article used to critically assess abstract formalism as a badly stated problem in the aesthetics of ECEC and it is joined with historical and contemporary pedagogical-aesthetical resources that may be capable of re-activating the aesthetics of ECEC.

First-person constraints on dynamic-mechanistic explanations in neuroscience: The case of migraine and epilepsy models

According to recent discussion, cross-explanatory integration in cognitive science might proceed by constraints on mechanistic and dynamic-mechanistic models provided by different research fields. However, not much attention has been given to constraints that could be provided by the study of first-person experience, which in the case of multifaceted mental phenomena are of key importance. In this paper, we fill this gap and consider the question whether information about first-person experience can constrain dynamic-mechanistic models and what the character of this relation is. We discuss two cases of such explanatory models in neuroscience, namely that of migraine and of epilepsy. We argue that, in these cases, first-person insights about the target phenomena significantly contributed to explanatory models by shaping explanatory hypotheses and by indicating the dynamical properties that the explanatory models of these phenomena should account for, and thus directly constraining the space of possible explanations.

Neuroscience explanations really do satisfy: A systematic review and meta-analysis of the seductive allure of neuroscience.

Extraneous neuroscience information improves ratings of scientific explanations, and affects mock juror decisions in many studies, but others have yielded little to no effect. To establish the magnitude of this effect, we conducted a random-effects meta-analysis using 60 experiments from 28 publications. We found a mild but highly significant effect, with substantial heterogeneity. Planned subgroup analyses revealed that within-subjects studies, where people can compare the same material with and without neuroscience, and those using text, have stronger effects than between-subjects designs, and studies using brain image stimuli. We serendipitously found that effect sizes were stronger on outcomes of evaluating satisfaction or metacomprehension, compared with jury verdicts or assessments of convincingness. In conclusion, there is more than one type of neuroscience explanations effect. Irrelevant neuroscience does have a seductive allure, especially on self-appraised satisfaction and understanding, and when presented as text.

Mapping explanatory language in neuroscience

The philosophical literature on scientific explanation in neuroscience has been dominated by the idea of mechanisms. The mechanist philosophers often claim that neuroscience is in the business of finding mechanisms. This view has been challenged in numerous ways by showing that there are other successful and widespread explanatory strategies in neuroscience. However, the empirical evidence for all these claims was hitherto lacking. Empirical evidence about the pervasiveness and uses of various explanatory strategies in neuroscience is particularly needed because examples and case studies that are used to illustrate philosophical claims so far tend to be hand-picked. The risk of confirmation bias is therefore considerable: when looking for white swans, all one finds is that swans are white. The more systematic quantitative and qualitative bibliometric study of a large body of relevant literature that we present in this paper can put such claims into perspective. Using text mining tools, we identify the typical linguistic patterns used in the alleged mechanistic, dynamical, and topological explanations in the literature, their preponderance and how they change over time. Our findings show abundant use of mechanistic language, but also the presence of a significant neuroscience literature using topological and dynamical explanatory language, which grows over time and increasingly differentiates from each other and from mechanistic explanations.

“Spiders […] stringing webs through her head”: Representations of memory in Anthony Doerr's “Memory Wall” and Meredith Westgate's The Shimmering State

AbstractAlthough science has demonstrated that memories are flexible mental constructions, rather than a stable record of the past preserved in an internal archive, fiction keeps fantasizing about technologies that will locate memories in the brain and edit or download them into an external medium. Anthony Doerr's short story “Memory Wall” (2010) and Meredith Westgate's novel The Shimmering State (2021) continue this preoccupation. They portray treatments for memory‐related diseases that involve downloading memories into a portable medium so that they could be reexperienced, which makes them susceptible to commodification as prosthetic memories. To represent memory, the two texts blend neuroscientific explanations with the traditional conceptualizations of an archive and computer, subverting them in the process. The protagonists' experiences suggest the impossibility of the past's total preservation as a linear archive and explode the neuroscientific view of the self and memory as cerebral properties, highlighting instead the complex interchanges between body, mind, brain, and emotion, involved in the production of memory. A new model of memory informed by prosthetic memories violates privatized interiority and dislodges the temporal coordinates of the past, which leads to the ungrounding of subjectivity. This results in an ontological shift whereby memory is increasingly severed from personal identity.

Clarifying the relation between mechanistic explanations and reductionism.

The topic of mechanistic explanation in neuroscience has been a subject of recent discussion. There is a lot of interest in understanding what these explanations involve. Furthermore, there is disagreement about whether neurological mechanisms themselves should be viewed as reductionist in nature. In this paper I will explain how these two issues are related. I will, first, describe how mechanisms support a form of antireductionism. This is because the mechanisms that exist should be seen as involving part-whole relations, where the behavior of a whole is more than the sum of its parts. After this, I will consider mechanistic explanations and how they can be understood. While some people think the explanations concern existing entities in the world, I will argue that we can understand the explanations by viewing them in terms of arguments. Despite the fact that it is possible to understand mechanistic explanations in this manner, the antireductionist point remains.

EVOLUTIONARY PATH OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND REASON: COGNITOME FROM A PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVE

The ability of an organism to experience subjective states is an object of research for many disciplines of science. This article seeks to consider consciousness on the foundation of advances in neuroscience, cognitive science, anthropology, and philosophy. Particular attention is given to the concept of “cognitome” suggested by K.V. Anokhin. We agree with understanding conscious activity as a particular ability of an organism, which cannot be reduced to a mass of simpler systems. However, we believe that subjective ability for the cognition or “anticipatory reflection” of the environment must be considered under the history of natural evolution. We suggest that a particular interference pattern that emerges from the activity of neural domain systems can be a foundation for a critical enhancement of a system’s efficiency and cause further evolution of cognitive systems. This theory is coherent with the most elaborated neuroscientific explanations of consciousness and can explain the direct match between the neural system’s dynamics and states of subjective reality.

What Neuroscience Tells Us About Mental Illness: Scientific Realism in the Biomedical Sciences

Our philosophical understanding of mental illness is being shaped by neuroscience. However, it has the paradoxical effect of igniting two radically opposed groups of philosophical views. On one side, skepticism and denialism assume that, lacking clear biological mechanisms and etiologies for most mental illnesses, we should infer they are constructions best explained by means of social factors. This is strongly associated with medical nihilism: it considers psychiatry more harmful than benign. On the other side of the divide, naturalism and reductionism are on the look for failures in the biological functioning of the organism whenever a genuine mental illness occurs. Psychiatry as currently practiced, accordingly, exhibits the gaps of an ongoing research programme; a yet to be completed neuroscience would link mental illnesses with identifiable biological mechanisms. Both sides of this divide claim to be fostered by scientific discoveries and advances in neuroscience, when taken at face value. Against this background, we argue instead for a modest view. To that end, we draw attention to some nuances in the scientific realism debate. While contending that neuroscientific theories and models aim to provide true representations of their target systems, and can justifiably claim to have attained some, we argue that our confidence should not be placed beforehand in specific features of these scientific representations. Hence, it would be unwarranted to extract morals for psychiatry from posits (or their absence) in neuroscientific explanations of mental illnesses. To illustrate our position, we examine some recent discoveries in neuroscience concerning bipolar disorder. We conclude by linking our topic to a broader issue in the philosophy of medicine: insofar as psychiatry is a biomedical specialty, its classifications of health and disease are guided by pragmatic concerns, as well as by scientific discoveries.

Neurofeminism: Feminist critiques of research on sex/gender differences in the neurosciences.

Over the last three decades, the human brain and its role in determining behavior have been receiving a growing amount of attention in academia as well as in society more generally. Neuroscientific explanations of human behavior or other phenomena are often especially appealing to lay people. Therefore, neuroscientific explanations that can affect individuals, groups, or social relations in general should be formulated in a careful and responsible way. One field in which especially feminist scholars request more caution is the neuroscientific examination of sex/gender differences. Feminist scholars have described various ways in which sexist bias might be present in neuroscientific research on sex/gender differences. In this context, they coined the term "neurosexism" to describe the entanglement between neuroscientific work and sexist ideology, and "neurofeminism" as a response to that. Here, we aim to give an overview over the contemporary neurofeminist literature. In the first part, common levels of analysis in the neurofeminist literature are presented and the research level is explored in more detail. In the second part, some common developments in more recent neurofeminist scholarship are discussed. For this, we review recent publications with the aim to provide neuroscientists with a solid understanding of neurofeminist criticism so that they may evaluate neuroscientific claims about on sex/gender differences from this critical perspective.

Measuring and Enhancing Initial Parent Engagement in Parenting Education: Experiment and Psychometric Analysis.

BackgroundPrevention efforts focused on parenting can prevent and reduce the rates of child internalizing and externalizing problems, and positive changes in parenting skills have been shown to mediate improvements in child behavioral problems. However, parent skills training programs remain underused, with estimates that under half of eligible parents complete treatment and even lower rates engage in preventive interventions. Moreover, there is no validated measure to assess initial engagement in parent education or skills training, which is an understudied stage of parent engagement.ObjectiveWe aimed to test a novel engagement strategy, exploring whether including information pertaining to the neuroscience of child development and parent skills training enhanced parental intent to enroll. In addition, a novel self-report measure, the 18-item Parenting Resources Acceptability Measure (PRAM), was developed and validated.MethodsIn a group of 166 parents of children aged 5 to 12 years, using an engagement strategy based on the Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations, we conducted a web-based experiment to assess whether the inclusion of neuroscience information related to higher levels of engagement via self-report and behavioral measures. The PRAM was subjected to an exploratory factor analysis and examined against relevant validity measures and acceptability measurement criteria.ResultsThree PRAM factors emerged (“Acceptability of Parenting Resources,” “Interest in Learning Parenting Strategies,” and “Acceptability of Parenting Websites”), which explained 68.4% of the total variance. Internal consistency among the factors and the total score ranged from good to excellent. The PRAM was correlated with other relevant measures (Parental Locus of Control, Parenting Sense of Competence, Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, Parent Engagement in Evidence-Based Services, and behavioral outcomes) and demonstrated good criterion validity and responsiveness. Regarding the engagement manipulation, parents who did not receive the neuroscience explanation self-reported lower interest in learning new parenting skills after watching an informational video compared with parents who did receive a neuroscience explanation. However, there were no significant differences between conditions in behavioral measures of intent to enroll, including the number of mouse clicks, amount of time spent on a page of parenting resources, and requests to receive parenting resources. The effects did not persist at the 1-month follow-up, suggesting that the effects on engagement may be time-limited.ConclusionsThe findings provide preliminary evidence for the utility of theory-driven strategies to enhance initial parental engagement in parent skills training, specifically parental interest in learning new parenting skills. In addition, the study findings demonstrate the good initial psychometric properties of the PRAM, a tool to assess parental intent to enroll, which is an early stage of engagement.

The problem with appealing to history in defining neural representations

Representations seem to play a major role in many neuroscientific explanations. Philosophers have long attempted to properly define what it means for a neural state to be a representation of a specific content. Teleosemantic theories of content which characterize representations, in part, by appealing to a historical notion of function, are often regarded as our best path towards an account of neural representations. This paper points to the anti-representationalist consequences of these accounts. I argue that assuming such teleosemantic views will deprive representations of their explanatory role in computational explanations. My argument rests on the claim that many explanations in cognitive neuroscience are entirely independent of any historical considerations. In making this claim, I will also offer an adapted version of the famous Swampperson thought experiment, which is better suited to discussions of subpersonal neural representations.

The seductive allure effect extends from neuroscientific to psychoanalytic explanations among Turkish medical students: preliminary implications of biased scientific reasoning within the context of medical and psychiatric training

Research suggests that people tend to overweight arguments accompanied by neuroscientific terminology, which is dubbed as the seductive allure of neuroscience explanations (SANE) in the literature. Such an effect might be of particular significance when it comes to physicians and mental health professionals (MHP), given that it has the potential to cause significant bias in their understanding as well as their treatment approaches toward psychiatric symptoms. In this study, we aimed to test the SANE effect among Turkish medical students, and assess its uniqueness by comparing it with a discipline that still maintains an important role in contemporary psychiatric training in Turkey: psychoanalysis. 109 medical students with a basic level of knowledge of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience were asked to rate the credibility of explanations of differing quality (good vs. circular) for psychological phenomena, followed by three types of information: none, neuroscientific (SNI) or psychoanalytical (SPI). Our findings showed that SNI significantly increased the judged quality of explanations for both conditions with the effect being more prominent for circular explanations. On the other hand, SPI had no effect on good explanations but enhanced the judged quality of circular explanations in a level comparable to that of SNI. For the first time, the SANE effect was replicated among medical students and provided preliminary data in favor of a similar effect for psychoanalytically oriented information.

Disruption to the Core Self in Autism, and Its Care

ABSTRACT This article offers a neuroscientific explanation of the experience of autism as a disruption to the embodied experience of the Core Self. It recognizes human experience is integrative by nature. Attending to the insights of Penelope Dunbar (Pum), who has lived with autism for decades, we explore an affective neuroscience understanding of autistic experience as a disruption to embodiment and coherence of the Core Self, and how to work creatively with its impulses for health and personal development. Pum describes her autistic disruptions to the intra-personal coherence of her basic states of being, moving-with-feeling in self-awareness, and how this disturbance to her internal subjective coherence of mind challenges her capacity to self-regulate arousal, and communicate with others. By examination of the source of her problems in childhood and ways of working with them, Pum has clarified fundamental elements in the development of her capacity to regulate self-care in creative efforts that facilitate both affective embodiment and sensory-motor coherence in growth of understanding in her mind and body. With her advice, we explore how current neurobiological insights in autism as a disruption to the regulation of affective embodiment and sensory-motor integration leads to new recommendations for therapeutic care to relieve autistic distress and restricted modes of being. Although particular to her circumstances and cultivated habits of autistic expression, this analysis offers insight into the fundamental nature of autism, and ways of positive working with one’s autism for creative gains.

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder from an Embodied Cognition Perspective.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is characterized by problems of control over behavior and cognition. Although almost all of the studies on pathogenesis of OCD point out fronto-striatal dysfunction, it is still not possible to reveal mechanisms to explain the entire clinical course of OCD through these circuits. A more holistic explanation can be given through the Embodied Cognition (EC) perspective, which suggests that the alteration/dysfunction of low-level sensory-motor process may appear as a multifarious extent of dysfunction of high-level cognitive processes. Fronto-striatal circuits play fundamental role in behavioral control. These circuits also have a central role for the feed-forward motor control (FFMC). In FFMC, the internal model of movement is driven by efference copies as templates for motor behavior, without being adjusted by sensory information. If impairment of low-level sensory-motor processing is crucial to occurrence of compulsions, one possible hypothesis about this impairment is the problem which emerges from occurrence of efference copy in FFMC. On the other hand, the efference copy has also pivotal role for subject's feeling of the agency of an action. Therefore, there may be role of failure in successfully reproduction of the efference copy in the background of subjects' experience of losing control on compulsive behaviors. In this paper, we will discuss how the embodied cognition (EC) perspective which can be one of the biological bases of computationalism, which brings neuroscientific explanations on the functioning of nervous system to a more symbolic perspective, may contribute to our understanding of etiopathogenesis of OCD. In this perspective, our method will be to integrate the theoretical basis provided by EC perspective to the current models for OCD, rather than falsifying them.

Psychiatry is essential for now but might eventually disappear (although this is unlikely to happen any time soon).

Objective:To provide an overview of specific aspects of historical and possible future trajectories of psychiatry.Conclusions:Psychiatric treatments alleviate suffering, promote physical health, and are associated with increased longevity. As the biological underpinnings of mental illnesses are slowly uncovered, they generally cease to be primarily part of psychiatry (e.g. epilepsy, anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis). If this process continues, the biological basis of all symptom-based ‘mental illnesses’ might be described, and psychiatry absorbed into neurology and other disciplines. This will be a positive development if it provides better treatment for mental illness and psychiatric symptoms in other conditions, which is psychiatry’s sole concern. Psychiatry’s own survival as a distinct discipline is irrelevant if other disciplines can do the job better, possibly in collaboration. Given the tiny impact of neuroscience on psychiatry to date, the disappearance of psychiatry is unlikely to occur anytime soon, if ever. It is possible that human psychological functioning and psychiatric suffering are sufficiently complex and changeable as to defy complete, fine-grained, neuroscientific explanation. This would leave a role for psychiatry indefinitely, treating the immensely disabling, biologically unexplained clusters of symptoms that we currently call ‘mental illnesses’, increasingly in collaboration with, or absorbed within, other disciplines in medicine.

Человек и техника: новый антропологический поворот в культуре

The relevance of the study is associated with the need for a detailed analysis of the new anthropological foundations in culture in the context of the new sociocultural situation. It the context of the digitalization of culture, in modern philosophy, interest is shifting to the study of technologies and their impact on human life and behavior. Also, the problem of studying the essence of man, his nature and spirituality fades into the background. The aim of the research is to study the processes of transformation of human understanding in the context of human-technology interaction in digital culture, the direct impact of these processes on human perception and behavior. The author analyzes the processes of digitalization of culture. During analyzing the processes of digitalization of culture, the author relied on modern foreign theoretical and applied research, as well as on the hermeneutic method. This research is interdisciplinary, because it combines data from the fields of philosophy, neurophysiology and psychology. The researching is accompanying such factors as: the transformation of a person into a resource for making technological decisions, pseudo-economic positivism, the formation of a model of a schizoid personality, the dominance of neuroscientific explanations in the field of human nature. The author describes a neurobiological model for explaining human behavior, which considers a person in terms of determinism. The result of this model is a deterministic understanding of consciousness. These circumstances allow us to conclude about the delayed effects of the digitalization of culture, one of the essential in which is the ignorance of a person and his spirituality. The author concludes that a significant consequence of the digitalization of culture is a new anthropological turn in the understanding of man and his spirituality. This anthropological turn testifies to the need to return to man and his spirituality, the basis for the study of which will be the creation of a new direction in modern Russian philosophical anthropology, which is of an interdisciplinary nature. In the context of the digitalization of culture, a rethinking of the very concept of a person, the spiritual aspects of his existence in modern society and culture is required.

Ibogaine therapy for addiction: Consumer views from online fora

Background Ibogaine is a psychedelic drug used by for-profit clinics and lay-people to treat addiction, despite some reported fatalities and a lack of rigorous clinical research. Little is known about ibogaine therapy from a consumer perspective. Online discussions generate and disseminate information about ibogaine therapy and provide a window into how people understand ibogaine's risks and uses. We examined views expressed in online fora in order to describe a consumer perspective of ibogaine therapy for addiction, and to elucidate the role of online fora in mediating people's understanding of, and engagement with ibogaine. Methods We thematically analysed 40 threads comprising posts from 101 individual contributors from two popular online fora; Reddit (n = 20) and Drugs Forum (n = 20). Results Our analysis identified three primary themes: (1) online fora as a resource for do-it-yourself research; (2) the therapeutic interaction in ibogaine therapy, and; (3) therapeutic mechanisms of ibogaine. Online fora were a key resource for information about ibogaine therapy, where personal experiences and evidence-based information were valued. Treatment arrangements, risks, and harm reduction were discussed at length by forum participants. Discussions of therapeutic effects focused on pharmacological mechanisms but positive psychological changes resulting from the psychedelic experience were also reported. Clinic-based treatment was preferred by many forum participants due to safety concerns, but money and time and treatment intent sometimes necessitated lay-administration of ibogaine. Microdosing of ibogaine was also frequently discussed. Conclusion: Online fora appear to have facilitated a sense of community where individuals are held to account for the success of ibogaine therapy. Fora discussions illustrate that neuroscientific explanations of addiction and behaviour have explanatory salience for people involved in ibogaine therapy. Online fora could be used as a platform for clinician and peer-led support and harm-reduction interventions, and for further research monitoring treatment practices and long-term outcomes.