Sarcasm

It's been said that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but it can actually be quite complex. Most people have been in a situation where a sarcastic remark is misinterpreted - a situation exacerbated when dealing with the written word stripped of tone and other cues. Over at The Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer talks a bit about how the brain deals with it and processes reality:

Given the mental difficulties involved in deciphering sarcasm, it's interesting to note that the right hemisphere has been repeatedly implicated as an essential component of sarcastic processing. For instance, a 2005 study of patients with lesions to the ventromedial area of the right prefrontal cortex found that they exhibited severe deficits in understanding sarcastic speech, at least when compared to people with left PFC lesions. And then there's this 2008 study, which showed that people hear sarcasm better when it's presented to their left ear.

For some early examples of sarcasm, you need look no further than the bible, where the prophet Elijah taunts Baal worshipers to provide proof of their god (1 Kings 18:27):

At noon Elijah started making fun of them: "Pray louder! He is a god! Maybe he is day-dreaming or relieving himself, or perhaps he's gone off on a trip! Or maybe he's sleeping, and you've got to wake him up!"

There's a splash of irony there too.

The Rise and Fall of Phrenology

Recently, my sister sent me a paper she wrote on phrenology to proofread. Being the wonderful older brother that I am, I obliged, after all it's not a subject I'm overly familiar with and it was definitely more up my alley than the women's studies papers I often receive to read the morning they're due.

For those who didn't grow up in Victorian Europe and are otherwise unaware of this particular "science", phrenology is the determination of a person's personality and mental capacity according to the shape of the skull. Phrenology earned a fair bit of popularity in the early 1800s, but is now (rightly) shunned by the psych and neuroscience communities.

The idea behind phrenology stems from the notion that mental functions are localized to discrete areas of the brain. German physiologist Franz Joseph Gall's interest in the area was piqued at an early age when he noticed that among his classmates, those with prominent eyes also excelled at verbal memory tasks. He deduced that the frontal lobes were the centre for verbal memory and suggested that the size of a brain region is directly connected to its functional strength. From there it followed that stronger (and therefore larger) areas would create bulges in the skull to match the corresponding bulges in the underlying brain tissue. Using a map of brain function and scalp massage to determine cranial topology, an individual's personality could be assessed. And thus was born phrenology (then called craniology).

It was Gall's student, Johann Spurzheim, who really helped the spread of phrenology. He popularized it in the English speaking world and, notably, America, where one of the first Phrenological Societies was established. Spurzheim switched the focus from the anatomical to the social and political applications, appealing to those looking for guidance, and offering people a way to change through mental exercise.

Interest in the technique picked up, largely due to the innate human desire to understand - and predict - oneself. We can still see this today with the inordinate interest in things like fortune cookies, psychic readings, palmistry and astrology. The trend then, as now, was for man to try to rationally explain his own behaviours. Gall's craniology provided a tool understand, predict and maybe even control human behaviour and its popularity began to snowball.

In the US, popularity was booming. Journals such as the American Phrenological Journal granted legitimacy to the practice, earning praise from the likes of Thomas Edison and Alfred Russell Wallage, and the businesses popping up popularized it through talented salesmanship. The Fowler brothers turned phrenology into big business in the tradition of the great snake-oil men, with an entertaining and riveting show advising individuals on all aspects of their lives, from love lives to employment prospects, and ending each show with a practical demonstration. Phrenology had established itself both as a science and in the public mind as a legitimate industry.

Obviously, the shine of phrenology didn't last forever - it certainly isn't an acceptable specialty at any medical school I'm aware of. It was a combination of things that contributed to its downfall. While phrenology was enjoying popularity in North America, it was coming under attack across the pond. One of the primary figures challenging the science was Peter Mark Roget, the English physician famous for his contributions to Encycolopedia Britannica and the eponymous Roget's Thesaurus. Roget, and others, disputed phrenology on both methodological and physiological grounds.

The first objection raised was against the very underpinnings of the phrenological movement. While the field was predicated on skull topology being directly related to brain topology, there was no evidence of a connection between the two. In fact, whether 'high energy' (i.e. more developed) parts of the brain were quantitatively larger was the object of dispute, nor could the hypothetical sub-organs being proposed by phrenologists to explain their science be observed on dissection. On top of physiological arguments, phrenology fell prey to the classic fallacy of equating correlation with causation.

Phrenology was also under assualt from outside the scientific community, with religious leaders taking aim. Central to the phrenological 'science' was materialism, which is in contrast to the church's position of mind-body dualism. That is, the idea that personality and behaviour is strictly a consequence of the physical attributes of the brain is contrary to teachings of a soul. As a result, phrenology was condemned as implicit atheism. This, coupled with growing rejection in the scientific community and waning novelty of the practice led to the disappearance of phrenolgy and its being discarded as a credible science.

Now, there are other pseudosciences that have a similar history to phrenology, yet they endure. Astrology, for example, was widely accepted as reality. It was (and continues to be) opposed by religious leaders and has been rejected as a real science. However, astrology columns can still be found in any newspaper. Likewise, you can still get a tarot card reading, have your palm read or visit a psychic very easily. How is it that they persist but phrenology did not? There are a couple of reasons that might be.

First is its short history. Compared to the other pseudoscience mentioned above, phrenology was a flash in the pan. It may not have had time to establish itself in the public consciousness in the same way that astrology was able to. Furthermore, despite the poor methodology and basis in reality, phrenology was a scientific endeavor. Being such, results couldn't be rationalized with occult-based explanations. If predictions were wrong, the theory was invalidated. Phrenology was pushed out in favour of other ideas of self, such as the psychoanalysis of Freud or Jung. More importantly, some aspects of phrenology were absorbed into the body of scientific thought, making it easier to discard the invalid ideas. Modern neuroscience obviously still holds a material view of the mind, but the idea of localized functions and specialty areas - the basis of phrenology - have also survived. Every fMRI lighting up the music centre of the brain, for example, owes itself in part to phrenology - the brain science of its day. (Some have even suggested that functionl imaging is the phrenology of the 21st century) Despite having gone the way of the dodo, the study of phrenology remains an interesting piece of science history whose influence can still be seen.

Turning Oil Into Neuroscience

This report just in - neuroscientist and Ottawa native Bruce McNaughton was lured back across the border from Arizona to the academic powerhouse that is the University of Lethbridge. The bait? A cool $20 mill from the province of Alberta - the Polaris award. A lot of people are saying "HOLY SHITBALLS!!!!! THAT'S A LOT OF $$$$$$$!!!" And right they are. That's almost as many hits as we get by the minute here at the BayBlab (although we certainly aren't getting paid any coin for it). But let's not get too worked up about the whole thing. After all, the guy had a paper in SCIENCE (tm) just last year. He's a SCIENCE (tm) SuperStar! SuperStars are SuperStars and so we shouldn't be surprised to see that it takes SuperStar cash to reel them in. This deal seems pretty reasonable to me when you line it up with some other Alberta blockbusters:

Bruce McNaughton (Neuroscientist): $20,000,000 over 20 years.

Jarome Iginla (Hockey Player): $21,000,000 over 3 years.

Stephen Harper (Politician): $840,000 over 3 years.

Boone Pickens (Oil Tycoon): $1,000,000,000 + per year.

So be warned world - Alberta oil is waving a big fat wad of cash and they're coming after your scientists! And by the looks of it, some of them might even be crazy enough to go live there...

Foreign Accent Syndrome

Foreign Accent Syndrome is a rare condition that can occur after brain injury. With this condition, a patient speaks the same language, but with a different regional accent (for example, a person from the American midwest may adopt a British accent). Recently at McMaster University, and published in the Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences [press release] a Canadian case was reported. In this instance, a woman from Southern Ontario suffered a stroke and began speaking with a Newfoundland accent, which continues even two years after the original brain injury:

"Rosemary's speech is perfectly clear, unlike most stroke victims who have damage to speech-motor areas of the brain," says Humphreys. "You wouldn't guess that the speech changes are the result of a stroke. Most people meeting her for the first time assume she is from out East. What we are seeing in this case is a change in some of the very precise mechanisms of speech-motor planning in the brain's circuitry."

Engineering the Brain into a Solar-Powered Calculator and Will Biology Ever Be a "Real" Science?

• Engineering the brain is just cool, and this has to be the ultimate example. Groups from Stanford and The Max-Planck have collaborated to create transgenic mice whose neurons can be exquisitely controlled with photons of light. Neurons were engineered to express two types of photoreceptors from algae, one responsive to blue light which creates an action potential, and another responsive to red light which inhibits activity. This highly-specific tool (we're talking lasers) for probing neuronal circuitry will likely replace the far cruder electrode stimulator and undoubtedly open the way to vast new territories of research in neurobiology. Read the original Nature paper here, as well as another concurrently-published PLoS One paper describing a similar system in cultured neurons.

• As a biologist I'm always jealous of physicists, what with the Feynmanian mathematical certainty and Einsteinian grandeur that they wield in their quest to explain the universe. We biologists are are less self-confident bunch, tempered (and tortured) by lives predominated by experimental failures within the lab. Will biology ever join chemistry and physics as a so-called "capital-S Science", with a set of its own all-powerful, generalized and quantitative Laws? (Not to be confused with The Ten Commandments...) MIT biological historian Evelyn Fox Keller argues that biology may never see its Moses descend from the mountain. Instead, she suggests in this Nature essay, that biology is special, and the exceptions more important than the rule. Enquist and Stark, in this response, are more optimistic about the prospects for a quantitative Biology with all-encompassing Laws. Maybe there's hope for biology after all, and there will come a day when we can make predictions that even a VC investor would take to the bank.