aftermath of the NYT / Lindstrom debacle

Over the last few days the commotion over Martin Lindstrom’s terrible New York Times iPhone loving Op-Ed, which I wrote about in my last post, seems to have spread far and wide. Highlights include excellent posts by David Dobbs and the Neurocritic, but really there are too many to list at this point. And the verdict is overwhelmingly negative; I don’t think I’ve seen a single post in defense of Lindstrom, which is probably not a good sign (for him).

In the meantime, Russ Poldrack and over 40 other neuroscientists and psychologists (including me) wrote a letter to the NYT complaining about the Lindstrom Op-Ed, which the NYT has now published. As per usual, they edited down the letter till it almost disappeared. But the original, along with a list of signees, is on Russ’s blog.

Anyway, the fact that the Times published the rebuttal letter is all well and good, but as I mentioned in my last post, the bigger problem is that since the Times doesn’t include links to related content on their articles, people who stumble across the Op-Ed aren’t going to have any way of knowing that it’s been roundly discredited by pretty much the entire web. Lindstrom’s piece was the most emailed article on the Times website for a day or two, but only a tiny fraction of those readers will ever see (or even hear about) the critical response. As far as I know, the NYT hasn’t issued an explanation or apology for publishing the Op-Ed; they’ve simply published the letter and gone on about their business (I guess I can’t fault them for this–if they had to issue a formal apology for every mistake that gets published, they’d have no time for anything else; the trick is really to catch this type of screw-up at the front end). Adding links from each article to related content wouldn’t solve the problem entirely, of course, but it would be something. The fact that Times’ platform currently doesn’t have this capacity is kind of perplexing.

The other point worth mentioning is that, in the aftermath of the tsunami of criticism he received, Lindstrom left a comment on several blogs (Russ Poldrack and David Dobbs were lucky recipients; sadly, I wasn’t on the guest list). Here’s the full text of the comment:

My first foray into neuro-marketing research was for my New York Times bestseller Buyology: Truth and Lies about Why We Buy. For that book I teamed up with Neurosense, a leading independent neuro-marketing company that specializes in consumer research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) headed by Oxford University trained Gemma Calvert, BSc DPhil CPsychol FRSA and Neuro-Insight, a market research company that uses unique brain-imaging technology, called Steady-State Topography (SST), to measure how the brain responds to communications which is lead by Dr. Richard Silberstein, PhD. This was the single largest neuro-marketing study ever conducted—25x larger than any such study to date and cost more than seven million dollars to run.

In the three-year effort scientists scanned the brains of over 2,000 people from all over the world as they were exposed to various marketing and advertising strategies including clever product placements, sneaky subliminal messages, iconic brand logos, shocking health and safety warnings, and provocative product packages. The purpose of all of this was to understand, quite successfully I may add, the key drivers behind why we make the purchasing decisions that we do.

For the research that my recent Op-Ed column in the New York Times was based on I turned to Dr. David Hubbard, a board-certified neurologist and his company MindSign Neuro Marketing, an independently owned fMRI neuro-marketing company. I asked Dr. Hubbard and his team a simple question, “Are we addicted to our iPhones?“ After analyzing the brains of 8 men and 8 women between the ages of 18-25 using fMRI technology, MindSign answered my question using standardized answering methods and completely reproducible results. The conclusion was that we are not addicted to our iPhones, we are in love with them.

The thought provoking dialogue that has been generated from the article has been overwhelmingly positive and I look forward to the continued comments from professionals in the field, readers and fans.

Respectfully,

Martin Lindstrom

As evasive responses go, this is a masterpiece; at no point does Lindstrom ever actually address any of the substantive criticisms leveled at him. He spends most of his response name dropping (the list of credentials is almost long enough to make you forget that the rebuttal letter to his Op-Ed was signed by over 40 PhDs) and rambling about previous unrelated neuromarketing work (which may as well not exist, since none of it has ever been made public), and then closes by shifting the responsibility for the study to MindSign, the company he paid to run the iPhone study. The claim that MindSign “answered [his] question using standardized answering methods and completely reproducible results” is particularly ludicrous; as I explained in my last post, there currently aren’t any standardized methods for reading addiction or love off of brain images. And ‘completely reproducible results’ implies that one has, you know, successfully reproduced the results, which is simply false unless Lindstrom is suggesting that MindSign did the same experiment twice. It’s hard to see any “thought provoking dialogue” taking place here, and the neuroimaging community’s response to the Op-Ed column has been, virtually without exception, overwhelmingly negative, not positive (as Lindstrom claims).

That all said, I do think there’s one very positive aspect to this entire saga, and that’s the amazing speed and effectiveness of the response from scientists, science journalists, and other scientifically literate folks. Ten years ago, Lindstrom’s piece might have gone completely unchallenged–and even if someone like Russ Poldrack had written a response, it would probably have appeared much later, been signed by fewer scientists (because coordination would have been much more difficult), and received much less attention. But with 48 hours of Lindstrom’s Op-Ed being published, dozens of critical blog posts had appeared, and hundreds, if not thousands, of people all over the world had tweeted or posted links to these critiques (my last post alone received over 12,000 hits). Scientific discourse, which used to be confined largely to peer-reviewed print journals and annual conferences, now takes place at a remarkable pace online, and it’s fantastic to see social media used in this way. The hope is that as these technologies develop further and scientists take on a more active role in communicating with the public (something that platforms like Twitter and Google+ seem to be facilitating amazingly well), it’ll become increasingly difficult for people like Lindstrom to make crazy pseudoscientific claims without being immediately and visibly called out on it–even in those rare cases when the NYT makes the mistake of leaving one the biggest microphones on earth open and unmonitored.

the New York Times blows it big time on brain imaging

The New York Times has a terrible, terrible Op-Ed piece today by Martin Lindstrom (who I’m not going to link to, because I don’t want to throw any more bones his way). If you believe Lindstrom, you don’t just like your iPhone a lot; you love it. Literally. And the reason you love it, shockingly, is your brain:

Earlier this year, I carried out an fMRI experiment to find out whether iPhones were really, truly addictive, no less so than alcohol, cocaine, shopping or video games. In conjunction with the San Diego-based firm MindSign Neuromarketing, I enlisted eight men and eight women between the ages of 18 and 25. Our 16 subjects were exposed separately to audio and to video of a ringing and vibrating iPhone.

But most striking of all was the flurry of activation in the insular cortex of the brain, which is associated with feelings of love and compassion. The subjects’ brains responded to the sound of their phones as they would respond to the presence or proximity of a girlfriend, boyfriend or family member.

In short, the subjects didn’t demonstrate the classic brain-based signs of addiction. Instead, they loved their iPhones.

There’s so much wrong with just these three short paragraphs (to say nothing of the rest of the article, which features plenty of other whoppers) that it’s hard to know where to begin. But let’s try. Take first the central premise–that an fMRI experiment could help determine whether iPhones are no less addictive than alcohol or cocaine. The tacit assumption here is that all the behavioral evidence you could muster–say, from people’s reports about how they use their iPhones, or clinicians’ observations about how iPhones affect their users–isn’t sufficient to make that determination; to “really, truly” know if something’s addictive, you need to look at what the brain is doing when people think about their iPhones. This idea is absurd inasmuch as addiction is defined on the basis of its behavioral consequences, not (right now, anyway) by the presence or absence of some biomarker. What makes someone an alcoholic is the fact that they’re dependent on alcohol, have trouble going without it, find that their alcohol use interferes with multiple aspects of their day-to-day life, and generally suffer functional impairment because of it–not the fact that their brain lights up when they look at pictures of Johnny Walker red. If someone couldn’t stop drinking–to the point where they lost their job, family, and friends–but their brain failed to display a putative biomarker for addiction, it would be strange indeed to say “well, you show all the signs, but I guess you’re not really addicted to alcohol after all.”

Now, there may come a day (and it will be a great one) when we have biomarkers sufficiently accurate that they can stand in for the much more tedious process of diagnosing someone’s addiction the conventional way. But that day is, to put it gently, a long way off. Right now, if you want to know if iPhones are addictive, the best way to do that is to, well, spend some time observing and interviewing iPhone users (and some quantitative analysis would be helpful).

Of course, it’s not clear what Lindstrom thinks an appropriate biomarker for addiction would be in any case. Presumably it would have something to do with the reward system; but what? Suppose Lindstrom had seen robust activation in the ventral striatum–a critical component of the brain’s reward system–when participants gazed upon the iPhone: what then? Would this have implied people are addicted to iPhones? But people also show striatal activity when gazing on food, money, beautiful faces, and any number of other stimuli. Does that mean the average person is addicted to all of the above? A marker of pleasure or reward, maybe (though even that’s not certain), but addiction? How could a single fMRI experiment with 16 subjects viewing pictures of iPhones confirm or disconfirm the presence of addiction? Lindstrom doesn’t say. I suppose he has good reason not to say: if he really did have access to an accurate fMRI-based biomarker for addiction, he’d be in a position to make millions (billions?) off the technology. To date, no one else has come close to identifying a clinically accurate fMRI biomarker for any kind of addiction (for more technical readers, I’m talking here about cross-validated methods that have both sensitivity and specificity comparable to traditional approaches when applied to new subjects–not individual studies that claim 90% with-sample classification accuracy based on simple regression models). So we should, to put it mildly, be very skeptical that Lindstrom’s study was ever in a position to do what he says it was designed to do.

We should also ask all sorts of salient and important questions about who the people are who are supposedly in love with their iPhones. Who’s the “You” in the “You Love Your iPhone” of the title? We don’t know, because we don’t know who the participants in Lindstrom’s sample, were, aside from the fact that they were eight men and eight women aged 18 to 25. But we’d like to know some other important things. For instance, were they selected for specific characteristics? Were they, say, already avid iPhone users? Did they report loving, or being addicted to their iPhones? If so, would it surprise us that people chosen for their close attachment to their iPhones also showed brain activity patterns typical of close attachment? (Which, incidentally, they actually don’t–but more on that below.) And if not, are we to believe that the average person pulled off the street–who probably has limited experience with iPhones–really responds to the sound of their phones “as they would respond to the presence or proximity of a girlfriend, boyfriend or family member”? Is the takeaway message of Lindstrom’s Op-Ed that iPhones are actually people, as far as our brains are concerned?

In fairness, space in the Times is limited, so maybe it’s not fair to demand this level of detail in the Op-Ed iteslf. But the bigger problem is that we have no way of evaluating Lindstrom’s claims, period, because (as far as I can tell), his study hasn’t been published or peer-reviewed anywhere. Presumably, it’s proprietary information that belongs to the neuromarketing firm in question. Which is to say, the NYT is basically giving Lindstrom license to talk freely about scientific-sounding findings that can’t actually be independently confirmed, disputed, or critiqued by members of the scientific community with expertise in the very methods Lindstrom is applying (expertise which, one might add, he himself lacks). For all we know, he could have made everything up. To be clear, I don’t really think he did make everything up–but surely, somewhere in the editorial process someone at the NYT should have stepped in and said, “hey, these are pretty strong scientific claims; is there any way we can make your results–on which your whole article hangs–available for other experts to examine?”

This brings us to what might be the biggest whopper of all, and the real driver of the article title: the claim that “most striking of all was the flurry of activation in the insular cortex of the brain, which is associated with feelings of love and compassion“. Russ Poldrack already tore this statement to shreds earlier this morning:

Insular cortex may well be associated with feelings of love and compassion, but this hardly proves that we are in love with our iPhones.  In Tal Yarkoni’s recent paper in Nature Methods, we found that the anterior insula was one of the most highly activated part of the brain, showing activation in nearly 1/3 of all imaging studies!  Further, the well-known studies of love by Helen Fisher and colleagues don’t even show activation in the insula related to love, but instead in classic reward system areas.  So far as I can tell, this particular reverse inference was simply fabricated from whole cloth.  I would have hoped that the NY Times would have learned its lesson from the last episode.

But you don’t have to take Russ’s word for it; if you surf for a few terms on our Neurosynth website, making sure to select “forward inference” under image type, you’ll notice that the insula shows up for almost everything. That’s not an accident; it’s because the insula (or at least the anterior part of the insula) plays a very broad role in goal-directed cognition. It really is activated when you’re doing almost anything that involves, say, following instructions an experimenter gave you, or attending to external stimuli, or mulling over something salient in the environment. You can see this pretty clearly in this modified figure from our Nature Methods paper (I’ve circled the right insula):

Proportion of studies reporting activation at each voxel

The insula is one of a few ‘hotspots’ where activation is reported very frequently in neuroimaging articles (the other major one being the dorsal medial frontal cortex). So, by definition, there can’t be all that much specificity to what the insula is doing, since it pops up so often. To put it differently, as Russ and others have repeatedly pointed out, the fact that a given region activates when people are in a particular psychological state (e.g., love) doesn’t give you license to conclude that that state is present just because you see activity in the region in question. If language, working memory, physical pain, anger, visual perception, motor sequencing, and memory retrieval all activate the insula, then knowing that the insula is active is of very little diagnostic value. That’s not to say that some psychological states might not be more strongly associated with insula activity (again, you can see this on Neurosynth if you switch the image type to ‘reverse inference’ and browse around); it’s just that, probabilistically speaking, the mere fact that the insula is active gives you very little basis for saying anything concrete about what people are experiencing.

In fact, to account for Lindstrom’s findings, you don’t have to appeal to love or addiction at all. There’s a much simpler way to explain why seeing or hearing an iPhone might elicit insula activation. For most people, the onset of visual or auditory stimulation is a salient event that causes redirection of attention to the stimulated channel. I’d be pretty surprised, actually, if you could present any picture or sound to participants in an fMRI scanner and not elicit robust insula activity. Orienting and sustaining attention to salient things seems to be a big part of what the anterior insula is doing (whether or not that’s ultimately its ‘core’ function). So the most appropriate conclusion to draw from the fact that viewing iPhone pictures produces increased insula activity is something vague like “people are paying more attention to iPhones”, or “iPhones are particularly salient and interesting objects to humans living in 2011.” Not something like “no, really, you love your iPhone!”

In sum, the NYT screwed up. Lindstrom appears to have a habit of making overblown claims about neuroimaging evidence, so it’s not surprising he would write this type of piece; but the NYT editorial staff is supposedly there to filter out precisely this kind of pseudoscientific advertorial. And they screwed up. It’s a particularly big screw-up given that (a) as of right now, Lindstrom’s Op-Ed is the single most emailed article on the NYT site, and (b) this incident almost perfectly recapitulates another NYT article 4 years ago in which some neuroscientists and neuromarketers wrote a grossly overblown Op-Ed claiming to be able to infer, in detail, people’s opinions about presidential candidates. That time, Russ Poldrack and a bunch of other big names in cognitive neuroscience wrote a concise rebuttal that appeared in the NYT (but unfortunately, isn’t linked to from the original Op-Ed, so anyone who stumbles across the original now has no way of knowing how ridiculous it is). One hopes the NYT follows up in similar fashion this time around. They certainly owe it to their readers–some of whom, if you believe Lindstrom, are now in danger of dumping their current partners for their iPhones.

h/t: Molly Crockett

the male brain hurts, or how not to write about science

My wife asked me to blog about this article on CNN because, she said, “it’s really terrible, and it shouldn’t be on CNN”. I usually do what my wife tells me to do, so I’m blogging about it. It’s by Louann Brizendine, M.D., author of the absolutely awful controversial book The Female Brain, and now, its manly counterpart, The Male Brain. From what I can gather, the CNN article, which is titled Love, Sex, and the Male Brain, is a precis of Brizendine’s new book (though I have no intention of reading the book to make sure). The article is pretty short, so I’ll go through the first half of it paragraph-by-paragraph. But I’ll warn you right now that it isn’t pretty, and will likely anger anyone with even a modicum of training in psychology or neuroscience.

Although women the world over have been doing it for centuries, we can’t really blame a guy for being a guy. And this is especially true now that we know that the male and female brains have some profound differences.

Our brains are mostly alike. We are the same species, after all. But the differences can sometimes make it seem like we are worlds apart.

So far, nothing terribly wrong here, just standard pop psychology platitudes. But it goes quickly downhill.

The “defend your turf” area — dorsal premammillary nucleus — is larger in the male brain and contains special circuits to detect territorial challenges by other males. And his amygdala, the alarm system for threats, fear and danger is also larger in men. These brain differences make men more alert than women to potential turf threats.

As Vaughan notes over at Mind Hacks, the dorsal premammillary nucleus (PMD) hasn’t been identified in humans, so it’s unclear exactly what chunk of tissue Brizendine’s referring to–let alone where the evidence that there are gender differences in humans might come from. The claim that the PMD is a “defend your turf” area might be plausible, if oh, I don’t know, you happen to think that the way rats behave under narrowly circumscribed laboratory conditions when confronted by an aggressor is a good guide to normal interactions between human males. (Then again, given that PMD lesions impair rats from running away when exposed to a cat, Brizendine could just as easily have concluded that the dorsal premammillary nucleus is the “fleeing” part of the brain.)

The amygdala claim is marginally less ridiculous: it’s not entirely clear that the amygdala is “the alarm system for threats, fear and danger”, but at least that’s a claim you can make with a straight face, since it’s one fairly common view among neuroscientists. What’s not really defensible is the claim that larger amygdalae “make men more alert than women to potential turf threats”, because (a) there’s limited evidence that the male amygdala really is larger than the female amygdala and (b) if such a difference exists, it’s very small, and (c) it’s not clear in any case how you go from a small between-group difference to the notion that somehow the amygdala is the reason why men maintain little interpersonal fiefdoms and women don’t.

Meanwhile, the “I feel what you feel” part of the brain — mirror-neuron system — is larger and more active in the female brain. So women can naturally get in sync with others’ emotions by reading facial expressions, interpreting tone of voice and other nonverbal emotional cues.

This falls under the rubric of “not even wrong“. The mirror neuron system isn’t a single “part of the brain”; current evidence suggests that neurons that show mirroring properties are widely distributed throughout multiple frontoparietal regions. So I don’t really know what brain region Brizendine is referring to (the fact that she never cites any empirical studies in support of her claims is something of an inconvenience in that respect). And even if I did know, it’s a safe bet it wouldn’t be the “I feel what you feel” brain region, because, as far as I know, no such thing exists. The central claim regarding mirror neurons isn’t that they support empathy per se, but that they support a much more basic type of representation–namely, abstract conceptual (as opposed to sensory/motor) representation of actions. And even that much weaker notion is controversial; for example, Greg Hickok has a couple of recent posts (and a widely circulated paper) arguing against it. No one, as far as I know, has provided any kind of serious evidence linking the mirror neuron system to females’ (modestly) superior nonverbal decoding ability.

Perhaps the biggest difference between the male and female brain is that men have a sexual pursuit area that is 2.5 times larger than the one in the female brain. Not only that, but beginning in their teens, they produce 200 to 250 percent more testosterone than they did during pre-adolescence.

Maybe the silliest paragraph in the whole article. Not only do I not know what region Brizendine is talking about here, I have absolutely no clue what the “sexual pursuit area” might be. It could be just me, I suppose, but I just searched Google Scholar for “sexual pursuit area” and got… zero hits. Is it a visual region? A part of the hypothalamus? The notoriously grabby motor cortex hand area? No one knows, and Brizendine isn’t telling.  Off-hand, I don’t know of any region of the human brain that shows the degree of sexual dimorphism Brizendine claims here.

If testosterone were beer, a 9-year-old boy would be getting the equivalent of a cup a day. But a 15-year-old would be getting the equivalent of nearly two gallons a day. This fuels their sexual engines and makes it impossible for them to stop thinking about female body parts and sex.

If each fiber of chest hair was a tree, a 12-year-old boy would have a Bonsai sitting on the kitchen counter, and a 30-year-old man would own Roosevelt National Forest. What you’re supposed to learn from this analogy, I honestly couldn’t tell you. It’s hard for me to think clearly about trees and hair you see, seeing as how I find it impossible to stop thinking about female body parts while I’m trying to write this.

All that testosterone drives the “Man Trance”– that glazed-eye look a man gets when he sees breasts. As a woman who was among the ranks of the early feminists, I wish I could say that men can stop themselves from entering this trance. But the truth is, they can’t. Their visual brain circuits are always on the lookout for fertile mates. Whether or not they intend to pursue a visual enticement, they have to check out the goods.

To a man, this is the most natural response in the world, so he’s dismayed by how betrayed his wife or girlfriend feels when she sees him eyeing another woman. Men look at attractive women the way we look at pretty butterflies. They catch the male brain’s attention for a second, but then they flit out of his mind. Five minutes later, while we’re still fuming, he’s deciding whether he wants ribs or chicken for dinner. He asks us, “What’s wrong?” We say, “Nothing.” He shrugs and turns on the TV. We smolder and fear that he’ll leave us for another woman.

This actually isn’t so bad if you ignore the condescending “men are animals with no self-control” implication and pretend Brizendine had just made the  indisputably true but utterly banal observation that men, on average, like to ogle women more than women, on average, like to ogle men.

Not surprisingly, the different objectives that men and women have in mating games put us on opposing teams — at least at first. The female brain is driven to seek security and reliability in a potential mate before she has sex. But a male brain is fueled to mate and mate again. Until, that is, he mates for life.

So men are driven to sleep around, again and again… until they stop sleeping around. It’s tautological and profound at the same time!

Despite stereotypes to the contrary, the male brain can fall in love just as hard and fast as the female brain, and maybe more so. When he meets and sets his sights on capturing “the one,” mating with her becomes his prime directive. And when he succeeds, his brain makes an indelible imprint of her. Lust and love collide and he’s hooked.

Failure to operationalize complex construct of “love” in a measurable way… check. Total lack of evidence in support of claim that men and women are equally love-crazy… check. Oblique reference to Star Trek universe… check. What’s not to like?

A man in hot pursuit of a mate doesn’t even remotely resemble a devoted, doting daddy. But that’s what his future holds. When his mate becomes pregnant, she’ll emit pheromones that will waft into his nostrils, stimulating his brain to make more of a hormone called prolactin. Her pheromones will also cause his testosterone production to drop by 30 percent.

You know, on the off-chance that something like this is actually true, I think it’s actually kind of neat. But I just can’t bring myself to do a literature search, because I’m pretty sure I’ll discover that the jury is still out on whether humans even emit and detect pheromones (ok, I know this isn’t a completely baseless claim), or that there’s little to no evidence of a causal relationship between women releasing pheromones and testosterone levels dropping in men. I don’t like to be disappointed, you see; it turns out it’s much easier to just decide what you want to believe ahead of time and then contort available evidence to fit that view.

Anyway, we’re only half-way through the article; Brizendine goes on in similar fashion for several hundred more words. Highlights include the origin of male poker face, the conflation of correlation and causation in sociable elderly men, and the effects of oxytocin on your grandfather. You should go read the reset of it if you practice masochism; I’m too full of rage depressed to write about it any more.

Setting aside the blatant exercise in irresponsible scientific communication (Brizendine has an MD, and appears to be at least nominally affiliated with UCSF’s psychiatry department, so ignorance shouldn’t really be a valid excuse here), I guess what I’d really like to know is what goes through Brizendine’s mind when she writes this sort of dreck. Does she really believe the ludicrous claims she makes? Is she fully aware she’s grossly distorting the empirical evidence if not outright confabulating, and is simply in it for the money? Or does she rationalize it as a case of the ends justifying the means, thinking the message she’s presenting is basically right, so it’s ok if nearly all a few of the details go missing in the process?

I understand that presenting scientific evidence in an accurate and entertaining manner is a difficult business, and many people who work hard at it still get it wrong pretty often (I make mistakes in my posts here all the time!). But many scientists still manage to find time in their busy schedules to write popular science books that present the science in an accessible way without having to make up ridiculous stories just to keep the reader entertained (Steven Pinker, Antonio Damasio, and Dan Gilbert are just a few of the first ones that spring to mind). And then there are amazing science writers like Carl Zimmer and David Dobbs who don’t necessarily have any professional training in the areas they write about, but still put in the time and energy to make sure they get the details right, and consistently write stories that blow me away (the highest compliment I can pay to a science story is that it makes me think “I wish I studied that“, and Zimmer’s articles routinely do that). That type of intellectual honesty is essential, because there’s really no point in going to the trouble of doing most scientific research if people get to disregard any findings they disagree with on ideological or aesthetic grounds, or can make up any evidence they like to fit their claims.

The sad thing is that Brizendine’s new book will probably sell more copies in its first year out than Carl Zimmer’s entire back catalogue. And it’s not going to sell all those copies because it’s a careful meditation on the subtle differences between genders that scientists have uncovered; it’s going to fly off the shelves because it basically regurgitates popular stereotypes about gender differences with a seemingly authoritative scientific backing. Instead of evaluating and challenging many of those notions with actual empirical data, people who read Brizendine’s work will now get to say “science proves it!”, making it that much more difficult for responsible scientists and journalists to tell the public what’s really true about gender differences.

You might say (or at least, Brizendine might say) that this is all well and good, but hopelessly naive and idealistic, and that telling an accurate story is always going to be less important than telling the public what it wants to hear about science, because the latter is the only way to ensure continued funding for and interest in scientific research. This isn’t that uncommon a sentiment; I’ve even heard a number of scientists who I otherwise have a great deal of respect for say something like this. But I think Brizendine’s work underscores the typical outcome of that type of reasoning: once you allow yourself to relax the standards for what counts as evidence, it becomes quite easy to rationalize almost any rhetorical abuse of science, and ultimately you abuse the public’s trust while muddying the waters for working scientists.

As with so many other things, I think Richard Feynman summed up this sentiment best:

I would like to add something that’s not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you’re talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you’re not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We’ll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you are maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.

For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of this work were. “Well,” I said, “there aren’t any.” He said, “Yes, but then we won’t get support for more research of this kind.” I think that’s kind of dishonest. If you’re representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you’re doing–and if they don’t want to support you under those circumstances, then that’s their decision.

No one doubts that men and women differ from one another, and the study of gender differences is an active and important area of psychology and neuroscience. But I can’t for the life of me see any merit in telling the public that men can’t stop thinking about breasts because they’re full of the beer-equivalent of two gallons of testosterone.

[Update 3/25: plenty of other scathing critiques pop up in the blogosphere today: Language Log, Salon, and Neuronarrative, and no doubt many others…]