As long as we’re talking about brains this morning, here’s another topic that irritates me: the abuse of the term neuroplasticity.
Way, way back in the late 1970s, my first textbook in neuroscience was this one: Marcus Jacobson’s Developmental Neurobiology
Steven Novella makes an important point: memories are fluid. There’s no VCR in your head, and no tape recorder either, and memories are constructs. You remember the framework (sometimes very poorly) of a past event, and your brain builds a plausible set of details around it. When you picture Christmas at your grandmother’s house when you were 12, you don’t have a record in your head of how many logs were in the fireplace or a second by second recording of the flickering of the fire. You remember that Grandma had a fireplace, and sometimes she had logs burning in it, and maybe there was a fire that year, and your brain obligingly assembles an image for you.
I never watched Oprah, because she was a gullible woo-artist; I don’t watch Dr Oz, because he’s quack; and now all I can say is fuck Bill Maher, because he’s a crank on so many things. On his latest show, he surrounded himself with Marianne Williamson, a “spiritual teacher” and proponent of prayer, Amy Holmes, a news announcer for The Blaze (Glenn Beck’s spinoff), and some guy who didn’t say much, and he went off on a grand tour of kook talk, confident that his panelists wouldn’t disagree with him. Watch. Be embarrased for him.
Once again, I am reminded that I’m in the wrong business to make money. Bjorn Lomborg is in the news again, and I learn that the man makes $775,000/year for running the Copenhagen Consensus Center…which is a drop box in Lowell, Massachusetts. I don’t think buying a mailbox is the secret, though — I think you also have to convince the Koch Brothers to deposit checks in it. Apparently the trick behind that is to lie persuasively about science in a way that allows very rich people to become more rich.
Oh, sure, it can tell you in a general way that there will be crossroads ahead, but it can’t tell you in advance which ones are dead ends, or where you’ll end up by following them.
Look closely at the eel in this picture. Look up around its head. Do you wonder what that odd little blob is?
I am being taunted. There have been a couple of promising occurrences in the ongoing battle with trolls that I should find encouraging, but I really don’t.
The creationists are mightily annoyed at the broadcast of a commercial that has John F. Kennedy talking about our evolutionary history as marine organisms.
I’ve got some complaints, too.
A lot of my youth was spent hanging about in Radio Shack (or the Boeing surplus store, but that’s a different story), and I can’t imagine losing them, but Radio Shack is in talks that may lead to a declaration of bankruptcy, selling half its stores to Sprint, and closing the rest. There will be no more Radio Shack signs, even if the stores persist under new management.
Denialists claiming to be pro-science. Politicians insisting on a balanced treatment. A population ignorant of the science indignantly rejecting a clear and well-established, evidence-based conclusion.
I’m not talking about creationism, although it’s exactly the same story. It’s the anti-vax position now.
