By now most people know that the dinosaurs (now clarified as non-avian dinosaurs), along with 85% of species alive at the time, became extinct 65.5 million years ago as a result of a massive meteor impact. This is almost certainly the impact crater at Chicxulub, which dates to the correct time. In addition, examination of fossils and geological layers centers this extinction event at Chicxulub.

This is referred to at the K-T extinction, referring to the end of the Cretaceous and beginning of the Tertiary periods. However, use of the designation “Tertiary” is being phased out, and the K-T extinction is now being referred to as the K-Pg extinction – for Cretaceous-Paleogene.

While the single impact theory is the current consensus, there are two significant if minority competing theories. One is the Deccan Traps flood basalts – a 200 thousand year long event spanning the K-Pg boundary that involved massive volcanic eruptions, which could have causes extinctions through release of dust and sulfuric aerosols into the atmosphere. While not dead, this hypothesis has not fared well under recent evidence and is supported by only a small minority of paleontologists.

Another theory is that there were multiple impacts, two or more, all around the time of the K-Pg extinction. This is based largely on the presence of other craters that date to the same time period. There is also the Boltysh impact crater in the Ukraine, the Silverpit crater in the North Sea, and the Shiva crater. The thinking is that an asteroid or comet may have broken into multiple pieces which showered the earth over a period of time.

A new study published in Geology provides evidence that suggests that the Boltysh crater occurred 2-5 thousand years before the Chicxulub impact. The study team looked at spikes in fern spores in geological layers in the Boltysh crater. Ferns recover quickly after an impact and quickly colonize the devastated area. Therefore a spike in fern spores is a marker for an impact. What they found is that there is a fern spike in the sediment layer that likely resulted from the Boltysh impact itself. And then, 2-5 thousand years later, this layer was itself devastated resulting in another fern spore spike. They believe this second devastation was due to the Chicxulub impact. (Incidentally, scientists who study pollen and spores are called palynologists.)

This is interesting, if indirect, evidence. It still leaves us with the bulk of the evidence showing that the Chicxulub impact was the major cause of the K-Pg extinction, and probably enough to explain it by itself. The complete extinction of non-avian dinosaurs appears to have occurred right at that time. But it is possible that the ecosystem was being stressed by the Deccan Traps eruptions. It is also possible that one or more smaller impacts also contributed to the extinction event.

This is an interesting refinement to the impact theory, and I am mostly interested in how paleontologists make inferences about what happened in the past. The spore spike is a cool line of evidence, one I did not know about before.

Futurism

You can read the exchange for all the details. I want to focus on just a couple of points – predicting our efforts to reverse engineer the brain, and the question of how complex the brain is.  Kurzweil has predicted in the past that we will reverse engineer the brain – model it’s function in a computer, basically – by 2030. It was reported that in his talk he said 2020, but Kurzweil has clarified that this is not correct, he said 2030, sticking to his earlier predictions.

That’s a minor (but interesting) point, and Myers points out that it was not the focus of his original criticism. I agree with Kurzweil on some basic principles. First, we do have an active research program that is using computer modeling to reverse engineer the brain. These efforts are progressing nicely, and I do think that eventually it will succeed. I also agree that some technologies progress at an exponential rate, and they surprise those who were making predictions based upon a linear progression. Kurzweil gives an excellent example of this – the genome project. This project started out very slow, and many though it was lagging behind predictions, but as technology improved the effort to decode the human genome accelerated geometrically and actually finished years ahead of schedule. Now we can decode the genome of other species in a fraction of the time, and the pace continues to accelerate.

So Kurzweil has a legitimate point here – information-based technologies are accelerating, and if you account for that acceleration you get a better handle on predicting its future course. I do think, however, that Kurzweil is cherry-picking a bit also, for some information-based technologies have fallen short of prediction, such as speech recognition (an area of his particular expertise). Recognizing human speech works, but the technology has seen diminishing, rather than accelerating, returns in terms of accuracy, and this has delayed it adoption – which is not nearly as much as Kurzweil predicted in the past.

I think the example of speech recognition represents a factor that Kurzweil, in my opinion, seems to underappreciate. While our information tools may get better at an accelerating rate, some problems become exponentially more difficult as you try to eek out incremental gains. In other words, it seems that for some technologies (to use symbolic figures) each 1% improvement is 10 times more difficult than the previous incremental improvement. This offsets our exponential progress. The complexity of the genome project was linear – decoding that last 10% was as difficult as the first 10%, so it was the perfect example for Kurzweil. But other problems, like understanding how the brain works, are not linear in complexity. As our knowledge of the brain deepens, we are getting to greater and greater levels of complexity.

Further, while I think Kurzweil’s charicterization of technological progress is generally correct when you consider the broad brushstrokes of advancement, it is very difficult to apply them to any individual technology. There are hurdles, roadblocks, and breakthroughs with any individual technology or scientific problem that are impossible to predict.

On the point of predicting the future I am somewhat between Myers and Kurzweil. Kurzweil has some legitimate points to make, but I think he over applies them and cherry picks favorable examples. Myers also has some legitimate criticisms – Kurzweil does not quantify some problems (like how much of the brain we currently understand), and does not account for the fact that we do not know how much we do not know. There may be hidden layers of complexity of brain function we haven’t tapped into yet. But I think that Myers overall is a bit harsh on Kurzweil and does not give partial credit where it is due.

Will we reverse engineer the brain by 2030? I guess we will have to wait and see. Kurzweil gives himself a bit of an out by saying that we will reverse engineer the “basic functions” of the brain – this is vague enough that you can declare victory at any point along the way. You might argue we understand the brain’s basic functions now. I think we will succeed eventually, even to the point of being able to make an artificial brain, but I would not hazard a guess as to when.

Brain Complexity

The more interesting point of contention, and a real teaching point, is the question of how much we can infer about the complexity of the brain by looking at the genome? A separate question is whether or not you can reverse engineer the brain by examining the genome. Here both Myers and Kurzweil agree – you cannot. But Kurzweil says he never made that claim – it was misreported or misinterpreted. So we can put that aside – no one is arguing that the design of the brain is in the genome. You have to examine the brain to reverse engineer the brain.

But Kurzweil is still claiming that we can infer something about how much complexity is in the brain from the genome. He writes:

The amount of information in the genome (after lossless compression, which is feasible because of the massive redundancy in the genome) is about 50 million bytes (down from 800 million bytes in the uncompressed genome). It is true that the information in the genome goes through a complex route to create a brain, but the information in the genome constrains the amount of information in the brain prior to the brain’s interaction with its environment.

This is profoundly problematic, and reflects the fact that Kurzweil truly does not understand the process by which the brain develops. From a developmental point of view – there is no such thing as the brain prior to its interaction with the environment. First – is Kurzweil talking about a newborn infant’s brain? Does he understand the significant differences between that brain and a fully developed adult brain?

I think, to be generous, Kurzweil is trying to differentiate the design of the brain from the information contained within it (our memories, etc,). This could be analogous to a computer vs the software, or reverse engineer a generic human brain vs duplicating PZ Myers’ brain.

But that was never the point at all – the point Myers was making (which I also discussed this week on the SGU) is that the design of the brain is dependent upon interaction with the environment. Myers focused on brain proteins interacting with each other in a complex way, while I focused on the neurological functions of the brain.  The genome provides a set of processes by which brain design unfolds – but that program is dependent upon input from the brain’s environment, which includes the body of which it is part. The basic systems within the brain develop and organize themselves in response to sensory input or use. Our visual cortex requires visual stimulation, binary vision requires seeing with both eyes, our motor system requires use against gravity, our language cortex requires exposure to language, etc.

The process of brain design being a combination of genetic rules laying out neurons and connections in a pattern that is dependent upon feedback from some kind of input adds complexity and information to the brain. So again – what is Kurzweil talking about when he refers to a brain prior to interaction with the environment? He seems not to understand the process of brain development, and therefore he overestimates the degree to which information in the genome constrains information in the brain – or he underestimates the increase in information that derives from this interactive development process. Therefore his basic premise – the brain is not so complex because the genome does not contain that much information – is flawed and invalid (which was Myers original criticism).

Kurzweil adds another line of reasoning to his argument, writing:

For example, the cerebellum (which has been modeled, simulated and tested) — the region responsible for part of our skill formation, like catching a fly ball — contains a module of four types of neurons. That module is repeated about ten billion times. The cortex, a region that only mammals have and that is responsible for our ability to think symbolically and in hierarchies of ideas, also has massive redundancy. It has a basic pattern-recognition module that is considerably more complex than the repeated module in the cerebellum, but that cortex module is repeated about a billion times. There is also information in the interconnections, but there is massive redundancy in the connection pattern as well.

Here again, Kurzweil is grossly underestimating the complexity of the brain based upon some faulty assumptions. I agree with his point that there are modules or patterns in the brain that are repeated billions of times. But they are not simply repeated. You cannot describe this aspect of brain design by simply describing one module then say – repeat 1 billion times. With each repetition there is a novel and meaningful pattern of interconnectedness to other brain regions and to the body. Kurzweil seems to recognize this when he says: “There is also information in the interconnections, but there is massive redundancy in the connection pattern as well.” But he seems to be brushing it off too easily. We cannot assume that the pattern of interconnectedness is a simply redundant pattern.

We also have to consider that the added levels of complexity from the pattern of interconnectedness likely varies from brain region to region. Kurzweil might have a point if you are talking only about the primary visual cortex, for example – where there is a literal grid of neurons that correspond to the visual fields. Here the patterns are somewhat simple and repeated, and it is therefore not surprising that our efforts to reverse engineer these brain regions have progressed the most. But this is the lowest hanging fruit, and should not be considered representative of other brain regions and functions.

If we move to brain regions that subsume our most complex abstract thought and planning, there is no simple somatotopic pattern of neurons whose function we can easily infer. We have no idea, for example, how a pattern of neuronal connections equals a specific word, and connects to our knowledge of how to say the word, how to spell it, what the word means in all it’s complexity, memories of the word’s use, and its relation to other words and parts of words. But most importantly – we really don’t know yet how complex this problem even is, and so predicting how long it will take to solve the problem strikes me as utter folly.

Conclusion

I find the entire discussion between Myers and Kurzweil to be a fascinating topic, and an opportunity to explore various aspects of neurology in the context of a specific and interesting application – reverse engineering the brain. This amounts to an elaborate thought experiment, but those are a fun way to challenge our understanding of a topic.

Ultimately I come down closer to Myers’ position – Kurzweil does not seem to understand the brain or brain development, at least in certain key aspects, and this dooms his arguments to failure. He would do well to take the criticisms going his way seriously, and also to check his ideas with some actual neuroscientists. Myers, on the other hand, came off too harsh, but that seems to be his style. Kurzweil is an interesting mix of provocative ideas, some interesting insights, but also some serious flaws that border on crankery. This makes him a very intriguing character that I would not casually dismiss, but also I would take everything he says with a skeptical grain of salt.

Apparently, Wi-Fi is the new mold. In central Ontario parents are lobbying the school to turn off the Wi-Fi due to fears that it is making their children sick. You can take the news report of the parents concerns, time-warp about ten years in the past, and substitute “mold” for “Wi-Fi” – the arguments are the same, and the evidence as weak, but the identified problem has just shifted.

The Evidence

Let’s start by reviewing what we currently know about the health risks of Wi-Fi – wireless signals used to connect computers to a network or the internet. From a basic science perspective, there is little plausibility to the notion that Wi-Fi radiation would have any health effects. The amount of energy that is absorbed by a person living in a Wi-Fi field is negligible - less than 1% of exposure from a typical cell phone and well below current safety levels.

I have written about the risk from cell phones recently also. To summarize, there is no compelling evidence at this time that there is a health risk. The evidence so far seems to rule out any significant risk for adults with up to 10-15 years of exposure, but not yet for children or for >15 years exposure. In short, if there is any adverse health effect it must be tiny to be so difficult to detect – and Wi-Fi causes only 1% of the energy exposure as cell phones.

Further, the hypothesized risks of non-ionizing radiation (insufficient energy to break chemical bonds) is considered by many to lack plausibility due to the fact that so little energy is transferred to tissue.For non-ionizing radiation, regulations have focused on the thermal effects – heating tissue – which can occur depending upon the specific frequencies used and how easily it is coupled or transferred to tissues. This is the same effect exploited by microwaves (a form of non-ionizing radiation) to heat food.

The current regulations are largely based upon the thermal effects of EMF exposures – exposures are low enough to prevent significant heating of tissues. Some argue that this is not enough, however, and that there may be non-thermal biological effects, and therefore safety limits should be lowered.

While I agree with those who argue that a significant non-ionizing, non-thermal effect is unproven and implausible, a biological effect is not impossible, and so epidemiological and clinical studies are reasonable. The first question is simply – what is the exposure from Wi-Fi networks? Such exposures to EMF are typically thousands of times less than current safety limits. In fact, one review found:

In all cases, the measured Wi-Fi signal levels were very far below international exposure limits (IEEE C95.1-2005 and ICNIRP) and in nearly all cases far below other RF signals in the same environments.

So not only are exposures from Wi-Fi access points thousands of times less than safety limits, they are also less than the background radio frequency (RF) radiation.

Is there evidence for biological effects on cells? An extensive review of this research concluded:

Overall, there is little evidence of cellular effects of RF fields of health significance below current safety limits.

While they argue for further research in some areas, they were also including cell-phone level exposure, which remember is 100 times that of Wi-Fi, which in turn is no higher than background radiation.

What about electromagnetic hypersensitivity – the reporting of common non-specific symptoms, such as headache, fatigue, dizziness, and confusion, while being exposed to EMF? Well, the same review also summarizes this research, which finds that under blinded conditions there is no such hypersensitivity syndrome. Even with people who consistently report symptoms with exposure to EMF, in blinded conditions they cannot reliably tell if they are being exposed to EMF.

Wi-Fi in Schools

With the research as background, let’s take a look at the current Wi-Fi in school hubbub. News reports indicate:

Some parents in the Barrie, Ont., area say their children are showing a host of symptoms ranging from headaches and dizziness to nausea and even racing heart rates.

The symptoms, which also include memory loss, trouble concentrating, skin rashes, hyperactivity, night sweats and insomnia, have been reported in 14 Ontario schools in Barrie, Bradford, Collingwood, Orillia and Wasaga Beach since the board decided to go wireless, said Palmer.

That is a familiar list of symptoms – non-specific, common and subjective. They are similar to the symptoms that people previously blamed on mold in schools. (But it should be noted that the analogy to mold is not perfect as there is evidence to support the conclusion that some people have a genuine mold allergy, and developed real allergic symptoms to measurable exposures to mold. At the same time, there are those with non-specific symptoms who blame it on mold as the available explanation.)

How do parents know their children are having symptoms secondary to Wi-Fi?

“These kids are getting sick at school but not at home,” he said.

“I’m not saying it’s because of the Wi-Fi because we don’t know yet, but I’ve pretty much eliminated every other possible source.”

I doubt “every other possible source” has been adequately eliminated. That is tough to do for environmental exposures. Further, it should first be determined if there is an actual medical phenomenon, before explanations are sought. One of the primary sources of disconnect between medical professionals and the public is that professionals know from history of published evidence that people can exhibit symptoms without there being a specific physical cause, while the public remains largely unconvinced of this fact. As stated above, even those who had dramatic and consistent symptoms to EMF could not reproduce them under blinded conditions.

Further, the parents are more compelled than they should be at the timing of the symptoms. It should not be that much of a surprise that students are exhibiting non-specific symptoms at school but not home. Stress alone is a sufficient explanation, but there may be others. For example, many students go to school sleep-deprived because they are staying up too late. This is not an issue on weekends and over the summer. Sleep deprivation is a good explanation for most of the symptoms being reported.

There likely is no one answer to what the children are reporting. Once a community has identified a culprit, then many people with non-specific symptoms from any cause are likely to latch onto the available explanation for their symptoms.

Conclusion

Often these issues are framed as a debate over what level of safety is appropriate. There always seems to be those arguing for “zero” risk, or an absolute guarantee of safety. Absolute safety does not exist in our world and is not a reasonable goal. Even with this extreme position aside, it is always easy to argue for greater safety limits than are currently in place. It may always seem reasonable to say that we should err on the side of safety, or wait for further research.

But I do not think this is always the reasonable position. It makes more sense to consider risk vs benefit. In the case of Wi-Fi we have very low biological plausibility given the low levels of exposure, a 1000 fold safety margin with current regulations, no compelling evidence from cell studies of a biological effect, and no clinical evidence of a real health effect.

Meanwhile, convenient internet connectivity is increasingly a vital aspect of our modern lives – certainly in the context of education.

I wonder if those parents arguing against Wi-Fi in the schools, based upon vague anecdotal evidence in the face of low scientific plausibility and lack of evidence of risk, use cell phones. Do they drive, use power tools, have a swimming pool, or snow ski? There are probably hundreds of things we take for granted in our daily lives that have greater risks than Wi-Fi.

These news stories also highlight the need for greater public education in critical thinking. These parents mean well, they are just falling victim to poor critical thinking skills. The news report also indicates that the school board has been largely ignoring them, which is not a good strategy. Professionals and regulators also need to learn how to deal with the public over such issues.

What we have here are the seeds of yet another grassroots movement that is disconnected from science and hostile to authority. This is a scenario we have seen played out many times before, and no doubt we will see it many times again.

Commenter Ankur Varshney writes:

Mr Steven
I appreciate your enthusiasm to share this with all. I also appreciate that you have done so much analysis.
In all the arguments you have given your comments, i read them.
Creation / Design Argument – you have said something.
As far as watch – it is non living. So is the evolutionists idea of life comes from nonliving. SO WATCH ANALOGY IS CERTAINLY VALID. Just like a watch requires a designer, IT TAKES A CREATOR OR DESIGNER TO BREETHE OR DESIGN LIFE IN NON-LIVING! You probably failed to notice this simple logic.
There are so many flaws in all what you said that I am afraid it will take away my lot of time to point them all.
One more i would like to point though.
You said that gene mutation INCREASES information!!! Gene is there and YOU (AN INTELLIGENT SYSTEM) mutates it which leads to variation, no addition, it may lead to loss of info no addition :). It is really silly that such a thing comes from you. More so even if i take your case, the information has been added by intelligent system not automatically!!!
Have great day and please before posting such things calm down and think for a while the reasoning.
Thank you

As usual, I do not intent to pick on this one commenter, but he is regurgitating typical anti-evolution propaganda, which needs to me smacked down from time to time, and he is just a convenient messenger.

He writes:

“As far as watch – it is non living. So is the evolutionists idea of life comes from nonliving. SO WATCH ANALOGY IS CERTAINLY VALID. Just like a watch requires a designer, IT TAKES A CREATOR OR DESIGNER TO BREETHE OR DESIGN LIFE IN NON-LIVING! You probably failed to notice this simple logic.”

Ankur is making a false analogy here by confusing the origin of life with the later evolution of life. The watch analogy was specifically offered to say that something which is complex and displays design must have been created and designed by a creator. Therefore, since we see complexity and design in life it too must have had a creator.

But all the life that we know – that life which is being pointed to as complex and designed – is the result of a process (evolution) that has worked over billions of years. Life can grow, reproduce, and evolve. Watches cannot – so it is not a valid analogy.

Life did emerge from non-living matter, but that is irrelevant to the point. There was likely a process of chemical evolution – but still the non-living precursors to life were just chemicals, they did not display the design or complexity apparent in a watch. Ankur’s attempt to rescue this false analogy fails.

And before someone has a chance to point it out – yes, I said that life displays design. It displays bottom-up evolutionary design, not top-down intelligent design. This refers to another fallacy of creationists – the assumption that all design is top down. But nature demonstrates that this is a false assumption.

He continues:

“You said that gene mutation INCREASES information!!! Gene is there and YOU (AN INTELLIGENT SYSTEM) mutates it which leads to variation, no addition, it may lead to loss of info no addition :). It is really silly that such a thing comes from you.”

Really – I mutate my own genes through my intelligence? It’s hard to know what he is even saying here, but it is reminiscent of the typical creationist argument that you need a designed system first, then you can have (micro)evolution. But this is not based upon any established principles, logic, or facts – it is just begging the question on the part of creationists.

Further, Ankur is simply ignoring my actual arguments. An increase in variation is an increase in information – it takes more information to describe the greater variety. By any actual definition of information – variation increases information.

Also, as I argued, when you have gene duplication you are physically increasing the number of information carrying units – that is an increase in information. There is simply no way to avoid the mountain of genetic evidence that genetic information has increased over evolutionary time through evolutionary processes.

Creationists make such arguments by getting creative with their definition of “information” and changing it as needed throughout their arguments. Ankur seems to be basing his argument on some gut instinct about what information is, rather than a mathematically rigorous understanding of information theory.

The sad thing is, in his broken English he is a cogent and logical as the best propagandists that the intelligent design crowd has to offer.

Skeptics often go after big targets, which is reasonable, but the people who have risen to the top of their field (whether they are faith healers, psychics, mediums, or whatever) tend to be the most polished and experienced. (They tend to be, there are always exceptions.) However, we also have to realize that there is a second and third tier of faith healers and psychics who are trying to break into the top, but haven’t. These second-rate entertainers make great targets for skeptics – because many of them are not very good at their craft. They are doing the same things the top-tier psychic entertainers are, but are more obvious and are more likely to say stupid and revealing things when confronted.

By analogy – if you want to reveal how a magic trick is done, show someone who is not polished attempting the trick. They are likely to give it away. Don’t show a world class magician who is expert at hiding the technique and knows how to work a crowd.

Fellow SGU host Evan Bernstein and I once investigated a channeler in Connecticut – a woman who claimed to channel the spirit of D’hartma, a 700 year old spirit from Nepal. She was terrible. She was doing all the things that JZ Knight was doing, but just not very well. She did not have her story entirely straight and her performance was transparent. (You can read the full story here.)

I think Joe Power falls into this same category – in my opinion he is a second rate fake psychic medium trying desperately to break into the first tier. His career is described as “flagging.” Darren Brown famously pwned Power on his show – all Power could do was whine lamely.  Power is trying to be a “I see dead people” medium, but is not very good at cold reading and doesn’t have the stage presence to pull it off.

At the Assembly Gala he had only 5 minutes to put on his show, and he failed utterly, eventually getting booed off stage. The best part, however, is his lame excuses in the BBC article. He is quoted as saying:

“So I was expecting the sceptics at the Assembly launch night but I didn’t think it would be as bad as it was because anything people do should be respected.

Really? Anything? I think pretending to be psychic so that you can exploit the grief of other people in order to make money off of them is not deserving of respect (just to pick one example). Being booed and heckled is the proper response, and if we lived in a rational world every fake psychic and medium would be booed out of every venue in which they tried to ply their trade. Some things should not be tolerated, and booing, in the right context, can be a legitimate form of public protest. (Of course, anything can be abused, and I would not use this tactic to silence debate or opinions with which you do not agree.)

Power then gives away the game when he says:

“My mistake was that I didn’t have the lights on so I couldn’t see the recipient in the audience. I need response and dialogue to keep the energy.”

In other words – I need response in dialogue in order to do a cold reading, because I am not very good at it. Saying “the energy” is nicely vague – what does that mean, exactly? How does response and dialogue help him talk to dead people? Aren’t the dead people the source of the information? Hmmm…if he were talking to dead people, he would not need response and dialogue with the living. If he is doing a lame cold reading, he is utterly dependent upon response and dialogue.

I suppose it’s possible (like all paranormal phenomena, apparently) that talking to the dead just happens to work in such a way that makes it indistinguishable from the magic trick method of pretending to talk to the dead (cold reading).

Then one of two things will happen: either the new idea or treatment will fade, becoming little more than a footnote in the history of science, or a subculture will persist in believing in the treatment and will dismiss contrary evidence and mainstream rejection as a conspiracy. Which course the new idea will take seems to depend largely on the original scientist – if they accept the new evidence and abandon their claims, it will likely fade. If they refuse to give up in the face of new evidence, then a new pseudoscience will likely be born.

We have seen this pattern play out with Laetrile, psychomotor patterning, cold fusion, and many other ideas.

Now we are in the midst of this pattern playing itself out yet again – with the Zamboni treatment for multiple sclerosis (MS). Dr. Zamboni is an Italian neurosurgeon whose wife as MS. He sought out to find a cure, and eventually discovered that patients with MS have a blockage in the venous draining of their brains, a condition he termed “chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency” (CCSVI). He further claims that MS can be treated, even cured, by opening up the veins that drain the brain with either angioplasty or stenting. Many MS patients have been interested in this potential new treatment, and many have even undergone treatment.

The neurological community is, to say the least, skeptical – but interested. There are many red flags of crankery in CCSVI, however. First, it may make for good story telling, but it is a bit curious that a neurosurgeon set out to discover a treatment for MS and found a neurosurgical one – even though there was no prior suggestion that this would be the case. Further, we have decades of research that tell us that MS is primarily an autoimmune disease – the patient’s immune system is attacking their own central nervous system. It is true that inflammatory plaques tend to occur around veins, but that is explained by the fact that blood vessels allow immune cells access to the central nervous system.

And finally Zamboni found in his own research that his criteria for CCSVI has 100% sensitivity and 100% specificity for MS – which triggers the “too good to be true” red flag. It is rare (perhaps nonexistent) to find a test in medicine that is correct 100% of the time, with no false positives or false negatives. These kinds of results strongly suggest experimenter bias.

Zamboni presented his research at the latest meeting of the American Academy of Neurology. I was not present, but I have spoken to some colleagues who were – the buzz is that Zamboni’s presentation was not impressive, and he came off as a bit of a crank. This by itself does not mean much – it’s more about personality than data – but it’s not surprising given the pattern I have outlined above.

The only reasonable response to such claims is cautious interest, and that is exactly what the medical community has done. In general most neurologists acknowledge that Zamboni’s claims need to be replicated and researched. Perhaps he is onto something, even if he is overstating the claims. Perhaps the perivenous inflammation of MS leads to CCSVI which exacerbates MS. Maybe Zamboni has found a piece to the puzzle, even if he has not solved the whole thing in one fell swoop.

Well now we have two independent replications of Zamboni’s research published in the latest issue of the Annals of Neurology – and both are completely negative. The first is a German study by Florian Doepp et al, using ultrasound to test the CCSVI criteria in 56 MS patients and 20 controls. They found almost completely negative results (one MS patient met one criterion, but not the others) – no signs of venous blockage in the MS patients.

The second study is a Swedish study by SundstrÃm et al (“Venous and cerebrospinal fluid flow in multiple sclerosis – a case-control study.” Peter SundstrÃm, Anders WÃ¥hlin, Khalid Ambarki, Richard Birgander, Anders Eklund and Jan Malm. Annals of Neurology) – not yet available online. This study used MRI scanning to assess blood flow in the internal jugular vein in 21 MS patients and 20 controls, and also found no difference.

Conclusion

These two studies are not going to be the final word on CCSVI and MS, but they are very important in signaling a note of caution to patients and clinicians about this new hypothesis. The treatment for CCSVI is invasive and has serious risks, and should not be undertaken lightly. I agree with the current consensus that evidence for CCSVI is too preliminary to warrant treatment, especially given the risks.

I do wish that the media and public would learn the more general lesson here – new dramatic ideas in science, especially those that seem to go against established knowledge, are likely to turn out to be wrong when the dust settles. It is partly the job of the skeptical community to provide cultural memory of such events – so the next time a lone scientist or doctor claims to have made a revolutionary breakthrough that seems a bit dubious, it is the skeptics who will be there to say – remember Zamboni.

20/20 did a fair job, but it’s hard for me to tell what impression the average viewer will come away with. The first 2/3 of the story was presented from a credulous point of view – essentially just telling Jennings’ story without any hint of skepticism. But then the editorial tone flips, and they give the “other side.” They did a fair job in this section of the segment, and my point of view was reasonably represented. And then at the end they leave the audience with the question – real or fake? Not the best format from a scientific point of view, but it could have been worse.

To summarize the story, Jennings, who was 28 at the time, received a flu shot in August of 2009, after which she started to develop dramatic neurological symptoms including shaking and difficulty speaking. Her story was picked up by a local news station, and from their it was picked up by Inside Edition and became a national story. Jennings spread a considerable amount of unwarranted fear about the flu vaccine, aided by a credulous media who failed to do even basic vetting of her story. In an ideal world, the original reporters would have showed their video to an actual neurologist and the story would have been nipped in the bud right there. But that’s not he world we live in.

Instead it was left to the science bloggers to point out that the video of Jennings was not showing dystonia (a specific type of movement disorder) but a rather textbook case of psychogenic symptoms. This is a difficult concept to get across, so much so that I wrote a dedicated blog entry to help explain it. The 20/20 segment did include my sound bite about this, but talking to people afterward they still have a hard time grasping psychogenic symptoms. Essentially, it is the brain’s response to stress in certain people, responding with very real neurological symptoms. But they are not based in any biological damage to the nervous system, rather it is a functional psychological disorder.

I also had a hard time getting the 20/20 producers to fully understand this, and further my degree of confidence about this. Jennings is actually a textbook case. I have now viewed considerable video of her symptoms, and showed it to various colleagues. There are a finite number of ways the brain and nervous system can malfunction (there are many more underlying causes, but only so many symptoms that can be produced). In other words, if one circuit in the brain is damaged (by whatever cause) it will produce a certain constellation of neurological findings with specific features. Jennings’ movements, evolving speech patterns, etc. do not fit into any known pattern of neurological damage. Rather, they have all the features of psychogenic symptoms.

The one that is perhaps easiest for people to understand is her vaguely British accent. She claims this simply results from her difficulty speaking, but again there are only so many ways that speech can be neurologically abnormal – none of them make you sound British.

The problem with the news reporting and public reaction is that it has fallen into a false dichotomy, and even the 20/20 story is headlined with “Medical Mystery or Hoax.” In fact, it is likely neither. The anti-vax community, which has embraced the story for its propaganda value, uses the hoax argument as a straw man. None of the science-bloggers discussing this case are making the claim that this is a hoax. But it’s clear that Jennings is not suffering from neurological damage (specifically mercury toxicity) from a flu vaccine.

There are some new tidbits that came out in the 20/20 report. First, we learn that Jennings did not discover that she can run walk backwards or sideways until she read online that this can be a feature of dystonia. Although I knew this, I think this was also the first time it was reported that Jennings did not receive a diagnosis of dystonia at Johns Hopkins. She was diagnosed by her neurologist there with a psychogenic disorder – Jennings first heard the term dystonia from the off-hand comment of a physical therapist. She then latched onto that as her diagnosis.

For me the most interesting part of the 20/20 segment was the interview with Rashid Buttar, the doctor who treated Jennings with  chelation therapy. Buttar’s response to challenges from the interviewer were right out of the quack playbook. When asked why he is not doing any science to back up his extraordinary claims he responded, “Nobody said it was science.” Buttar tried to defend his unscientific practices, as purveyors of dubious treatments tend to do, by appealing to anecdotes. When confronted with the fact that anecdotes are not scientific evidence he essentially responded by saying – talk to my patients. That’s right – his answer was a further appeal to anecdotal evidence.

The 20/20 segment also did a fair job of making the point the Buttar uses chelation therapy to treat just about anything. They then brought on a toxicologist to explain that Jennings was exposed to less mercury in the flu vaccine that you would get in a tuna fish sandwich.

Unfortunately, the 20/20 exposure (although I saw it as negative) will likely just send more patients to Dr. Buttar.

Conclusion

I remain sympathetic to Desiree Jennings. She is an unfortunate women who is being exploited by the media, dubious doctors, and the anti-vaccine movement. What she needs is the delicate management of science-based practitioners who know how to deal with such cases. What she doesn’t need is a media frenzy that invests her in her psychogenic symptoms.

I was also very sad to hear that her search for a “miracle cure” is not at an end. She said:

“If I have to go over to China and do experimental procedures, I’ll find a way to get it all back,” she said. “It may take a while, but I will get everything back. I will find a way.”

No – don’t go to China. All you will find there are clinics looking to take money from desperate Westerners with resources.

It is for people like Desiree Jennings that I feel compelled to be active in exposing health fraud. I have paid close attention to this story because of the anti-vaccine angle, but there is also another story here. Desperate patients with controversial or problematic symptoms are prime targets for fraud and quackery. There are sharks in the water ready to gobble up any victims who come their way. Regulations have failed to protect them (as they have with Buttar, who was able to skirt attempts at regulatory discipline). The media largely act like accomplices. Academia is failing to adequately address these issues (with some notable exceptions – but they are exceptions).

The public is practically left to fend for themselves, at the most desperate times in their lives, against sophisticated con-games that prey upon their health. That is the real story I want the media tell.

I was reminded of how embedded this myth is in our culture when I heard that not one but two movies out this past week repeat the 10% brain myth. In The Sorcerer’s Apprentice Nicholas Cage informs his young apprentice that normal people only use about 10% of their brains, but sorcerers can use all of it and that is what enables them to do magic. In Inception Leonardo DiCaprio makes a similar argument about his ability to enter the dreams of other people

So maybe it’s primarily Hollywood that didn’t get the memo. The 10% brain myth seems to be the go to explanation for any fantastical mental ability. I also see it crop up in science fiction from time to time. I was very disappointed to read it repeated in one of the Dune prequels, for example.

I have no problem separating fantasy and fiction from reality. I enjoy fantasy and science fiction and will allow for made up science in order to create the fictional world in which the story takes place. Sure, ships need some way to travel faster than light and the writer can make up whatever technobabble they wish to make this happen. In fantasy novels the existence of magic is taken for granted. If any explanation is offered for the mechanics of magic, that is a bonus.

But this does not excuse lazy fiction writing. The fictional science or metaphysics of these worlds is an important part of the setting and often an integral part of the plot as well. If it is done poorly, it does diminish the overall work. It’s not that I cannot suspend my disbelieve – it’s just bad fiction. If you are going to offer an explanation for why only certain people can do magic, make sure it’s not stupid. Thirty seconds on Google would have informed the writers that offering the 10% brain myth as an explanation was not fictional – it was just wrong.

And that is another important distinction to make, especially with science fiction. You are allowed to make up new science, but that is not an excuse to get known science wrong. To what extent blowing the science ruins a movie is a matter of taste. It certainly diminishes the story for me, but is not fatal as long as everything else is good. I am not the kind of person that would allow one bad thing to ruin an otherwise good movie or book.

The persistence of the 10% brain myth is evidence for cultural inertia – once misinformation gets into the culture, it is very hard to get rid of. This is especially true if the misinformation has some appeal – in this case suggesting that humans have vast untapped potential. Given that information on the internet is overwhelmingly debunking about this myth, I wonder if that will change. If these two movies are any indication – it hasn’t so far.

Last year I wrote about what has come to be called climategate – leaked e-mails from the CRU at the University of East Anglia which revealed some troubling statements and attitudes among the CRU scientists. At the time there were those who believed the e-mails to be the innocent chatter of scientists and others who thought it was the smoking gun of scientific fraud. At the time I wrote:

I don’t know what the lessons of climategate are yet – we need to see what actually happened first. But how people deal with climategate says a lot about their process. Those who are making bold claims based upon ambiguous, circumstantial, and out-of-context evidence, are not doing themselves or their side any favors.

In other words – let’s withhold final judgment until there has been time for investigations to discover what has actually been happening at the CRU. The e-mails were concerning, but not smoking gun evidence of anything – let’s wait and see. Well, now we have the results of several reviews of the evidence and therefore have something substantial upon which to based an informed opinion.

The BBC reports:

The review found nothing in the e-mails to undermine Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports.

It concludes that “their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt”.

However, it says “there has been a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness”, notable over complying with Freedom of Information (FoI) requests.

So after a thorough review there is no evidence of any actual scientific fraud, but the scientists were not adequately complying with FOI requests. It seems the climate scientists at the CRU had developed a bit of a bunker mentality and felt justified in frustrating what they felt were frivolous and harassing FOI requests. This, in turn, seems to be a symptom of an obscure scientific discipline (climate science) being thrust in recent years into the middle of a raging world-wide political controversy. There was not a culture among these scientists of dealing with the politically controversial aspects of their science. Hopefully climategate will be a turning point in this regard.

This episode reminds us that scientists are human, and therefore science itself is a human endeavor and subject to all the foibles that plague any human activity. But in the end the transparent and self-corrective aspects of science allow for reliable conclusions to be achieved in the end. After independent review the panels found that no data was hidden, destroyed, or manipulated and therefore the conclusions of the IPCC not threatened by climategate. Specifically, there were charges that the CRU did not have backups of data they relied upon for their conclusions. But the CRU was never the primary source of this data – they simply aggregated and analyzed it. The primary data has always been available from the sources. As the BBC reports:

“We find that CRU was not in a position to withhold access to such data or tamper with it,” it says.

“We demonstrated that any independent researcher can download station data directly from primary sources and undertake their own temperature trend analysis”.

Conclusion

This important follow up to the climategate story does not seem to be getting as much attention as the original scandal – which is typical. I do think it reinforces my point that in many situations it is prudent to wait for a thorough analysis of a complex situation rather than jump to conclusions based upon preliminary information. Specifically, those who were claiming that climategate was evidence that all of climate change science was a fraud have been made to look rather foolish. None more than the DiscoTute, however, who were claiming rather hysterically that this episode is an indictment of all of science.

I am not expecting any retractions.

It has also been learned that not all brains are the same in terms of aging. Most brains atrophy and develop pathological signs of aging, and this correlates with a reduction in mental agility (especially the ability to learn new things). But a lucky few do not seem to develop these age-related changes, and can remain mentally nimble well past 100. Nailing down the environmental and genetic variables that make the difference would be interesting and potentially very useful.

For now we are at the basic science level in addressing these questions – just figuring out what is going on. Clinical applications will hopefully come later. But there is one thing it seems we can say now based upon existing research – exercise, both physical and mental, is good for the brain and staves off the negative effects of aging.

A newly published study looking at the regulation of neural stem cells may ultimately illuminate one mechanism behind this. Researchers at the Salk Institute have been studying the regulation of neural stem cells. These are stem cells that lie quietly in the brain, waiting until they are called for to differentiate into neurons and make new connections. This is a delicate balance, however, as these cells need to remain viable and survive for a long time, but not activate or reproduce too much. The researchers have identified one major molecular signal involved in this regulation – the bone morphogenetic factor protein (BMP). They studied its activity in the hippocampus, a brain region involved in memory and  clearly shown to harbor neural stem cells.

In a series of experiments they identified that BMP signaling was inactive in proliferating or dividing cells. BMP signaling was active, however, in the quiet neural stem cells. They therefore hypothesized that BMP signaling is at least part of what is keeping these stem cells from dividing – a necessary function in keeping them viable as stem cells for years, while also preventing tumors from growing.

But so far they have only correlated BMP activity with the inhibition of dividing and proliferating. Scientists understand that correlation is not sufficient to establish causation, so they did the typical follow up experiment – they blocked BMP signaling (with a protein called NOGGIN) and showed that this does indeed allow neural stem cells to being dividing. They did this experiment in vitro (in a dish) and in mice brains. They also found that when neural stem cells were allowed to proliferate and turn into neurons, the pool of stem cells was eventually depleted. This suggests that BMP keeping neural stem cells quiet is important to maintaining a pool of stem cells throughout life.

This is an important step in understanding neural stem cells, but is just the beginning in a long path to hopefully understanding the genetic and environmental factors that influence neural stem cell function. It’s always difficult to extrapolate from this kind of basic science to clinical applications – you never know what applications will emerge. News reports tend to jump on the most dramatic potential applications – like preventing the aging of the brain. More often than not this just creates misleading expectations and disappointment (like the recent articles wondering why we haven’t reaped all the promised benefits of the human genome project). To some extent we have to be content to just advance our basic science understanding of the world, knowing that specific applications will spin off eventually, but unpredictably.

Meanwhile there is something everyone can do to improve their aging brain – exercise. It’s simple, but it works.