Science is incremental.  I get that.  And my job is awesome.  I get that, too.  For example, today I am writing from the beautiful Getty Center Library, where I can see all of West Los Angeles to the Pacific Ocean.  But it requires persistence and patience and a willingness to slog through details while keeping an eye on the bigger picture.  This is not advertised in the glossy pages of top journals or popular science magazines, radio shows, or anywhere else that I am aware of.

When I was younger, I thought that research was fast-paced and that the excitement of discovery overflowed from scientists, for whom it would be easy to spill words onto the pages of journals.  Then, other researchers (and the public) could drink up, pull ideas from different domains and ka-pow, even more exciting discoveries.  Being in my third year of graduate school now, and being at the Getty to work on my prospectus, I just want to be clear: for anyone who is thinking about a career in research, the elements that seem most necessary for good research once you have an idea (at least in my field) are good orgazational and planning skills, the ability to manage people (research assistants, coordinate with the business office, the people who manage the equipment, etc.), and attention to details.

I’ve been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers.  One of the two major criteria that Gladwell sets forth as key to success, is a willingness to work really hard.  Contrast this with one telling teaching review that Brett got last quarter in which one of his students complained that the course demanded an unreasonable 4 hours of homework each week!  Horrors.  Four whole hours.  Cry me a river.

If you can identify with the student above, if you do not want to sit around and think about the same set of problems for more than four hours, then research is probably not for you.

But if you are willing to dot your i’s and cross you t’s and you want to know how the world, or people, or anything else works, then you too, could be sitting in a beautiful library every Thursday, possibly even overlooking an ocean, and working on your prospectus too.

The US Preventative Services Task Force concluded last week that men over 75 years old should no longer be screened for prostate cancer. Furthermore, they conclude that “the current evidence is insufficient to assess the balance of benefits and harms of prostate cancer screening in men younger than age 75 years.”

As I have written before, while we in the US like to get as much care as possible, there are situations when more care isn’t necessarily better, and that in many cases, patient factors should help decide the course of treatment. Prostate cancer screening is a prime example of a situation in which screening can lead to a whole host of uncomfortable and potentially life altering consequences (e.g. invasive procedures, impotence), and may or may not lead to a longer life.

While there are certainly many situations in which the best treatments are clear and effective, in cases where the relationship between cause and effect, and treatment and health, are murkier, more may not be better, and in fact may be worse.

A recent article in the New York Times reported results from an APA study that concluded that abortion does not cause mental illness. The full title of the article is “Abortion Does Not Cause Mental Illness, Panel Says.” Maybe I am being paranoid, but somehow that title calls the results into question (as in, “a panel claims this, but we’re still not sure”). However, in the brief summary, the author points out that these results are the same as results from a large scale review of evidence in 1990. So, why are we continuing to ask this question? Is it because conservative forces are hoping that we’ll find something that gives credence to the idea that women shouldn’t have control over their own bodies? Given that this finding has been replicated in two large studies now, for my money, I’d rather invest in exploring mental health consequences of issues that have less to do with partisan politics and more to do with actual risk.

Since this website is supposed to be about sound as well as science, I’m excited to announce that most of the slides and podcasts for the Neuroimaging Training Program Summer Course at UCLA are up on the web!  Enjoy the sound and slides of experts from around the world as they discuss methods relevant to neuroimaging research.

The itunes link is here.  Note, slides and podcasts from last year’s course are available at the iTunes link as well.

I recently posted a summary of an article that I found interesting and likely to bring out some healthy controversy at PsychInAction. The article was about differences in the ways that liberals and conservatives process information (in the brain). The basic finding was that people who identified as conservative (compared to those who identified as liberal) showed less activity in a brain area that has previously been related to cognitive control during a task that requires one to inhibit a certain prepotent response (basically, you need to switch gears and restrain yourself from the habitual response). In concluding, the authors suggest that while liberals performed better on the laboratory task that required response inhibition, the conservatives in their sample would likely perform better on a task where a fixed response style is optimal.

As with many brain studies, there are several caveats and logical fallacies that are easy to fall into (see here for a discussion of what we can and can’t say with brain data), but in an informal lecture, even scientifically-conservative Russ lamented recently that in order to get papers in places like Nature, we, as scientists need to argue for why our findings are cool and worth the space they take to print in the absence of space to list all of the constraints, assumptions, and other details that might help people fully understand all of the limitations of a given dataset. So, while we should stick closely to our data and not make wild claims about what the brain has to tell us about social scientific questions, using brain data to generate new hypotheses (that are later tested) is how science can move forward.

The study described above is not perfect (would be interesting to see with a larger sample and to know more about third variable personality factors), and it is interesting to consider counter examples (as one colleague pointed out, it would be easy to argue that some religious conservatives show incredible flexibility in taking from the Bible), but I think as scientists, in addition to poking holes in the methods of others (a necessary set of checks and balances), we should also be considering how different methods can inform one another and how to test alternative hypotheses if we don’t believe the findings of published work.

There are direct relationships between where you fall in the socioeconomic hierarchy and your health. There are also relationships between whether you are a man or a woman, and where you fall on this hierarchy. Lastly, there are relationships between gender and health. How do gender and socioeconomic status interact to give some people a better shot at a healthy life? The attached files are from a talk I gave on this topic, as well as a reference list to accompany the slides. Please feel free to email or post with questions.

SES, Gender and Health (Slides)

SES, Gender and Health (Outline and Biblio)

Many of you have heard me tell Scott stories. Scott is the craziest and most articulate person I know, full of life and energy, a real pleasure to have as a colleague and friend. Scott has conducted research in deception, including counter intelligence and other applied work, and has strong opinions on many topics, including the inefficiency of current lie detection methods and the pointless nature of torture (three cheers for evidence based opinions!). I had been planning to interview Scott about his research, and to post the audio here, but last Thursday, his dazzling light was extinguished in a fatal motorcycle accident involving a truck.

While Scott was an expert in deception, his work was far reaching and included work in persuasion and cryptography among other topics, and he even gave lectures with his partner (an expert in eating disorders) about the parallels between totalist organizations (e.g. cults, terrorist organizations) and eating disorders (in the ways they take over your mind and control your life).

Scott was passionate about making things better for people at all levels, from the small daily puns and compliments he paid his colleagues to the zeal and fervor he brought to our research, and the energy devoted to combating human rights abuses.

A partial list of Scott’s publications from his time at RAND can be found here:

http://rand.org/pubs/authors/g/gerwehr_scott.html

Check out this website, spoofing the cosmetic industry’s “no animal testing” logo.

As funding becomes ever more politicized and as we seek to reach a wider, more interdisciplinary audience, the words and symbols we choose to represent ourselves and our science become of greater and greater importance.

In two recent conversations with David Hemenway, I learned about how to get more bang for our buck in keeping people safer, and about a cool statistical insight that helps explain things ranging from why your classes are larger than “average” to why its hard to reduce the number of cars on the road.

Listen to the audio:

Public Health Success Stories

Why Your Classes are Larger than Average

Recent work by Bob Kaplan and Dominick Frosch suggests that when patients and doctors work together to make decisions, everyone wins.  More…