Tag Archives: pseudoscience

Dr Caroline Leaf and the tongues trivia tall tales

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In every day life, if someone started talking in strings of indecipherable, chaotic syllables, you’d be giving them quite a lot of space, concerned about how much methamphetamine they’d been using.

In the average charismatic church, it’s just another service (the speaking in tongues, not the meth).

I’ve grown up in Pentecostal churches, and was baptised in the Holy Spirit when I was a child, so I forget how freaky it is for those who’ve never seen a whole church start talking or singing in tongues. For the uninitiated, the Bible talks about speaking in other tongues, which is a “New Testament phenomena where a person speaks in a language that is unknown to him. This language is either the language of angels or other earthly languages (1 Cor. 13:1). It occurred in Acts 2 at Pentecost and also in the Corinthian church as is described in 1 Corinthians 14. This New Testament gift was given by the Holy Spirit to the Christian church and is for the purpose of the edification of the Body of Christ as well as for glorifying the Lord.” (http://carm.org/speaking-in-tongues)

In scientific terms, speaking in tongues is referred to as “Glossolalia”, from the Greek, ‘glosso-‘ ~ ‘the tongue’ and ‘-lalia’ ~ ‘to speak, to chat’. Scientists who initially studied it in the 60’s and 70’s drew the conclusion that glossolalia was related to psychopathology (that people who spoke in tongues were crazy) [1, 2], and in later decades, it was thought to be caused by a form of temporal lobe epilepsy [3].

Earlier today, Dr Caroline Leaf, a communication pathologist and self-titled cognitive neuroscientist, declared that, “When we speak in tongues, research shows that the areas involved in discernment in the brain increase in activity, which means we increase in wisdom.”

I was fascinated to find this research for myself. Dr Leaf never references her social media memes, so I started looking through the medical literature on the subject from respected databases like PubMed, and search engines like Google Scholar.

Despite a thorough search, I was only able to find one article that studied the pattern of brain activity during speaking in tongues. The article, “The measurement of regional cerebral blood flow during glossolalia: A preliminary SPECT study” [4] took five healthy women, psychiatrically stable, long term members of their churches, who had all spoken in tongues for many years. They scanned their brain activity after a period of singing to gospel songs in English and compared it to their brain activity after the same amount of time praying in tongues (while listening to the same music as before).

What they found was that the brain was more active in the left superior parietal lobe, while there was a decrease in brain activity in the prefrontal cortices, left caudate nucleus and left temporal pole. There was a trend for an increase in the activity of the right amygdala, but this may have just been chance.

So are any of those brain regions responsible for discernment as Dr Leaf suggested?

Well, that all depends on how you define “discernment”. “Discernment” is not really a common neurobiological term. The standard term in the literature is “judgement”. The brain regions that are associated with evaluation and judgement are the amygdala and ventral portions of the striatum as well as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), the insula, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), and the periaqueductal gray (PAG) [5].

Are there any parts of the brain that match in the two lists? Only one – the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, or vmPFC for short. The prefrontal cortex is important in reasoning and decision-making, especially if there is uncertainty or novelty, while the vmPFC in particular is involved in the use of goal-relevant information in guiding responses, e.g., assigning value to choice options [6].

According to Dr Leaf, “When we speak in tongues, research shows that the areas involved in discernment in the brain increase in activity”. But that’s certainly not what the research paper said. The actual research is entirely the opposite.

Again, there are really only two reasonable explanations as to why the research contradicts Dr Leaf; either there is another piece of research which supports Dr Leaf’s assertion, or Dr Leaf is simply wrong.

At the risk of repeating myself, Dr Leaf needs to quote her sources when she is writing her little social media memes. Her meme may be perfectly justified by robust scientific evidence, but if she isn’t willing to share her sources, we’ll never know, and the only conclusion remaining is that Dr Leaf can’t interpret simple research.

So as it stands, there really isn’t any evidence that speaking in tongues makes you more discerning. By trying to claim otherwise, Dr Leaf further undermines her own reputation and credibility as an expert.

References

  1. Hine, V.H., Pentecostal glossolalia: towards a functional reinterpretation. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1969. 8: 212-26
  2. Brende, J.O. and Rinsley, D.B., Borderline disorder, altered states of consciousness, and glossolalia. J Am Acad Psychoanal, 1979. 7(2): 165-88 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/370074
  3. Persinger, M.A., Striking EEG profiles from single episodes of glossolalia and transcendental meditation. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1984. 58: 127-33
  4. Newberg, A.B., et al., The measurement of regional cerebral blood flow during glossolalia: a preliminary SPECT study. Psychiatry Res, 2006. 148(1): 67-71 doi: 10.1016/j.pscychresns.2006.07.001
  5. Doré, B.P., et al., Social cognitive neuroscience: A review of core systems, in APA Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology, Mikulincer, M., et al., (Eds). 2014, American Psychological Association: Washington, DC. p. 693-720.
  6. Nicolle, A. and Goel, V., What is the role of ventromedial prefrontal cortex in emotional influences on reason?, in Emotion and Reasoning, Blanchette, I., (Ed). 2013, Psychology Press.

STOP THE PRESSES! Dr Leaf releases a new meme based on my correction, still doesn’t acknowledge source. (13 November 2014)

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So, I can’t find fault on what Dr Leaf said here.  It fits with the paper I quoted from Newberg et al (2006).  Still, it begs the question of why Dr Leaf couldn’t have said this in the first place, and why she still isn’t willing to share her citations?

It also raises the other obvious question, why is it important to know what our brain does in glossolalia?  It’s only a study of 5 patients, and I’m sure that not all episodes of speaking in tongues is associated with decreased intentionality.  The research, being so small, isn’t a true reflection of the practice of speaking in tongues.  Lets hope that the future will bring more funding to better study this central tenet to the charismatic faith.

Dr Caroline Leaf and the matter of mind over genes

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I think I might have to throw away my genetics textbook.

I was always taught that genes were the main driver behind health and disease, and I always thought it was a pretty good theory.

But not according to Dr Caroline Leaf, communication pathologist and self-titled cognitive neuroscientist, who said on her social media feeds today, “Our health is not controlled by genetics – our health is controlled by our mind.”

Taking her statement at face value, she appears to be saying that genes have nothing to do with our health. Dr Leaf has made some asinine statements in the past, but to suggest that genes are irrelevant to human health seemed so stupid that no one in their right mind would suggest such a thing.

Perhaps I was taking her statement the wrong way? I wanted to make sure I didn’t jump to any rash conclusions about Dr Leaf’s statement, so I pondered it at length. Could she be referring to ‘control’ in the absolute sense? How much control do genes have on our health? What about the mind?

After deliberating for a while, I still came to the conclusion that Dr Leaf’s statement was nonsense.

Unfortunately, Dr Leaf’s statement is, like so many of her previous Facebook memes, so vague as to be misleading. The meaning of ‘health’ and ‘controlled’ could be taken so many ways … which part of our health? How much regulation constitutes ‘control’? What about genetics?

Looking at her statement in more depth, it becomes clear that no matter which way Dr Leaf meant it, it’s still wrong. For example, all of human health is controlled, in part, by genetics. That’s because life itself is controlled by genetics. The human genome provides a blueprint for the construction of all of the proteins in all of the cells in our entire body. The expression of those genes determines exactly how our body will run. If the genes are wrong, if the translation of the gene code into a protein is wrong, or if too much or too little of a protein is made, all determines whether our body is functioning at its optimum level or not.

The stimulus for the expression of our genes is influenced by the environment in which we live. If I go out into the sun a lot, the UV light triggers my skin cells to make the protein melanin, which makes my skin go darker and helps to provide some protection against the damaging effects of the UV light.

While the environment plays a part of the expression of some genes, it’s wrong to say that genetics doesn’t control the process. If I go into the sun too much, I risk developing a melanoma, because the sun damages the genes in some of my skin cells, causing them to grow without control.

Genes are still responsible for the disease itself. Sometimes the trigger is from the environment, sometimes it’s not. There are some people with genes for melanoma who don’t need an environmental trigger, because they develop melanoma on skin that’s exposed to very little UV light, like the genital skin.

So fundamentally, even taking the environment into account, our health is controlled by our genetics.

The other part of Dr Leaf’s meme is also wrong. Our health is not controlled by our mind. Our genes are influenced by “the environment”, which according to the seminal paper by Ottman, “The environmental risk factor can be an exposure, either physical (e.g., radiation, temperature), chemical (e.g., polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons), or biological (e.g., a virus); a behavior pattern (e.g., late age at first pregnancy); or a “life event” (e.g., job loss, injury). This is not intended as an exhaustive taxonomy of risk factors, but indicates as broad a definition as possible of environmental exposures.” [1]

Even if one considers the mind as part of the sub classification of “a behavior pattern”, it’s still pretty clear that most of the factors that make up our environment are not related to our mind at all but are related to the external world, of which we have minimal or no control over. Sure, we make choices, but our choices aren’t truly free. They’re constrained by the environment in which we find ourselves. In the same way, our mind may have some tiny influence on our health, but only insofar as our environment and our genes will allow.

When it all boils down, this meme of Dr Leaf’s is rested on her foundational presumption that our mind can control matter, a very strong theme throughout her most recent book [2], but which is still preposterous. Our thoughts are simply a function of our brain, which is in turn determined by the function of our nerve cells, which is in turn a function of our genes and their expression.

Our mind doesn’t control matter. Matter controls our mind.

I can keep my genetics textbooks after all.

References

  1. Ottman, R., Gene-environment interaction: definitions and study designs. Prev Med, 1996. 25(6): 764-70 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8936580
  2. Leaf, C.M., Switch On Your Brain : The Key to Peak Happiness, Thinking, and Health. 2013, Baker Books, Grand Rapids, Michigan:

Dr Caroline Leaf – Exacerbating the Stigma of Mental Illness

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It was late in the afternoon, you know, that time when the caffeine level has hit critical and the only way you can concentrate on the rest of the day is the promise you’ll be going home soon.

The person sitting in front of me was a new patient, a professional young woman in her late 20’s, of Pakistani descent. She wasn’t keen to discuss her problems, but she didn’t know what else to do. After talking to her for a few minutes, it was fairly obvious that she was suffering from Generalised Anxiety Disorder, and I literally mean suffering. She was always fearful but without any reason to be so. She couldn’t eat, she couldn’t sleep, her heart raced all the time.

I was actually really worried for her. She let me do some basic tests to rule out any physical cause that was contributing to her symptoms, but that was as far as she let me help her. Despite talking at length about her diagnosis, she could not accept the fact that she had a psychiatric condition, and did not accept any treatment for it. She chose not to follow up with me either. I only saw her twice.

Perhaps it was fear for her job, social isolation, or a cultural factor. Perhaps it was the anxiety itself. Whatever the reason, despite having severe ongoing symptoms, she could not accept that she was mentally ill. She was a victim twice over, suffering from both mental illness, and its stigma.

Unfortunately, this young lady is not an isolated case. Stigma follows mental illness like a shadow, an extra layer of unnecessary suffering, delaying proper diagnosis and treatment of diseases that respond best to early intervention.

What contributes to the stigma of mental illness? Fundamentally, the stigma of mental illness is based on ignorance. Ignorance breeds stereotypes, stereotypes give rise to prejudice, and prejudice results in discrimination. This ignorance usually takes three main forms; people with mental illness are homicidal maniacs who need to be feared; they have childlike perceptions of the world that should be marveled; or they are responsible for their illness because they have weak character [1].

Poor information from people who claim to be experts doesn’t help either. For example, on her social media feed today, Dr Caroline Leaf said, “Psychiatric labels lock people into mental ill-health; recognizing the mind can lead us into trouble and that our mind is powerful enough to lead us out frees us! 2 Timothy1:7 Teaching on mental health @TrinaEJenkins 1st Baptist Glenardin.”

Dr Caroline Leaf is a communication pathologist and self-titled cognitive neuroscientist. It’s disturbing enough that Dr Leaf, who did not train in cognitive neuroscience, medicine or psychology, can stand up in front of people and lecture as an “expert” in mental health. It’s even more disturbing when her views on mental health are antiquated and inane.

Today’s post, for example. Suggesting that psychiatric labels lock people in to mental ill-health is like saying that a medical diagnosis locks them into physical ill-health. It’s a nonsense. Does diagnosing someone with cancer lock them into cancer? It’s the opposite, isn’t it? Once the correct diagnosis is made, a person with cancer can receive the correct treatment. Failing to label the symptoms correctly simply allows the disease to continue unabated.

Mental illness is no different. A correct label opens the door to the correct treatment. Avoiding a label only results in an untreated illness, and more unnecessary suffering.

Dr Leaf’s suggestion that psychiatric labels lock people in to their illness is born out of a misguided belief about the power of words over our thoughts and our health in general, an echo of the pseudo-science of neuro-linguistic programming.

The second part of her post, that “recognizing the mind can lead us into trouble and that our mind is powerful enough to lead us out frees us” is also baseless. Her assumptions, that thought is the main driving force that controls our lives, and that fixing our thought patterns fixes our physical and psychological health, are fundamental to all of her teaching. I won’t go into it again here, but further information on how Dr Leaf’s theory of toxic thinking contradicts basic neuroscience can be found in a number of my blogs, and in the second half of my book [2].

I’ve also written on 2 Timothy 1:7 before, another of Dr Leaf’s favourite scriptures, a verse whose meaning has nothing to do with mental health, but seized upon by Dr Leaf because one English translation of the original Greek uses the words “a sound mind”.

So Dr Leaf believes that labelling someone as having a mental illness will lock them into that illness, an outdated, unscientific and purely illogical notion that is only going to increase the stigma of mental illness. If I were @TrinaEJenkins and the good parishioners of 1st Baptist Glenardin, I would be asking for my money back.

With due respect, and in all seriousness, the stigma of mental illness is already disproportionate. Mental illness can cause insurmountable suffering, and sometimes death, to those who are afflicted by it. The Christian church does not need misinformation compounding the suffering for those affected by poor mental health. Dr Leaf should not be lecturing anyone on mental health until she has been properly credentialed.

References

  1. Corrigan, P.W. and Watson, A.C., Understanding the impact of stigma on people with mental illness. World Psychiatry, 2002. 1(1): 16-20 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16946807
  2. Pitt, C.E., Hold That Thought: Reappraising the work of Dr Caroline Leaf, 2014 Pitt Medical Trust, Brisbane, Australia, URL http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/466848

Dr Caroline Leaf and the myth of the myth of multitasking

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Can you successfully multitask?

According to Dr Caroline Leaf, communication pathologist and self-titled cognitive neuroscientist, multi-tasking is a myth.

Actually, Dr Leaf isn’t completely wrong. Her factoid is so vague that there may be some truth in it somewhere. The problem with teaching via vague factoid is that no one can apply anything from it. If we were to take Dr Leaf’s statement as a specific teaching or advice, then we would be misled.

Why? Because it all comes down to how you define ‘multi-tasking’.

I have a couple of patients in a nursing home, two old ladies who sit on a balcony in the sun, knitting and talking at the same time. Isn’t that multi-tasking? Think of what you do every day. How often are you doing something menial while doing something requiring a bit more attention? How often do you have a conversation with your passenger while your driving? Isn’t that multi-tasking? When you get up in the morning and you are able to make a cup of tea and some breakfast at the same time, read some of the paper or your e-mails while you’re eating your breakfast at the same time, etc. Isn’t that multi-tasking?

We multi-task all the time. If we had to do everything in a linear, sequential fashion, we would never get anything done. We are able to multi-task because routine tasks have become largely habitualised by our brains and don’t need lots of processing power to complete. Hence why we can do something as complex a driving a car while still talking to our passenger or listening to music. Certain occupations, such as air-traffic control, involve high levels of multi-tasking [1].

When a task is new and/or complicated, our brains need to utilise our resources of attention to properly process the information required by the task. There is only so much that our working memory can handle. Our working memory uses tricks to handle larger amounts of information through a process called “chunking” [2] but there is still a finite limit. Performing two or more cognitively demanding tasks at the same time is difficult, and the brain can often cope by shifting tasks, although there is always a price to pay for this [3].

So it is true that there are some tasks that require more of the cognitive capacity of the brain to process. The higher the cognitive load, the more capacity needed, and the less likely that the brain will be able to multi-task with it. Thus, it’s reasonable to suggest that we can’t multi-task all of the time with every task we have to perform (although the more we do a task, the more habitual it becomes, thus reducing the cognitive load of the task, and increasing our ability to multi-task it).

However it’s misleading to say that we can’t multi-task at all. It’s a myth that multi-tasking is a myth. Dr Leaf’s comment that, “Paying attention to one task at a time is the correct way”, isn’t a summary of the neuroscience of attention, but a subjective statement based on her grandiose pretension. There is no objective evidence that “one task at a time” offers generally applicable benefit.

So don’t be afraid of multi-tasking. Just know your limits.

References

  1. Nelson, J.T., et al., Enhancing vigilance in operators with prefrontal cortex transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). Neuroimage, 2014. 85 Pt 3: 909-17 doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.11.061
  2. Bor, D. and Seth, A.K., Consciousness and the prefrontal parietal network: insights from attention, working memory, and chunking. Front Psychol, 2012. 3: 63 doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00063
  3. Monsell, S., Task switching. Trends in cognitive sciences, 2003. 7(3): 134-40

Dr Caroline Leaf and the cart-before-the-horse conundrum

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A chaotic mind filled with thoughts of anxiety, worry, etc. sends out the wrong signal right down to the level of our DNA

So says Dr Caroline Leaf, communication pathologist and self-titled cognitive neuroscientist.

Her Facebook factoids have varied in their quality lately, ranging from the almost reasonable, down to the outright ridiculous. Today’s contribution rates an 8.5 out of 10 on the pseudoscience scale.

The reason why it rates so high is for the same reason why many of her factoids, and indeed nearly all her teaching, rates the same: Dr Leaf has the relationship between the brain and the mind back to front.  Dr Leaf squarely puts the proverbial cart before the horse.

One would think if you were going to claim to be a cognitive neuroscientist, you would at least get the basic facts right. But Dr Leaf’s teaching, from her first book through to her last, is based on this idea that it’s the mind that is in control of the brain, hence why she thinks that thoughts can be so toxic.

Dr Leaf’s entire teaching heavily rests on her fallacious assumption that the mind is in control of the brain. Thoughts are only important if the mind controls the brain. Toxic thoughts can only affect our health if the mind controls the body. Controlling toxic thoughts is only worthwhile if our mind can influence our brain and body in positive or negative ways.

The problem for Dr Leaf is that there is no credible scientific evidence that the mind controls the brain. The only evidence she does tend to proffer is based on the work of other pseudoscientists, or she misinterprets or misquotes real scientific data to fit her erroneous working theory. For example, Dr Leaf refers to a paper titled, “Local and nonlocal effects of coherent heart frequencies on conformational changes of DNA” [1]. She says that this paper is, “An ingenuous experiment set up by the HeartMath Foundation (which) determined that genuine positive emotion, as reflected by a measure called ‘heart rate variability’, directed with intentionality towards someone actually changed the way the double helix DNA strand coils and uncoils. And this goes for both positive and negative emotions and intentions.” [2: p111] Actually, the experiment was based on faulty assumptions, and so full of flaws in their methodology and analysis, that it could show nothing at all [3]. All it could prove was that Dr Leaf was so desperate to grasp hold of anything that seemed to support her theory that she was willing to use a twenty-year-old study from a group of pseudoscientists that also believe in occult practices like ESP and telekinesis (http://psychotronics.org).

The concept that we have a soul that’s separate to, and controls our brain, is called dualism. Modern science gave up on dualism a long time ago. While psychological sciences have been slower to give up on the idea of our thoughts as influential, no credible scientist still holds on to the idea that we have an ethereal force that controls our biology. Dualism is untenable both scientifically and philosophically [4].

The reality is the exact opposite to what Dr Leaf teaches. Our brain is responsible for all of the functions that are traditionally associated with the mind/soul/spirit. For more in depth information, please see my essay: Dr Caroline Leaf, Dualism, and the Triune Being Hypothesis. Therefore, a “chaotic mind filled with thoughts of anxiety, worry, etc” doesn’t send signals down to our DNA. It’s our DNA and the many steps in it’s expression, and the interaction of our biology and our environment, that then causes our minds to be worried, anxious, chaotic etc.

Dr Leaf is welcome to hold any view she likes, but she cannot claim to be a cognitive neuroscientist while holding a view that is directly contradicted by actual cognitive neuroscience. Nor should she be welcome to speak as an expert when she clearly is not one.

For the sake of her audiences and the Christian church as a whole, Dr Leaf needs to revise her teaching and bring it into line with the facts established by real cognitive neuroscientists.

References

  1. Rein, G. and McCraty, R. Local and nonlocal effects of coherent heart frequencies on conformational changes of DNA. in Proc. Joint USPA/IAPR Psychotronics Conf., Milwaukee, WI. 1993.
  2. Leaf, C.M., Switch On Your Brain : The Key to Peak Happiness, Thinking, and Health. 2013, Baker Books, Grand Rapids, Michigan:
  3. Pitt, C.E., Hold That Thought: Reappraising the work of Dr Caroline Leaf, 2014 Pitt Medical Trust, Brisbane, Australia, URL http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/466848
  4. Bunge, M., The Mind-Body Problem, in Matter and Mind. 2010, Springer Netherlands. p. 143-57.

Dr Caroline Leaf and the brain control misstatement

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“Always give credit where credit’s due.”

Dr Leaf is a communication pathologist, and a self-titled cognitive neuroscientist. Yesterday, Dr Leaf made a couple of carefully worded statements on her social media feeds, which given the quality of her previous couple of neuroscience-based factoids, is a definite improvement.

First, she said that, “Your brain is being continuously rewired throughout your life …”. Yep, I can’t disagree with that one. The brain is a very dynamic tissue, constantly remodelling the synaptic wiring to process the information it receives on a daily basis. That’s why the brain is referred to as ‘plastic’, reflecting the property of plastic to be moulded into any shape.

Her next offering sounds really good too. It’s full of encouragement, positivity and hope … the classic feel-good quote: “You can bring your brain under your control, on the path to a better, healthier, stronger, safer and happier life.” Whether it’s true or not depends on how literally you interpret it.

If you loosely interpret it, then it sounds ok. Sure, we have some control over how we act, and if we live our life in the direction dictated by our values, then we will have a better, healthier, stronger, safer and happier life. Modern psychological theory and therapies confirm this [1].

However, what Dr Leaf actually said was, “You can bring your brain under your control”. Having some control over our actions is entirely different to bringing our brain under our control. We can control some of our actions, but we don’t control our brain any more than we ‘control’ our car.

When we say that we’re ‘controlling’ the car, what we actually mean is that we are controlling the speed and direction of the car. But there are thousands of electrical and mechanical actions that take place each second that are vital for the running of the car, and that we have absolutely no direct control over. It just takes one loose nut or faulty fuse to make the car steer wildly out of control, or stop functioning entirely, and then we’re not in control at all.

In the same way, various diseases or lesions in the brain show that brain is really in control, tic disorders for example. These can range from simple motor tics (sudden involuntary movements) to complex tic disorders, such as Tourette’s (best known for the involuntary tendencies to utter obscenities). Another common example are parasomnias – a group of disorders in which people perform complex behaviours during their sleep – sleep talking, sleep walking, or sleep eating.

The fact we don’t see all of the underlying processes in a fully functional brain simply provides the illusion of control. Our brain is driving, our stream of thought just steers it a little, but it doesn’t take much to upset that veneer of control we think we possess.

Ultimately, our brain is still responsible for our action. We don’t have a separate soul that is able to control our brain. Any decisions that we make are the result of our brain deciding on the most appropriate course of action and enacting it [2] (and see also ‘Dr Caroline Leaf, Dualism, and the Triune Being Hypothesis‘ for a more in-depth discussion on the subject of dualism). Therefore, we can’t ever bring our brain under control.

This is important because if we believe that we can bring our brain under control, then by simple logical extension, we can control everything our brain is responsible for – our emotions, our feelings, our thoughts, our memory, and every single action we make. This is Dr Leaf’s ultimate guiding philosophy, though it’s not how our neurobiology works. If we were to believe that we control our thoughts and feelings, we set up an unwinnable struggle against our very nature, like trying to fight the tides.

We are not in control of all our thoughts, feelings, emotions or all of our actions, and neither do we have to be. We just need to make room for our uncomfortable emotions, feelings and thoughts, and to move in the direction of those things we value.

So if you were to take Dr Leaf at her word, she still missed the mark with her post. It sounds ok in a very general sense, but closer inspection reveals a subtle but significant error.

Giving credit where credit’s due, Dr Leaf has tried to tighten up her social media statements. It’s commendable, but unfortunately she needs to bring her underlying philosophy closer to the accepted scientific position to further improve the quality of her teaching.

References

  1. Harris, R., Embracing Your Demons: an Overview of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Psychotherapy In Australia, 2006. 12(6): 1-8 http://www.actmindfully.com.au/upimages/Dr_Russ_Harris_-_A_Non-technical_Overview_of_ACT.pdf
  2. Haggard, P., Human volition: towards a neuroscience of will. Nat Rev Neurosci, 2008. 9(12): 934-46 doi: 10.1038/nrn2497

Dr Caroline Leaf and the genetic fluctuations falsehood

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While idling away on Facebook, as is my usual pass time, I came upon Dr Leaf’s Facebook feed. There were her usual self-indulgent holiday happy-snaps and another couple of Pinterest-style fluffy inspirational posts. Then this: “Our genetic makeup fluctuates by the minute based on what we are thinking and choosing”.

Dr Caroline Leaf is a South African born and trained, US based, communication pathologist. She also claims that she’s a cognitive neuroscientist. Given the quality of the posts on her social media pages recently, no one could ever take such a claim seriously.

To make sure we’re all clear about what she just said, I’m going to say it again: “Our genetic makeup fluctuates by the minute based on what we are thinking and choosing”. It was an astonishing, if not bewildering statement, especially coming from someone with a PhD level education. If Dr Leaf were a medical doctor and publically made a statement like that, her registration would be reconsidered.

The core of the statement, which pushes it so far beyond the boundaries of rational scientific thinking, is the phrase “Our genetic makeup fluctuates by the minute.”

DNA in our cells is like an old audio cassette tape. Audio cassette tape is a long magnetic stripe, storing the code which the tape player decodes as sound. DNA is a chemical string which has a sequence of “bases” off to the side. The full DNA molecule is made of two matching strings joined by chemical bonds between the bases (hence the name, “base pairs”). Depending on what the cell needs, it runs the DNA through a decoder to either copy it, or to ‘play’ it (i.e. using the information stored in the code to build new proteins).

Like the tape in an audio cassette, the code of the DNA is incredibly stable. The rate of DNA mutation is about 1 in 30 million base pairs [1]. DNA doesn’t ‘fluctuate’, (“rise and fall irregularly in number or amount” [2]). It’s not the stock market. The number of genes in each cell of my body does not rise or fall depending on whether I’m having a good hair day.

The other part of Dr Leaf’s statement, that our DNA “fluctuates … based on what we are thinking and choosing” is also scientific nonsense. The only way that your thoughts and choices are capable of inducing genetic mutations is if those thoughts or choices involve cigarette smoking or standing next to industrial sources of ionising radiation.

I think Dr Leaf is trying to say that our thoughts and choices can change our gene expression, which is the construction of new proteins from the instructions in the DNA code. However, gene expression has nothing to do with our thoughts and choices. IVF embryos are expressing genes like crazy as they grow from one cell to an embryo in just a petri dish. It doesn’t think or choose.

More often than not, our thoughts and our choices are the result of gene expression, not the cause of it. We don’t have any specific control over the process either. The process of genetic expression is dependant on a complex series of promoters and tags on the DNA, which are controlled by other proteins and DNA within the cell, not thought or choice.

The truth is that gene expression occurs moment-by-moment, regardless of what we think or don’t think, do or don’t do. Gene expression is simply DNA being read. Our genetic makeup, the DNA code, is stable. It does not fluctuate. There is no part of Dr Leaf’s statement that is scientifically accurate.

Ultimately, Dr Leaf continues on her pursuit of pseudoscience, an affront to the people who trust her to tell them the truth, and the God of all truth that she purportedly represents.

References

  1. Xue, Y., et al., Human Y chromosome base-substitution mutation rate measured by direct sequencing in a deep-rooting pedigree. Curr Biol, 2009. 19(17): 1453-7 doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.07.032
  2. Oxford Dictionary of English – 3rd Edition, 2010, Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK.

Dr Caroline Leaf and the genetic remodelling myth

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We are all slowly mutating!

Yep, it’s true. Not to the same extent as you might see in shows like X-Files or Dr Who, but still, our DNA is slowly accumulating permanent changes to the pattern of the genes that it contains. Thankfully, it’s only in science fiction that the mutations result in zombie apocalypse scenarios.

Dr Caroline Leaf is a Communication Pathologist and a self-titled cognitive neuroscientist. Still glowing from the unquestioning adulation of her faithful followers at the Switch On Your Brain conference last week, Dr Leaf has hit social media again. Most of her posts have been innocuous quotes that look borrowed from Pinterest, but today, Dr Leaf has ventured into the pseudoscientific again by claiming that, “Our genes are constantly being remodeled by our response to life’s experiences.”

Unless your response to life’s experiences is to stand next to an industrial microwave generator or live in a nuclear waste dump, Dr Leaf’s statement is pure fiction. Dr Leaf confuses the mutation of our genes with the expression of our genes.

The only way our genes actually change is through mutation. A mutation is a permanent change in the sequence of the DNA molecule. A genetic mutation is a permanent change in the DNA sequence that encodes a gene. DNA is constantly mutating, because of environmental damage, chemical degradation, genome instability and errors in DNA copying or repair [1: p97]. Still, the actual rate of DNA mutation is about 1 in 30 million base pairs [2]. So DNA is very stable, and changes for a number of reasons, only some of which are related to our external environment. And as I alluded to just before, slightly tongue-in-cheek, our responses are not the main contributor to these environmental influences, unless we deliberately expose ourselves to ionizing radiation or smoke cigarettes. Our DNA does not change because of our thought processes as Dr Leaf advocates [3].

What does change more readily is the expression of those genes. Gene expression is the cell machinery reading the genes and making the proteins that the genes encode. The genes are expressed to make the proteins needed for the cell to maintain its function. Which genes are expressed is dependant on the cell’s stage of development and the environment it finds itself in. For example, when the body encounters a high level of dietary iron, a series of steps activates a gene to promote the production of ferritin, a protein that helps to carry iron in the blood stream [1: p375-6]. Gene expression isn’t solely dependent on our environment though, because an embryo is expressing genes like crazy in order to make the proteins to build a human being, but the gene expression in an embryo is largely following a pre-determined time course, not the environment [4] (and certainly not because of responses to life’s experiences).

In summary, our genes are controlled by a myriad of different factors, nearly all of which have nothing to do with our responses or choices. Our genes are not changed by our choices or our responses. Our genes may be mutating, but God designed our cells with mechanisms to repair them. Our genes are not being remodelled by our responses. That’s the realm of science fiction.

References

  1. Strachan, T. and Read, A., Human Molecular Genetics. 4th ed. 2011, Garland Science, New York, USA:
  2. Xue, Y., et al., Human Y chromosome base-substitution mutation rate measured by direct sequencing in a deep-rooting pedigree. Curr Biol, 2009. 19(17): 1453-7 doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.07.032
  3. Leaf, C.M., Switch On Your Brain : The Key to Peak Happiness, Thinking, and Health. 2013, Baker Books, Grand Rapids, Michigan:
  4. Ralston, A. and Shaw, K. Gene Expression Regulates Cell Differentiation. Nature Education, 2008. 1(1): 127; http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/gene-expression-regulates-cell-differentiation-931

Like to read more about Dr Leaf’s teaching and how it compares to current science? Download the free eBook HOLD THAT THOUGHT, Reappraising The Work Of Dr Caroline Leaf

Dr Caroline Leaf and the Mixed Message Memes

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If you were talking to your doctor, and she said, “Smoking is bad for you”, while lighting a cigarette for herself, would you be confused? Bit of a mixed message, don’t you think?

When I got back to Facebook last night, I found this interesting post from Dr Leaf: “If you have just spoken or done something … It means you have the physical root thought in your brain.” Perhaps not interesting in an I-never-knew-that sort of way … more interesting in a yet-another-mixed-message sort of way.

Dr Caroline Leaf is a Communication Pathologist and a self-titled Cognitive Neuroscientist. She has a habit of posting fluffy pseudoscientific memes to her social media feeds, which sound plausible at face value, but look a little closer, and they crumble like a sand castle at high tide.

Her current post is actually a bit sturdier than usual. We do use information we’ve learned to guide our ultimate behaviour, which include our words and our actions. But that’s not the whole story.

Our brain is an amazing organ. It processes a torrent of incoming information, compares it to previous experience stored in memory, and then delivers real-time instructions to the rest of the body, whilst updating the memory systems with the new information received. However, the brain also has a limited amount of energy that it can utilise – the brain only runs on about 40 watts of power [1: p7] (the same as a low power light bulb). In order to use this limited energy efficiently, the brain automates certain actions, like skills or habits, while retaining the flexibility to handle situations or to perform different actions than the skills or habits that we have developed.

The brain achieves this feat of brilliance by having a number of different types of memory [2] – procedural memory, priming, classical conditioning and non-associative learning make up implicit memory (memory not available to conscious awareness). Declarative memory is the fifth type of memory, which has two sub-components: episodic memory, which is the recallable memory of specific events (that you had coffee and eggs for breakfast), which itself is heavily dependent on semantic memory, the recallable memory for concepts (the abstract concepts of coffee, eggs, and breakfast) [3].

The storage of memories within declarative memory is also done piecemeal, by breaking down the information stored into chunks. Byrne notes, “We like to think that memory is similar to taking a photograph and placing that photograph into a filing cabinet drawer to be withdrawn later (recalled) as the ‘memory’ exactly the way it was placed there originally (stored). But memory is more like taking a picture and tearing it up into small pieces and putting the pieces in different drawers. The memory is then recalled by reconstructing the memory from the individual fragments of the memory.” [4] Retrieving the original memory is an inaccurate process, because sometimes pieces of the memory are lost, faded or mixed up with another [5]. What the memory systems lose in accuracy of recall is more than made up for by the flexibility of the information stored in memory to plan current action, and to imagine possible future scenarios.

Each time the brain decides on an action, it subconsciously performs five different steps to determine the best action to take, although the best way to consider the process is simply to say that “voluntary” action is a flexible and intelligent interaction with the subject’s current and historical context (present situation and past experience) [6].

In a new situation, the brain takes the information from the senses (sight, hearing etc) and compares it with the necessary pieces of information recalled from memory, including previous actions taken in similar situations and their outcome. It then decides on the best course of action, plans what to move, when to move, how to move, and then performs one more final check before proceeding. If the situation is familiar, and the brain has a previous script to follow, like a skill or a habit, it will perform those actions preferentially because it’s more efficient in terms of brain energy used, but if there is no previous script, the brain will plan a novel set of actions appropriate to the situation.

The best example of this is driving a car. I learnt to drive in my parents’ 1970-something, 4-to-the-floor Chrysler Galant. The skills required to handle a manual transmission car with an old clutch was challenging to learn, but once those skills were mastered and road rules learnt, I could drive successfully. But I didn’t need to learn evasive maneuvers. When confronted with an emergency situation for the first time, my brain moved my body very quickly to control the car in ways I’d not practiced, before my conscious mind had a chance to process the incident. So my brain used skills I had learnt in ways that I had not learnt, independent of my conscious will.

Dr Leaf’s underlying assumption is that we are in full control of our thoughts and actions. Unfortunately for Dr Leaf, neuroscience proves that predictable brain activity occurs several seconds before a person is aware of their intention to act [7, 8], which runs counter to her presupposition. To try and patch the enormous hole in her argument, she contends that the brain activity that occurs before we are consciously aware of our intentions is just our non-conscious brain accessing our stored, previously conscious thoughts (see also [9], page 42). The implication is that anything you do is still a choice that you made in either the present, or your past. As she said in the Facebook post, “Everything you say and do is first a thought that you have built in your brain.”

Unfortunately for Dr Leaf, cognitive neuroscience disproves her folk-science. It’s way oversimplified to suggest that everything we do is based on our thought life. There are many chunks of our memory that don’t come from a willful, conscious input of information (acquired fear is one example). And the brain can use chunks of memory, often from memory systems not accessible by our conscious awareness, to produce complex actions that are completely new, without needing our conscious input.

Even though cognitive neuroscience disproves her meme, which is embarrassing enough for a woman who calls herself a cognitive neuroscientist, the bigger problem for this meme is that Dr Leaf is again contradicting herself.

About a month ago, Dr Leaf published on her social media feeds, “Don’t blame your physical brain for your decisions and actions. You control your brain!” Now she says that your words and actions are the result of a hardwired “physical root thought”, so your decisions and actions ARE the result of your physical brain. Which is it Dr Leaf? For the sake of her followers, her clarification would be welcome. After all, the more she contradicts herself, the more doubt she casts over the validity of the rest of her writing and teaching. Is she accurately interpreting research, and drawing valid conclusions? Dr Leaf is welcome to comment.

But one thing’s for sure; her mixed message memes are certainly not doing her any favours.

References

  1. Berns, G., Iconoclast : a neuroscientist reveals how to think differently. 2008, Harvard Business School Press, Boston:
  2. Squire, L.R. and Zola, S.M., Structure and function of declarative and nondeclarative memory systems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 1996. 93(24): 13515-22 http://www.pnas.org/content/93/24/13515.abstract
  3. Binder, J.R. and Desai, R.H., The neurobiology of semantic memory. Trends Cogn Sci, 2011. 15(11): 527-36 doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2011.10.001
  4. Byrne, J.H. Learning and Memory (Section 4, Chapter 7). Neuroscience Online – an electronic textbook for the neurosciences 2013 [cited 2014, Jan 3]; Available from: http://neuroscience.uth.tmc.edu/s4/chapter07.html.
  5. Bonn, G.B., Re-conceptualizing free will for the 21st century: acting independently with a limited role for consciousness. Front Psychol, 2013. 4: 920 doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00920
  6. Haggard, P., Human volition: towards a neuroscience of will. Nat Rev Neurosci, 2008. 9(12): 934-46 doi: 10.1038/nrn2497
  7. Libet, B., et al., Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness-potential). The unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act. Brain, 1983. 106 (Pt 3): 623-42 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6640273
  8. Soon, C.S., et al., Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain. Nat Neurosci, 2008. 11(5): 543-5 doi: 10.1038/nn.2112
  9. Leaf, C.M., Switch On Your Brain : The Key to Peak Happiness, Thinking, and Health. 2013, Baker Books, Grand Rapids, Michigan:

(PS: And happy Independence Day, USA! #4thofjuly )

Autism Series 2013; Part 1 – Why it matters.

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What do you think of when you think about autism?  Is it a TV character like Jake, from Kiefer Sutherland’s recent series ‘Touch’, or perhaps Sheldon from ‘The Big Bang Theory’?  Or is it a movie character like the savant that Dustin Hoffman played in ‘Rain Man’? They are common stereotypes, but they only depict a tiny fraction of the autism that is all around us every day.  Chances are, you would run into people every day who have autism.  Would you be able to pick them?

The current point prevalence rate of autism is given by various international health bodies including the World Health Organization, as one person in a hundred.  With a prevalence of one percent of the population as having autism, you would think it would be better known, better dealt with by teachers, better handled by public officials, better screened and managed by health workers, and better resourced in terms of assistance to families and in terms of research dollars.

But while funding and recognition are important, the greatest impact that the lack of autism awareness has is the human cost.  It is the cost that can’t be measured in terms of dollars, caused by the maligned stigma that having autism brings.

Autism at the less severe end, what used  to be called ‘high functioning’ autism, or what I prefer to classify as (the now unofficial diagnosis of) Aspergers Syndrome, doesn’t make a person look that much different on the outside.  But it makes their behaviour somewhat odd to everyone else.  They have quirks.  They have strange mannerisms.  They have rigid ways of doing things.  They have very narrow interests.  They misread social cues.

“Normal” people don’t like odd.  Especially children.  If you don’t fit in to their particular group-think view of the world, their intolerant tormenting can be merciless and unrelenting.  Some people never grow up though, and many adults with autism can be marginalised by their adult peers. Every barb, joke and isolating experience eroding at the soul of a person with autism until there is nothing left.

This is the most destructive of all. It is death by a thousand insults.

I am writing this series of blogs because I want to help assist in whatever way I can to reduce the ignorance surrounding autism.  There is still so much ignorance out there – simple ignorance because the message is still diffusing through our social networks, and  obstinate ignorance, by people who use pseudoscientific scare mongering to promote their views, or promote bogus treatments for the sole purpose of taking advantage of the desperation of some of those who live with autism.

No matter which form of ignorance is out there, ignorance is ignorance and it does the same damage.  It needs to be stopped.

When I was a little boy, I was odd.  It took me a while before I started talking.  I had an obsession with vacuum cleaners and watches.  I was the misfit, or the loner.  I was incessantly bullied in the latter half of primary school and almost all the way through high school.  I didn’t want to go out and be with large groups of other kids.  My parents made me go to marshall arts training, cub scouts, church groups and school holiday excursions.

I hated those social outings.  I had huge anxiety being in these large groups.  Even when I wasn’t being mocked or belittled, I still felt anxious because I didn’t naturally fit in with the other kids.  The leaders of the group would go out of their way to include me but that had the opposite effect of highlighting how much of a social misfit I was.  The anxiety was disabling when I was in middle high school.

Thankfully I was smart, mainly in maths and science.  Academic achievement was my only positive, so I took refuge in studying.  I graduated in the top percentile in my state, and made it into medical school.  I did a whole medical degree, five years in hospitals including several in subspecialty paediatrics, and a fellowship in General Practice, and another eight years of GP experience, before my son was diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum.

Despite years of medical training, It’s only been since my son’s diagnosis that I have been realising just how much of my quirky behaviour and social dysfunction was due to the fact that I’m on the spectrum too.  All those years, I thought I was retarded, socially incompetent, a freak.  All those years, I was bullied, harassed and made to think I was stupid, just because I didn’t naturally understand the unspoken social codes , but no one explained them to me.

That’s nearly forty years of living with self-doubt, low self-esteem, low self-confidence, and various mental health issues, because I never knew, because no one else knew, because of ignorance and intolerance.

So it stings when I hear people spread mistruths about ASD, and it pains me when the mistruths are spread by people who should know better.  It makes me mad when the mistruths come from self-titled ‘experts’.

I don’t want my son going through the same stigma and denigration, or anyone else on the spectrum for that matter.  The truth about autism – what it is, what it is caused by, and what strengths autism bestows, need to hold sway so that death by a thousand insults is no longer tolerable in our progressive society.

I will publish further blog posts over the coming days to weeks on what autism is, on why it seems to be increasing, and the latest scientific evidence on what autism may be caused by.  I will devote a whole blog (or two) to the misinformation surrounding vaccines and autism.  So stay tuned.