Best. Botched suicide. Ever.

The New York Times reported in 1988:

A mentally ill young man who shot himself in the head in a suicide attempt suffered a brain injury that apparently eliminated his phobia of germs and his obsession with washing his hands, doctors say.

The .22-caliber slug destroyed the section of the brain responsible for his disabling obsessive-compulsive behavior without causing any other brain damage, his doctor said in a report in Physician's Weekly, a British journal of psychiatry. Victims of the disorder typically have an inexplicable compulsion to repeat activities over and over.

The afflicted man, now a straight-A college student, tried to kill himself five years ago, when he was 19 years old, said Dr. Leslie Solyom, a psychiatrist at Shaughnessy Hospital in Vancouver, British Columbia."

The man, identified only as George, washed his hands hundreds of times a day and took frequent showers, Dr. Solyom said. The behavior had forced him to drop out of school and quit his job.

Dr. Solyom treated him for more than a year before he tried suicide.

''George was also very depressed and told his mother that his life was so wretched that he would rather die,'' Dr. Solyom related. ''She said, 'So look George, if your life is so wretched, just go and shoot yourself.' So George went to the basement, stuck a .22-caliber rifle in his mouth and pulled the trigger.''

The bullet lodged in the left front lobe of the brain. Surgeons removed it but could not get out all the fragments. ''When he was transferred to our hospital three weeks later, he had hardly any compulsions left,'' Dr. Solyom said. George had also retained the same I.Q. he had before becoming ill, Dr. Solyum said, and he returned to school, got a new job and is now in his second year of college.

Oliver Sacks (1933 - 2015)

Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and writer, has died of cancer at 82.

Here's the New York Times obit. (A video about Sacks will automatically start playing when you click the link. I've removed links from this block quote, and added some links.)

Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and acclaimed author who explored some of the brain’s strangest pathways in best-selling case histories like “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” using his patients’ disorders as starting points for eloquent meditations on consciousness and the human condition, died Sunday at his home in New York City. . . .

Dr. Sacks announced in February, in an Op-Ed essay in The New York Times, that an earlier melanoma in his eye had spread to his liver and that he was in the late stages of terminal cancer.

As a medical doctor and a writer, Dr. Sacks achieved a level of popular renown rare among scientists. More than a million copies of his books are in print in the United States, his work was adapted for film and stage, and he received about 10,000 letters a year. (“I invariably reply to people under 10, over 90 or in prison,” he once said.)

Dr. Sacks variously described his books and essays as case histories, pathographies, clinical tales or “neurological novels.” His subjects included Madeleine J., a blind woman who perceived her hands only as useless “lumps of dough”; Jimmie G., a submarine radio operator whose amnesia stranded him for more than three decades in 1945; and Dr. P. — the man who mistook his wife for a hat — whose brain lost the ability to decipher what his eyes were seeing.

Describing his patients’ struggles and sometimes uncanny gifts, Dr. Sacks helped introduce syndromes like Tourette’s or Asperger’s to a general audience. But he illuminated their characters as much as their conditions; he humanized and demystified them. . . .

“I had always liked to see myself as a naturalist or explorer,” Dr. Sacks wrote in “A Leg to Stand On” (1984), about his own experiences recovering from muscle surgery. “I had explored many strange, neuropsychological lands — the furthest Arctics and Tropics of neurological disorder.”

His intellectual curiosity took him even further. On his website, Dr. Sacks maintained a partial list of topics he had written about. It included aging, amnesia, color, deafness, dreams, ferns, Freud, hallucinations, neural Darwinism, phantom limbs, photography, pre-Columbian history, swimming and twins. . . .

“I love to discover potential in people who aren’t thought to have any,” he told People magazine in 1986.

Other books included the best-selling “An Anthropologist on Mars” (1995), about autistic savants and other patients who managed to thrive with their disorders; “The Mind’s Eye” (2010), about the ways people compensate for brain injuries; and three books about specific neurological conditions: “Migraine” (1970), “The Island of the Colorblind” (1997) and “Seeing Voices” (1989), a look at language perception among the deaf. . . .

Dr. Sacks’s accounts of neurological oddities found a wide popular audience and were adapted for Hollywood, the theater, even opera. Robin Williams portrayed a Sacks-like doctor in the 1990 film version of “Awakenings,” and the novelist Richard Powers based a central character on him in his 2006 book, “The Echo Maker.” The 2011 movie “The Music Never Stopped” was adapted from “The Last Hippie,” one of the case studies collected in “An Anthropologist on Mars.” An opera based on “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” with music by Michael Nyman and a libretto by Christopher Rawlence, had its premiere in London in 1986 and was staged at Lincoln Center in New York in 1988. . . .

A skilled pianist, Dr. Sacks often wrote about the relationship between music and the mind, eventually devoting a whole book, “Musicophilia” (2007), to the subject. Dr. Sacks disagreed with the Harvard psychologist and author Steven Pinker’s view of music as “auditory cheesecake, an evolutionary accident piggybacking on language,” and pointed to its ability to reach dementia patients as evidence that music appreciation is hard-wired into the brain.

“I haven’t heard of a human being who isn’t musical, or who doesn’t respond to music one way or another,” he told an audience at Columbia University in 2006. “I think we are an essentially, profoundly musical species. And I don’t know whether — for all I know, language piggybacked on music.”

Referring to Nietzsche’s claim that listening to Bizet had made him a better philosopher, Dr. Sacks said, “I think Mozart makes me a better neurologist.” . . .

After several early flings, he wrote [in his 2015 memoir], he settled into a period of celibacy that lasted 35 years before he found love late in life. He is survived by his partner of eight years, the writer Bill Hayes. . . .

In 1989, interviewing him for “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,” Joanna Simon asked Dr. Sacks how he would like to be remembered in 100 years.

“I would like it to be thought that I had listened carefully to what patients and others have told me,” he said, “that I’ve tried to imagine what it was like for them, and that I tried to convey this.

“And, to use a biblical term,” he added, “bore witness.”

He also bore witness to his own dwindling life, writing reflective essays even in his last days. On Aug. 10, his assistant, [Kate] Edgar, who described herself as his “collaborator, friend, researcher and editor” as well, wrote in an email: “He is still writing with great clarity. We are pretty sure he will go with fountain pen in hand.”

Several days later, a valedictory essay titled “Sabbath” appeared in The Times. In it, Dr. Sacks considered the importance of the Sabbath in human culture and concluded:

“And now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual, but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life — achieving a sense of peace within oneself. I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.”

Car passengers: never put your feet on the dashboard

After a 22-year-old woman fell asleep on a long car trip with her feet on the dashboard, the car crashed, and the airbag caused her knees to hit her head, causing brain damage. Her mom comments:

“I got back a different daughter. I lost a sweet 22-year-old who worked full-time and put herself through university. She was on a great path. I got a 13-year-old with anger issues.”

Animal minds and meat

Recent studies have found that people are more likely to deny or minimize animal minds when they think of the animals as food, or when they expect to eat meat soon:

[M]eat eaters were asked to think about cows and sheep. Some of them thought about these animals living an idyllic life on a farm. Others thought specifically about these animals growing up on a farm and then being killed for food. Later, they also rated the mental abilities of the animals. When people thought about the animals as food, their ratings of the mental abilities of the animals were lower than when they thought about the animals living on a farm.

It isn't just thinking about animals being used for food, though. In one final study, all of the participants had to write about the process of raising and butchering animals for food. All of the participants thought they were going to do a food sampling task after writing the essay. Half of the participants were told they would be eating fruit during the food sampling, while others were told they would be eating beef and lamb. Finally, participants rated the mental abilities of cows and sheep. The group that was about to eat meat gave much lower ratings of the mental abilities of cows and sheep than the group that was about to eat fruit.

This abstract of the studies theorizes that we deny animal minds in order to reduce our own cognitive dissonance. The dissonance can result from simultaneously wanting to eat meat, yet not wanting to harm beings that have minds.

"Who's in charge — you or your brain?"

That question is debated in this Guardian piece. It's a flawed question, since your brain is part of you.

It reminds me of this excellent article: "'Is it evolutionary, or is it . . .?'" The point of the article is that that's probably not a good way to start a question, since you can agree with an evolutionary explanation of human behavior while also agreeing with other explanations of the same behavior. (Previously.)

The "brain" article ends with this passage by neuroscientist David Eagleman, which I strongly agree with:

It is not contradictory to recognise that we are sealed off from most of reality, and that we can discover more of it by a process of careful experimentation. That is the endeavour of science. For example, you cannot see, hear or touch radio waves, but you can build machines to translate the waves into the biologically delimited language in which you can understand them. You can build such machines only because science reaches beyond what we know to discover new realms.

Neuroscience is uncovering a bracing view of what's happening below the radar of our conscious awareness, but that makes your life no more "helpless, ignorant, and zombie-like" than whatever your life is now. If you were to read a cardiology book to learn how your heart pumps, would you feel less alive and more despondently mechanical? I wouldn't. Understanding the details of our own biological processes does not diminish the awe, it enhances it. Like flowers, brains are more beautiful when you can glimpse the vast, intricate, exotic mechanisms behind them.

One problem is that reductionism is very tempting. Reductionism means feeling unsatisfied with making an observation based on evidence — "Hey look, here's something" — and feeling the need to rule out the possibility of other types of observations by adding: "And it's the only thing." Reductionism can make people feel contrarian and scientific, without actually being scientific. There can be multiple layers of explanation that are all accurate and not mutually exclusive; different kinds of description can peacefully coexist.

A template for the mental-health industry

Alex Knepper writes (on Facebook):

You can't be a self-actualized human being while afflicted with crippling boredom. It's affecting millions -- you are not alone. And we know that there are chemicals in the brain that relate to boredom, so, since it's chemically-caused, you can't be held responsible for it. If you want to reverse this disorder, you may benefit from our very expensive drug. Make sure to see an expensive Mental Health Advocate to see how you can pay to get this drug and correct your disease of boredom.

(Previously.)

The statistical point that neuroscience papers get wrong half the time

Ben Goldacre explains.

The explanation does take a few dense paragraphs; Goldacre admits his own writing is going to cause some "pain" for readers, and I had to read it twice before I got it. But it's worth it for anyone interested in brain studies.

UPDATE: I posted the article to Metafilter, where a commenter named "valkyryn" takes another shot at explaining it:

Say we've got two samples, A and B. For our sample size and subject matter, if we expose it to chemical X, any detected results need to be above 20 Units (U) to be statistically significant.

We expose A to X, and we get a result of 30U. That's statistically significant.

We expose B to X, and we get a result of 15U. That isn't statistically significant.

But note that the result for A is less than 20U from the result for B. This means that while we did have a statistically significant finding for A, the difference between A and B is not statistically significant.

This significantly diminishes the value of our findings, as the math only supports a relatively unambitious claim. We want to say that A and B are different, but the math won't let us, as the difference in reaction between A and B is too small. We're left with a relatively uninteresting finding, namely that something seems to happen with A and X, but we aren't sure how much that matters.

Careers tend not to be made out of this kind of finding, and the author is implying that because scientists have an interest in careers, they're making more ambitious claims than their studies actually permit.

IN THE COMMENTS: LemmusLemmus illustrates the problem with this graph:

LemmusLemmus explains:

The result for condition A is significantly different from zero (i.e., it "is significant"), while the result for condition B is not (the confidence interval for A does not include zero, but the confidence interval for B does). However, the two confidence intervals overlap, which means that the results for conditions A and B are not significantly different from each other.

Do you "love your iPhone"?

"Literally"?

Or, is an article that says modern technology is disconnecting us from human interaction, and claims to back this up with a brain imaging study, too good for the New York Times to check?

Football and brain damage

I don't generally pay attention to sports news, but this has been a big story this week:

Before he shot himself fatally in the chest Thursday, the former Chicago Bears defensive back Dave Duerson sent family members text messages requesting that his brain tissue be examined for the same damage recently found in other retired players. . . .

As a longtime force in the N.F.L. players union, Duerson, 50, was keenly aware of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease linked to depression, dementia and occasionally suicide among more than a dozen deceased players. He had expressed concern in recent months that he might have had the condition, said one person close to him who spoke on condition of anonymity. . . .

Now, at Duerson’s request, his brain may contribute to knowledge of how — and how many — football players are at risk for C.T.E. Thirteen of the 14 deceased N.F.L. players who have been examined for the disease by the Boston University researchers have been found to have it, although that rate is skewed by the fact that many died in part through acts linked to the disease itself, like suicide, drug abuse or mental breakdown.

There also is a question as to whether the disease derives from a career in pro football or simply from many years of playing football at any level. Last year, C.T.E. was found in the brain of Owen Thomas, a University of Pennsylvania football captain who killed himself in April.

A year ago, Penelope Trunk wrote:

It’s unbelievable to me that everyone continues to watch football when we know that men are getting genuinely, permanently, brain damaged. The game is tantamount to cockfighting, only with people instead of animals.

The NFL has finally admitted the problem, to the extent it is poised to be the largest funding source for research about trauma to the brain. But still, the game encourages brain trauma. And people cheer.

I can understand if it’s like smoking. You’re addicted, you can’t stop. But what about bringing your kids to the game? What about all the people who make the Superbowl a family TV event? Kids who play football in high school are more likely to die from that than drunk driving or guns. And parents encourage their kids to play this sport?

The culture of football amazes to me — the incredible level of denial. So what I'm thinking is that people are delusional. And they know it, but they keep going. They cultivate delusion.

My Occam's Razor theory: society has a straightforward gender-based double standard. If there's a self-destructive behavior that's mostly done by women (anorexia, self-cutting), society feels sorry for these women and wants to help them. When there's a self-destructive behavior that's mostly done by men (football, fist fights, "daredevil" stunts), we accept it, or even cheer it on.

IN THE COMMENTS: My mom throws in some grim irony:

And don't forget the terrible equal pay for equal work problem. All those things you've associated with women are severely underpaid. Aaron Rodgers makes millions, but the self-cutting girl down the street gets literally nothing.

"Music is a form whose meaning depends upon its violation."

Jonah Lehrer analyzes "the neuroscience of music."

But there's something I don't understand about his whole explanation. It's all about how music sets up "expectations" and then violates them, or delays the satisfaction of them:

While music can often seem (at least to the outsider) like a labyrinth of intricate patterns – it’s art at its most mathematical – it turns out that the most important part of every song or symphony is when the patterns break down, when the sound becomes unpredictable. If the music is too obvious, it is annoyingly boring, like an alarm clock. (Numerous studies, after all, have demonstrated that dopamine neurons quickly adapt to predictable rewards. If we know what’s going to happen next, then we don’t get excited.) This is why composers introduce the tonic note in the beginning of the song and then studiously avoid it until the end. [I don't know of any music that fits that description! — JAC] The longer we are denied the pattern we expect, the greater the emotional release when the pattern returns, safe and sound. That is when we get the chills. . . .

The uncertainty makes the feeling – it is what triggers that surge of dopamine in the caudate, as we struggle to figure out what will happen next. And so our neurons search for the undulating order, trying to make sense of this flurry of pitches. We can predict some of the notes, but we can’t predict them all, and that is what keeps us listening, waiting expectantly for our reward, for the errant pattern to be completed.

Here's what I don't get: I've listened to the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony so many times that I know in advance what the whole thing is going to sound like, note for note. There isn't a single moment in the piece that I find genuinely surprising. I don't expect anything else from it other than exactly what it gives me. (Even if you're not a Beethoven fan like me, one so often hears the movement played that you could easily become well-acquainted with it without trying.) If enjoying music is all about challenging our expectations, shouldn't this movement fall flat for me? But I find it one of the most effective and emotional pieces of music in the world.

This video even gives you visual cues about what's going to happen in that movement before it happens (by Stephen Malinowski, who has over 100 of these). I don't find that this detracts from the musical experience at all:

Is there more or less stigma against a mental illness if people believe it's genetic?

This article looks at the question. The most striking finding: in a metastudy of 19 studies, "18 found that belief in a genetic or biological cause was associated with more negative attitudes to people with mental health problems. Just one found the opposite, that belief in a genetic or biological cause was associated with more positive attitudes."

The writer, Ben Goldacre, juxtaposes those psychological findings with this quote from a professor of neuropsychiatric genetics, responding to research that says ADHD is partly genetic:

"We hope that these findings will help overcome the stigma associated with ADHD . . . . Too often, people dismiss ADHD as being down to bad parenting or poor diet. As a clinician, it was clear to me that this was unlikely to be the case. Now we can say with confidence that ADHD is a genetic disease and that the brains of children with this condition develop differently to those of other children."

As Goldacre observes, anyone who's been campaigning against the stigmatization of mental health disorders seems have a severely mistaken assumption about people's attitudes toward mental health. If you believe someone's behavior comes from their genes, you won't necessarily be more inclined to forgive them. You might look down on them more: it's a problem with the whole person, not just a one-time decision they made. (That may be a very simplistic way to look at it. But I'm just describing how people in general might think; I'm not approving of these views.)

Do addicts have self-control?

This book review about "addiction and freedom" is worth reading, and it's a good companion to the book review about medicating children that I blogged recently. The book is Addiction: A Disorder of Choice by Gene M. Heyman, a Harvard psychologist. The reviewer is a psychiatrist, Sally Satel.

Both this review and the one about children illuminate the same fallacy, which I'd paraphrase like this:

1. A certain behavioral/mental problem -- call it "X" -- is associated with brain activity in ways that can be observed and predicted.  

2. Therefore, the solution to "X" must take the form of psychiatric/medical assistance; the solution cannot be individual free choice. (Indeed, even invoking that concept may be detrimental.)

There's a lot that could be said about why this is a fallacy and why it's so common. The question of free will lurks under the surface of the discussion, though Satel understandably sticks to talking about science, policy, and history, and hardly touches the philosophical problem. Here's what she says about the fallacy:

[M]uch of the public, and a dismaying number of psychiatrists, psychologists, and neuroscientists, mistakenly believe that if a behavior is influenced by genes or mediated by the brain then the actor cannot choose his actions. While every behavior has a biological correlate (and a genetic contribution) and every experience that changes behavior does so by changing the brain, the critical question, Heyman wisely says, is not whether brain changes occur (they do) but whether these changes block the influence of the factors that support self-control. . . .

Heyman uses the phenomenon of addiction to make a profound point about neuroscientific progress in general. "The implication is that as we learn more about a disorder," he writes, "the more likely it is to be thought of as a disease" -- and, consequently, as a condition whose course cannot be modified by its foreseeable consequences. Indeed, reconciling advances in brain science with their meaning for personal, legal, and civic notions of agency and responsibility will be one of our next major cultural projects.

Progress in brain science will also force a confrontation with the fact that the common interpretation of pathological behavior is often informed by a primitive form of dualism. If biological roots can be found, then we reflexively think “disease”—as in the obliteration of choice-making ability. The mechanical “brain disease” rhetoric is a symptom of the growing tendency to privilege neuroscientific explanations as the most authentic way of understanding human behavior.

In addition to logically explaining why that's a fallacy, Satel also says that the people who came up with the idea that addiction is a disease and is incompatible with self-control were motivated by political and financial concerns (and probably emotional impulses):

In fairness, the scientists who forged the brain disease concept had good intentions. By placing addiction on equal footing with more conventional medical disorders, they sought to create an image of the addict as a hapless victim of his own wayward neurochemistry. They hoped this would inspire companies and politicians to allocate more funding for treatment. Also, by emphasizing dramatic scientific advances, such as brain imaging techniques, and applying them to addiction, they hoped researchers might reap more financial support for their work. Finally, promoting the idea of addiction as a brain disease would rehabilitate the addict’s public image from that of a criminal who deserves punishment into a sympathetic figure who deserves treatment.

Those concerns may be admirable. But having good intentions behind your account of reality hardly ensures that your account will be accurate.

Finally, I had never heard of this incident (which begins the review), and I'm surprised it isn't better-known:

In 1970, high-grade heroin and opium flooded Southeast Asia. Military physicians in Vietnam estimated that between 10 percent and 25 percent of enlisted Army men were addicted to narcotics. Deaths from overdosing soared. In May 1971, the crisis exploded on the front page of The New York Times: “G.I. Heroin Addiction Epidemic in Vietnam.” Spurred by fears that newly discharged veterans would ignite an outbreak of heroin use in American cities, President Richard Nixon commanded the military to begin drug testing. In June, the White House announced that no soldier would be allowed to board the plane home unless he passed a urine test. Those who failed could go to an Army-sponsored detoxification program before they were re-tested.

The plan worked. Most GIs stopped using narcotics as word of the new directive spread and the vast minority who were detained produced clean samples when given a second chance. More startlingly, only 12 percent of soldiers who were dependent on opiate narcotics in Vietnam became re-addicted to heroin at some point in the three years after their return to the states. “This surprising rate of recovery even when re-exposed to narcotic drugs,” said the epidemiologist who collected the data, “ran counter to the conventional wisdom that heroin is a drug which causes addicts to suffer intolerable craving that rapidly leads to re-addiction if re-exposed to the drug.”

Satel says our ignorance of this real-life experiment represents a case of "generational amnesia." It's easy to keep believing in a dogma if you don't look at any of the evidence that goes against it.

(Photo by Daniel Modell, a.k.a. dM.nyc.)

Should children be medicated to deal with their psychological issues?

In this book review that's probably a more worthwhile read than the book, Alison Gopnik writes:

Within the past few years more and more children have been given powerful brain-altering drugs to deal with a wide range of problems. . . .

You can sympathize with the impulse of parents to do something, anything at all, to help their children. But that doesn't alter the fact that the scientific evidence just isn't clear about what to do. On balance, though, the evidence suggests that we should be conservative about prescribing drugs to children, and much more conservative than we actually are. Even the scientists who advocate some use of drugs acknowledge that they are overprescribed and badly managed. Brains are complex enough, children's developing brains are even more complex, and determining the long-term effects of drugs that alter those brains is especially difficult. Children are different from adults, often in radical ways, and many childhood problems resolve just as part of development.

On top of that, each generation of doctors discovers that the last generation was disastrously misguided in its medical interventions, from lobotomies to estrogen replacement, at the same time that they assure the patients that this time is different.

I'm also glad to see that the review highlights the importance of compatible "levels of description":

[Judith] Warner's book [We've Got Issues] also reflects a common confusion in popular writing about psychology. She writes as if there are just two kinds of explanations for human behavior. Either the everyday narratives are right—so that children are unhappy because their parents don't care about them, or they fail at school because they are lazy. Or else the right answer is that the children's problems are the result of "something in their brains." Warner's logic seems to be that since the parents do care about their kids, the problem must be in the children's brains and therefore drugs will fix it.

But everything about human beings, cultural or individual, innate or learned, is in our brains. Loss and humiliation change our serotonin levels, education transforms our brain connections, social support affects our cortisol. Neurological and psychological and social processes are inextricable. The work of psychological science is to identify causes at many levels of description—social, cultural, individual, and neurological.

There was a very insightful blog post (on Psychology Today's website) that makes a similar point about evolutionary psychology: "Is it evolutionary, or is it . . . ?" (That post speaks of "levels of causation," which is the same thing as the "levels of description" in the above block quote.) I've also blogged this concept before: "Can you give a neurological or evolutionary explanation of love without debunking the whole idea of love?"

By the way, that book review has several points that could be added to my list of ways blogs are better than books. The bias in favor of conclusions that come from riveting stories is huge.

Why isn't there "philosophy of journalism"? Or how about journalism of philosophy?

There should be courses in "philosophy of journalism," says Professor Carlin Romano. He teaches such a course at Yale. (The article is via Arts & Letters Daily.)

Prof. Romano frames the issue this way: 

If you examine philosophy-department offerings around America, you'll find staple courses in "Philosophy of Law," "Philosophy of Art," "Philosophy of Science," "Philosophy of Religion," and a fair number of other areas that make up our world.

It makes sense. Philosophy, as the intellectual enterprise that in its noblest form inspects all areas of life and questions each practice's fundamental concepts and presumptions, should regularly look at all human activities broad and persistent enough not to be aberrations or idiosyncrasies. ...

Why, then, don't you find "Philosophy of Journalism" among those staple courses?

Listing those topics creates a sense that you could have a philosophical field to correspond to every profession, but things don't work out so neatly. "Philosophy of art" is trying to penetrate the very nature of what artists create by asking, "What is art?" I don't think "philosophy of journalism" would be about trying to define journalism or explain what journalists do, since that wouldn't be a very challenging philosophical task.

Based on Prof. Romano's description of his lesson plans, he seems to be using journalism as a platform to discuss ethics, epistemology, and political philosophy. Journalism isn't a sui generis subject of philosophical inquiry; it's a bundle of human interactions that can be analyzed philosophically within traditional branches of philosophy that have existed for centuries. (In this respect, "philosophy of religion" is closer to "philosophy of journalism" than to "philosophy of art." Trying to define "religion" may be a worthwhile exercise, but it's unlikely to be the main point of a philosophy of religion class.)

I'm actually so convinced by his argument that this kind of class is worth teaching that I don't find the article too interesting. Instead of an article about whether there should be a philosophy of journalism, I'd rather see some discussion of whether there should be journalism about philosophy.

The New York Times, for instance, regularly reports on some of the more socially important academic breakthroughs, even including some that happen to be of interest to philosophers. But I can't remember seeing the Times directly report on a philosopher's ideas -- except in an obituary. You regularly read news articles about how the latest brain experiment has revealed so-and-so. Well, that's how the news likes to present it, but the truth is rarely so clear-cut or sensational. A headline-grabbing story based on brain scans is probably going to be highly conjectural, in part because brain imaging doesn't yet have much explanatory power.

Could any philosophical insight about the brain and/or the mind be significant enough to be reported in the New York Times? I'm sure reporters would say philosophical thoughts are too abstract to count as "news" at all. But philosophers of mind should stay sufficiently up to date with the latest neurological discoveries so that their philosophizing actually is timely.

I wish we lived in a world where philosophical ideas routinely made the news. I'm not sure if the journalists or the philosophers are more to blame. Probably the philosophers.

The oldest known artistic depiction of a woman may also be the oldest known pornography.

It's this 35,000-year-old sculpture.

Paul Mellars, an anthropologist at the University of Cambridge, says:

"The figure is explicitly — and blatantly — that of a woman, with an exaggeration of sexual characteristics (large, projecting breasts, a greatly enlarged and explicit vulva, and bloated belly and thighs) that by twenty-first-century standards could be seen as bordering on the pornographic"....

Here's a video segment about it.

So, what does this mean? It may have profound implications about the development of art and intelligence:

The oldest human art dates back much further, to between 75,000 and 95,000 years ago in Africa. But that art was abstract, and consisted of geometrical designs engraved on pieces of red iron oxide. This is the first known art to represent a woman, and possibly the first art to represent anything real at all....

The jump from abstract art to representative art ... might reflect a leap in the cognitive capacity of the human brain around this time. Some experts think that the development might have gone along with a leap in the complexity of human language.

But let's get back to the sex...

"If there's one conclusion you want to draw from this, it's that an obsession with sex goes back at least 35,000 years," [said Mellars].... "But if humans hadn’t been largely obsessed with sex they wouldn’t have survived for the first 2 million years. None of this is at all surprising."

A moral philosopher reacts to finding out she might enter a vegetative state.

British philosopher Soran Reader is outraged that she doesn't have a legal right to be killed if that happens.

She says:

Last month I was told I had a brain tumour.... As this [article] went to press, I was on my way to have a biopsy.... It carries a real risk of serious complications. I might die. I might suffer brain damage. I might lose large parts of my capacities to think, express myself and remember. ...

In all that mind-blowing horror, though, the possibility that really threatens to break me is that I may be unable to remember my children. ... I am certain that I do not want to live on if that happens.

I am terrified by the spectre of loss of self. But I am out of my mind with anger that my own country does not allow me to protect myself and my family from this horror safely. I am anguished at the thought that my children, on top of their grief at the loss of their mother, may have to cope with me as someone else, someone lost in the world or in a vegetative state. ...

My diagnosis has woken me from my mindless moral slumber on this topic, allowed me to feel the absolute outrage and moved me to start making the arguments.

It is completely wrong that UK law does not enable me to protect myself or my children from the loss of my self by arranging to be killed if the surgery goes wrong. ...

The law must be changed so that people facing fatal or self-destroying conditions do not also have to endure this agony of not being able to protect their selves and their loved ones. ...

I may not be in a position to press further for changes in the law after [the surgery], but I hope this article will persuade others to get this tiny little cornerstone of civilisation set right before too many others have had to bear this.

(Via Uncommon Priors.)

IN THE COMMENTS: Complications.

What's happening to McCain's brain?

This article from Slate gives a detailed look at what's likely to happen to John McCain's brain over the next 8 years. (It's based on general trends for anyone his age, not on anything about McCain as an individual.)

It's not all bad — there's some good and some bad. For example:

• Bad: cognitive function is believed to peak around age 50 and declines after that.

• Good: "a greater appreciation for ambiguity."

• Could go either way: old people "are easily distracted," but "that inability to filter information efficiently often means they can take in more information."

But there's no question that it matters. The article points out the obvious fact that "a 72-year-old's brain is different from that of a 46-year-old."

The author of that article has an interesting theory about how McCain's aging brain could explain his ill-advised response to the American who asked him about the prospect that we'll be in Iraq for 50 years: "Maybe 100! That'd be fine with me."

Should we even be talking about this? Of course. The idea that we need to hold back from discussing McCain's age is ludicrous.

There are plenty of situations in life when the polite, proper thing to do is to avoid mentioning someone's age. But this isn't one of those situations. He's trying to become the most powerful person in the world! If you're an American citizen, you have a responsibility to participate in deciding whether he gets the job or not. It's not only acceptable to talk about the pros and cons of his old age; we'd be abdicating our civic duties if we didn't.

I'm in my 20s; I wouldn't want someone my age to be president, which can't happen since it'd be unconstitutional. The Constitution has only an age minimum, not an age maximum . . . but the "35 years old" rule still recognizes the idea that age can be a test of someone's fitness to be president. Just because the Constitution doesn't have a rule about who's too old to be president doesn't mean you, the voter, can't have such a rule.

If he wins, McCain will start out as a 72-year-old president, and he'll be an 80-year-old president if he's successful enough to serve a full two terms. (He considered making a one-term pledge but decided against it.)

And if it's true that the presidency has a dramatic aging effect, he might end up seeming even older than 80 by the end.

Do we want our president to be that old? That's a crucial question for Americans to answer. As with many things in life, it might be "not nice" to talk about, but we cannot simply decline to think about it.

(Photo of McCain from World Economic Forum.)