"How impressive you find modern pop Bumpology depends in part on whether you believe that there are a lot of people who still think like that."

"In the same way, even the neuro-skeptics seem to agree that modern Bumpology remains an important corrective to radical anti-Bumpology: to the kind of thinking that insists that brains don’t count at all and cultures construct everything; that, given the right circumstances, there could be a human group with six or seven distinct genders, each with its own sexuality; that there is a possible human society in which very old people would be regarded as attractive and nubile eighteen-year-olds not; and still another where adolescent children would be noted for their rigorous desire to finish recently commenced tasks."

-from "Mindless: The New Neuro-Skeptics" by Adam Gopnik in the September 9th issue of the New Yorker.

Title of the Week!

"The Effect of Criticism on Functional Brain Connectivity and Associations with Neuroticism" by Michelle Nadine Servaas, Harriëtte Riese, Remco Jan Renken, Jan-Bernard Cornelis Marsman, Johan Lambregs, Johan Ormel, and André Aleman, appears in the journal PLOS ONE.

Title of the Week!

"Strobing Brain Thunders: Functional Correlation of Extreme Activity Events" by F. Lombardi, D.R. Chialvo, H.J. Herrmann, and L. de Arcangelis, appears in the journal "Chaos, Solitons & Fractals."

New Stories Needed

In my new essay, What Will Replace the Hero's Journey, on the Stanford Social Innovation Review blog, I explore the skepticism generated by reliance on the hero's journey narrative: person goes on journey, is challenged, resolves challenges, and is transformed. I offer several examples of authentic stories that reflect the complexity and messiness of life, and that are currently being publicly shared by organizations.

An excerpt:

Familiarity can be extremely comforting. In a hero’s journey, there are definitive winners, villains, benefactors, and plot twists. It certainly accelerates message comprehension: You too—if you act similarly—can be a hero.

But familiarity can also, ultimately, breed skepticism. And if audiences are becoming skeptical of such pat storylines, what, if anything, might replace the common hero’s journey?

Click here to read the full post.

Your functional neuroimaging update (with study questions).

1. "Graphs are the new blobs."

Discuss. How are graphs and blobs similar? How are they different?

2.  A leading search engine gives no hits on that phrase:

Do you expect this to remain true for long?

"Bucky is not like other dogs. But he is like ..." Part III. ("Visually similar images" from Google's "search by image")

(click on an image for full-screen)

Bucky is not like other dogs. But he is like a motorcycle, or Gerald Ford, or Harry Potter... ("Visually similar images" from Google's "search by image")

(click on an image for full-screen)

Understatement of the Week?

"In setting the nation on a course to map the active human brain, President Obama may have picked a challenge even more daunting than ending the war in Afghanistan or finding common ground with his Republican opponents."

–The opening sentence of the article "Connecting the Neural Dots" by John Markoff in today's New York Times.

Another succinct alternative to another dualism.

If you liked our succinct alternatives to Cartesian dualism, then you might like this sentence – the text of a slide –  from Prof. Luiz Pessoa's compelling presentation at today's stimulating Maryland Neuroimaging Retreat, hosted by the University of Maryland School of Medicine:

"There are no cognitive or emotional brain regions, per se."

In what sense is it true that, had the past been in some way different, an aspect of the present would be more substantial?

Counterfactual history is a literary genre, not a mode of scientific argument, so it was a (pleasant) surprise to come upon the following in a thoughtful and provocative article entitled "Default positions: how neuroscience's historical legacy has hampered investigation of the resting mind" by F. Callard, J. Smallwood, and D.S. Margulies, which appears in Frontiers in Psychology:

"... a compelling body of literature – largely unknown or disregarded ... – ... documents various methods to investigate the processes characterizing activities pursued during so-called “idle time” ... what we now refer to as self-generated mental activity including daydreaming, fantasy, mind-wandering, and dissociation. It is not difficult to see that if these research domains had flourished ... rather than been neglected, our vocabulary for describing self-generated thought would have been richer; our methods to investigate such thought more creative; and hence our capacities to interpret the psychological meaning of different forms of spontaneous neural activity in different systems, including the mental life and associated neural systems of the [Default Mode Network], more substantial."

Applied what?

I plan to show this slide at the upcoming Applied Brilliance Conference:

Simple Stories & Complex Narratives

Read my new post, reflecting on the question, "If your organization is seeking to solve a complex problem, must it always share complex stories?" Inspired, of course, by Invisible Children's Kony 2012, the most viral video ever.

I don't happen to think simple stories are needed to share complex narratives. (I use "narrative" to refer to the larger story and frame, and "story" as the small episodes and moments that encapsulate the larger narrative.) People are emotionally complex, live complex lives, and can relate to authentic, emotionally complex stories. The longevity of The New Yorker, the popularity of This American Life, the respect and attention paid the deeply reported journalism of ProPublica attest to our willingness to thoroughly engage with complex long-form narratives.

Read the complete essay here.

"The Hero of Saratoga"

When NeuroCooking last reported on David Kosizek in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, he was reading a letter home from the Korean War. Yesterday, we caught up again there with Mr. Kosizek – or should we say with General Benedict Arnold, conquerer of Ticonderoga, hero of Saratoga, and commander of West Point:

In a small theater in the museum, General Arnold defended his record to audience members who arrived more familiar with certain later events, such as, um, his attempt to sell to the British the plans to West Point, in order to ensure its capture.

Heart, Head, Hand & Complexity

I’ve just started collaborating with Peace Over Violence and saw this fundraising video they did at the end of last year.



It was highly successful: 50% increase from the previous year's annual appeal; doubled the number of donors; and brought in 30% new donors, which they attribute to the viral nature of the video.

It’s a great example of applying my Heart, Head & Hand(TM) framework to video. Emotional connection followed by data (presented graphically, not to diminish or compete with the emotional resonance of the speakers), closing with a strong and compelling ask.

One aspect that I imagine contributed to the success of the video is the acknowledgment of complexity. Note Leona, from 1:03 to 1:26:

A lot of times, and particularly with this case, yes, it had a very great outcome: the person who harmed is now going to go to jail. But the family has to deal with this concept of, 'Okay, but now we have this family member that has to go to jail.' And there's the complexity that's around - particularly in families where the abuse is within the families - separating out what that person did, and that person also being a family member.

Increasingly, I am finding that audiences are deeply appreciating organizations that acknowledge the complexity of their work; they can relate to life not being black and white, and they are happy that someone is stepping up to work in complex spaces.

I've seen this frequently with National Advocates for Pregnant Women, when audience members thank Executive Director Lynn Paltrow after a speech, for "finally, perfectly, capturing the complexity of what I am feeling." And, certainly, some (if not most) great literature presents complex characters in complicated situations.

Chances are, if you are a nonprofit organization, the solutions you are offering to seemingly intractable problems are fairly complex. That's good, and as it should be. Talk about that complexity, because people will, indeed, understand.

I worked with Enterprise Community Partners in engaging wealthy, altruistic, potential donors with the following

Think of when you bought your home. Or think of when you may have built a home, or done a renovation. Think of all the institutions and vendors that were involved. Think of the brokers you may have hired, or the general contractors, to get things done that you didn’t know how to do. Now, imagine if you were attempting to purchase land or property, renovate it or build on it, and wanted to make that property available to scores of families, while making sure those families would be safe, have access to schools and parks, and could afford their homes forever.

...Enterprise is the leader in navigating the financial, political, and social complexities of creating and preserving safe, healthy, and affordable homes. Please join Enterprise in finding big-picture, long-term solutions to some of our nation’s most difficult problems.

The truth is in the grey zone. Acknowledge complexity. Don't ask your donors to work as hard as you, however; make their ability to contribute to your solution easy.

Change, movement, & friction.

Just one sentence from "Democracy 101: Mark Twain's farewell address" by Lewis H. Lapham in the April 2011 issue of Harper's Magazine:

Democracy is a dangerous business; it allies itself to change, which engenders movement, which induces friction, which implies unhappiness, which assumes conflict not only as the normal but also as the necessary condition of its existence.

Title of the week!

"No Need to Talk, I Know You: Familiarity Influences Early Multisensory Integration in a Songbird's Brain" by Isabelle George, Jean-Pierre Richard, Hugo Cousillas, and Martine Hausberger, appears in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.

"Integrated brain activity forms the neural basis for the unity of mind and experience."

Just one sentence (another titles this post) from the first paragraph of the twelfth chapter ("Dynamics: Stability and Diversity") of Prof. Olaf Sporn's book "Networks of the Brain":

"The brain's ability to self-organize and undergo transient state dynamics is crucial for its capability to simultaneously satisfy momentary demands posed by the environment and integrate these exogenous signals with the endogenous activity of brain and body."

"... beyond neural reductionism and cognitive functionalism ..."

Today we share another chapter ending from Olaf Sporn's great book "Networks of the Brain".

Here is the closing of chapter 9, "Networks for Cognition":

"Perhaps network thinking will eventually allow us to move beyond neural reductionism and cognitive functionalism and formulate a theoretical framework for cognition that is firmly grounded in the biology of the brain."

"... naturally promote ..."

Another beautiful sentence, this one from the closing section ("Cognition: Pattern Formation in Networks") of the ninth chapter ("Networks for Cognition") of Prof. Olaf Sporn's book "Networks of the Brain":

"The small-world attributes of large-scale structural and functional networks, as well as their hierarchical and modular arrangement, naturally promote functional segregation and integration across the brain."

Six.

Today we heard Steve Wozniak on "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me!" talk about how he has six smart-phones, and six brackets to hold all of them on his car dashboard, and six different navigation apps running on them, so he gets six different sets of advice on how to get to his destination.