Scientology Tropes Enter Mainstream Neuroscience?

via @mallelis

At the literary/pop culture/feminist/humor blog known as The Toast, the hilarious Mallory Ortberg has skewered those ubiquitous ads from brain training behemoth Lumosity.

The Five Stages Of Lumosity

Stage I – Initiation

. . .
Friend, are you troubled by persistent waking blackouts? Do you tremble and shudder and flicker out of consciousness when asked to recall basic facts about your acquaintances? Does your right eye fill with blood whenever you have to try to remember your PIN? Let Lumosity patch over those mysterious missing blank spots in your sick and addled mind.

“Lumosity: Improving your brain through the science of neuroplasticity, but in a way that just feels like games.”

Lumosity: you can trust us. It doesn’t hurt. It’s normal. It feels normal. Good and normal. Just like a game. Won’t feel a thing. It’s normal, and you’re normal, and your brain is working better now than it was before. Before was bad. Now is good.

Then the user progresses to Stage II – The Audit,  Stage III - Saturation,  Stage IV – Synergy/Assimilation, and finally to...

Stage V – Full Compliance

The Golden Age of Tech II

Stage V features a series of screenshots taken from a flabbergasting Scientology promotional video (discussed on Reddit).

Ortberg's post is really quite brilliant — the cult-like following, the testimonials from humans ascended to a higher plane, the suspiciously vague ad campaigns that use suspiciously vague terms like "neuroplasticity".

In reality, though, it's hard to imagine two world views more completely out of step than Neuroscience and the bizarre set of beliefs known as Scientology.  {floating tone arms, anyone??}

In fact, Scientology is quite vehemently anti-psychiatry and anti-neuroscience. Many of you might remember Tom Cruise's condemnation of Brooke Shields for taking antidepressants to treat her postpartum depression, to which Shields replied: “Tom should stick to saving the world from aliens and let women who are experiencing postpartum depression decide what treatment options are best for them.”

The stance against psychiatric medication goes much further than that: they would like to eliminate NIMH, the major U.S. funding body for biological psychiatry and mental health research. The Secrets of Scientology site maintained by Carnegie Mellon Computer Science Professor David S. Touretzky has covered the sect's excesses for many years, including in a poster presented at the 1998 Society for Neuroscience meeting:

Opposition to Mental Health Research

Scientology demonizes the mental health professions in part because psychology and psychiatry are Scientology's main competitors. But another reason is that all cult groups need an external enemy to rally against. Scientologists are taught that modern psychiatrists still use lobotomy and electroshock treatments to dominate and control their patients.

Despite this, Scientology started out with a materialist model of the mind before it was derailed (perhaps by founder L. Ron Hubbard's alcohol and drug addiction). As Prof. Touretzky explains:

In 1950 Dianetics presented a purely materialistic view of the mind as a simple computer, with frequent references to "memory banks", "circuits", and data recording. The mind was implemented by the brain, and memory was a product of a cellular recording mechanism. Hubbard did not rule out the possibility that psychic phenomena such as ESP or telepathy might some day be demonstrated, but they played no role in Dianetics.

With the introduction of past lives, Hubbard switched from a materialist to a dualist conception of mind. In Dianetics, the "I" that looked at mental image pictures was the analyzer. In Scientology the "I" is the thetan, a spirit, that moves from one body to the next, carrying its reactive mind along with it. And in advanced Scientology auditing, subjects are instructed to communicate with their body thetans "telepathically", not verbally.

The E-Meter

Touretzky's SFN poster again:

The scientific trappings of Scientology extend even to instrumentation: a skin galvanometer called an E-meter (electropsychometer) is said to allow an auditor (therapist) to observe the creation or destruction of "mental mass'' by reading the needle movement.

 

Mark Super VII Quantum E-meter (Wikimedia Commons)

The E-meter (known variously as the Electropsychometer or the Electroencephaloneuromentimograph)¹ provides a crude measure of skin conductance. How crude? The original model used a pair of tin cans as electrodes. To learn more, you can surf the Internet's most extensive E-Meter site hosted by (you guessed it!) Prof. Touretzky.

According the Church of Scientology's own materials, however, the E-meter is used by auditors to locate areas of spiritual distress or travail:

The E-Meter measures the mental state or change of state of a person and thus is of enormous benefit to the auditor in helping the preclear locate areas to be handled. The reactive mind’s hidden nature requires utilization of a device capable of registering its effects – a function the E-Meter does accurately. 
. . .

When the person holding the E-Meter electrodes thinks a thought, looks at a picture, reexperiences an incident or shifts some part of the reactive mind, he is moving and changing actual mental mass and energy. These changes in the mind influence the tiny flow of electrical energy generated by the E-Meter, causing the needle on its dial to move. The needle reactions on the E-Meter tell the auditor where the charge lies, and that it should be addressed by a process.

Different needle movements have exact meanings and the skill of an auditor includes a complete understanding of all meter reactions.

Wow, that is true scientific precision. Impressive, now isn't it? Even the most computationally sophisticated cognitive neuroscientists don't claim to read the hidden mind's reactive nature using multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) of fMRI data. Or do they?


‘Neural Valence Meter’

I know the authors of a recent Nature Neuroscience paper that used MVPA to classify subjective affective states² (Chikazoe, Lee, Kriegeskorte, & Anderson, 2014) would be utterly horrified with the analogy, but I thought of the e-meter when I read this quote in a press release:

“It appears that the human brain generates a special code for the entire valence spectrum of pleasant-to-unpleasant, good-to-bad feelings, which can be read like a ‘neural valence meter’ in which the leaning of a population of neurons in one direction equals positive feeling and the leaning in the other direction equals negative feeling,” Anderson explains.

Call it priming by Ortberg if you will, but terminology like 'special code', 'entire valence spectrum', 'leaning in one direction/the other direction', and 'neural valence meter' sounded a little cult-like to me...

E-Meter Controls and Indicators

{imagine that the needle leaning in one direction = 'good' (clear), and in the other direction = 'bad'}

Footnotes

¹ A Gizmodo article that called the device an electroencephaloneuromentimograph is most notable for posting the lengthy complaining e-mail sent by the Church of Scientology.

² Let's call them 'neuroqualia' perhaps - “The entire valence spectrum was represented as a collective pattern in regional neural activity as sensory-specific and abstract codes, whereby the subjective quality of affect can be objectively quantified across stimuli, modalities and people.” (Chikazoe et al., 2014).


Reference

Chikazoe J, Lee DH, Kriegeskorte N, Anderson AK. (2014). Population coding of affect across stimuli, modalities and individuals. Nat Neurosci. Jun 22. doi: 10.1038/nn.3749. [Epub ahead of print]