Janet Albrechtsen, Susan Greenfield, Ben Goldacre and a new hypothesis about colonial commentators

(Above: Susan Greenfield interviewed by Lateline. Link below in text).

We're developing a scientific hypothesis here, which we think will be shortly ready for testing. Of course we're not saying it's the answer to any question, so much as a question to which there might be an answer.

No, it's nothing to do with what Glenn Beck might or might not have done.

Rather it's a straightforward calculation, though always evolving and subject to amendment:

Conservative + new technology + brain plasticity + inherited paranoia = FUDn1.

There's a binomial theorem which takes it a little bit further, but I think it's better to illustrate the logic as exemplified by the impact of Susan Greenfield on the minds of the likes of Janet Albrechtsen.

Society may end up losing its mind, she splutters in the header, thereby proving the FUDn1 conclusion is the correct outcome.

Now a cynic might ask how the commentariat can lose again that which is already lost, but there is a formulaic ritual to these proceedings, which we shouldn't lose sight of.

First there's the eerie, disturbing, upsetting encounter with a new technology. For my father it was a VHS machine, for me it was the loss of the telegram. For Albrechtsen?

Typing away on my laptop one night, I was startled by a bubble of words that appeared at the bottom right hand corner of my screen. “Hey, Janet, is that you?” Next bubble: “Wow, this is weird, I’ve never done this before,” my 50-something friend said.

“Me neither,” I replied, less than enthused about losing my social networking virginity. “Why wouldn’t we just pick up the phone and talk?” he asked. “Precisely. Too weird for me,” I answered curtly.

And there ended my cyber life.

Excellent. Luddite credentials established, we are now in a position to write off anything and everything to do with the games playing, iPod, iPhone, Blackberry using, computer familiar, intertubes wandering younger generation, and their filthy, devious, perverted, satanic mind losing ways. It also helps to be or to feel old:

You sure feel old when you try to figure out why young kids spend hours each day on social networking sites, not to mention playing computer games. No doubt, the fast developing world of information technology is a sign of progress. Information at our fingertips. Instant communication. Friendships forged online. Interactive games, full of noise and colour, that test our responses and build vivid imaginations.

And yet intuitively, parents wonder how healthy it is for their children to spend hours enthralled by a two-dimensional world of computer games and cyber relationships.

Friendships, contact, information at our fingertips, noise and color and vividness, progress and growth. It all just sounds so UNHEALTHY.

In much the same way as my parents wondered why we spent hours watching television (when the radio was still to hand) or wasted our brave new intellectual lives reading comics. Both demonized at the time as heralding the downfall of western civilization as we know it.

Fortunately for those old and tired media there are new demons ready to be demonized, and who better to do it than Albrechtsen acting as an empty echo chamber for the scribblings and thoughts of Susan Greenfield.

Cunningly Albrechtsen doesn't recite any of the more recent absurdities led by Greenfield to draw attention to herself and her theories - the most notably dumb one being the speculation that the recent GFC was produced by wild and reckless young things who'd learned their life skills playing computer games (you can watch Greenfield veer around that transparent absurdity in her Lateline interview here).

A mug like Miranda the Devine stumbled right into this mine field, never thinking to ask what factors might have been in play during the great depression, what were the ages of the people in charge of key financial institutions during the recent financial crisis, and what science would justify such an absurd extrapolation without reference to actual facts, like a study of the wild and reckless young things, and how they differed in brain structure from previous wild and reckless generations (oh yes, I remember the stories my grandmother told of the roaring twenties).

No, Albechtsen is just content to recycle Greenfield's stories of dopamine, violent games without consequences (as if that's somehow worse than military war games like Afghanistan, or World War II, with real consequences) and the changes in the brain that can be induced by playing the piano. Which makes me worry when a campaign to ban the piano will start, as people become alarmed about its hallucinatory impact on the minds of the young.

Of course Greenfield is always careful to do a dance - it's always might, or perhaps, or probably, or worth thinking about, or it can't be said with certainty, but it is interesting don't you think. And then it's always in for the kill. Albrechtsen shows she's learned this game well:

For the first time in human history, many children spend about six hours a day seeking short-term rewards from a computer screen, getting thrills and excitement without danger and consequences. There is nothing wrong with hedonistic sensual experiences, she hastens to add. People have always enjoyed this, whether from sex, food, parachuting or downhill skiing. But most of those activities had consequences weighed up by the human brain.

Her fear, as she told the House of Lords in February, is that the “mid-21st century mind might almost be infantilised, characterised by short-term attention spans, sensationalism, inability to emphasise and a shaky sense of identity.”

Note the 'there is nothing wrong' when we all know with a shake of our collective gnarled, hoary heads that something is wrong, very wrong. Profoundly wrong. The young are young, and we are old, and these cretins shall inherit the earth.

Why am I ineffably reminded of the dire warnings that were always trotted out about masturbation? Which led to short attention spans, sensationalism, a shaky sense of identity, brain damage, hair on the palms for boys, and damnation to eternal hell for all? And why is masturbation still a popular pastime? Intellectual as well as physical?

But back to the caveats. There's nothing wrong with sex, food, parachuting or downhill skiing. It's just computer games that contain the devils first unleashed by onanism.

Well I could produce a rant about the dangers of a society which wastes its time with an unhealthy capacity to take an interest in thuggee mindless jocks who've been trained to brutalize each other as they chase a pill around a paddock (from the take a dive mentality of soccer to the coathanger world of Barry Hall). But hey, whatever lights your fire and turns you on.

Sadly the need for FUD doesn't allow that spirit in relation to the cyber world:

Social networking is giving rise to a “look at me” generation who spend hours using Facebook (250 active million users) and Twitter (already six million people have signed on) seeking “constant reassurance; that you are listened to, recognised and important”. With only 24 hours in the day, the more time spent in the two-dimensional cyber-world means less time in face-to-face conversations in real time which “require a sensitivity to voice tone, body language and perhaps even to pheromones, those sneaky molecules that we release and which others smell subconsciously”.

So it goes. How the old always hate and envy the young. Has this changed over thousands of years? This year's reason for the hatred? Facebook and twitter. Hey last week wasn't it alcopops and young women who refused to convert from ladette to lady status, and learn how to sew and be nice?

Still there's an upside. If the young don't get to know about pheromones, likely there'll be little sex, and even less impregnation, and the world's population will decline faster than a Chinese bureaucrat can write out a one child policy in full. Yep, computer games and social networks are likely to see the end of sex, which will result in a decline in online pornography, which will make Senator Conroy happy, which will result in a lack of interest in the interweb, which will result in an increase in sex which will result in ...

Oh stop it, stop it already with the alarmist onanism.

“It is hard to see how living this way on a daily basis will not result inbrains, or rather minds, different from those of previous generations. We know the human brain is exquisitely sensitive to the outside world,” she says.

Well you know I guess in the sense that the Victorian mind was different from the medieval mind, and could contemplate the idea of steam, things were different (though perhaps not so different if you could inhabit the brain of Leonardo da Vinci).

And I guess the Victorians fear of speed - which led to the notion people might have to walk in front of trains with a flag for fear of people not coping with the strange new beast - now seems quaint to us. Just as the fear of the dislocations induced by speeding cars and speeding aeroplanes as unnatural and dangerous and sure to ruin the mind are now lost in the byways of social history.

And yes addictive personalities will find the intertubes and computer games too attractive, just as addicts find drugs, or sex, or alcohol, or gambling, or corn syrup laden junk food sure lures for the wasting of their lives.

But please enough with the moralizing cant and the half assed fear mongering and dissing of technology based on bad science, together with the easy out once the FUD has been established. The easy out? Well that goes with every Greenfield outburst and every echo chamber reflection:

She doesn’t pretend to have the answers, but hopes these questions will prompt more research and see educators, government and the science community working together to create technologies that enhance, rather than diminish the mind.

See? She doesn't pretend to have the answers, just as I don't pretend to have any understanding or knowledge of what Glenn Beck might or might not have done. And she wants the disease - technology - to somehow mystically become the cure. A computer game that takes you to the Greenfield level with heaps of energy and health, and a wild choice of weapons, not to mention a scratch card that will spray pheromones and compel you to mate with your partner in front of the screen?

Luckily these days I do have access to the interweb, and it will lead you to Ben Goldacre writing about Chilling warnings to parent from top neuroscientist.

Here's a taster. After explaining how the good baroness had personally endorsed a computer games product called MindFit - oh Satan how you mislead even the mighty - at eighty eight quid the pop, and discussing the Which magazine review as to its quality, Goldacre rounds his piece up thus:

Let us be clear. It is possible that much of the Baroness’s output on this topic is speculative flim flam, dressed up in an unnecessarily expensive and sciencey “gloss”. And perhaps it is dangerous and unhelpful for one of our most prominent science communicators, whose stated aim is to improve the public’s understanding of science, to appear repeatedly in the media making wild headline-grabbing claims, with minimal evidence, all the while telling us repeatedly that they are a scientist. Perhaps by doing this, the head of the Royal Institute unhelpfully misrepresents what it is that scientists do, and indeed the whole notion of what it means to have empirical evidence for a clearly stated claim, thus undermining the public’s understanding of science, devaluing the coin, and making our jobs harder? I don’t know. I am merely raising it as a hypothesis. We need to examine these questions in more detail. I am very, very happy to do so.

Well of course I must make it clear that my hypothesis is totally independent of Goldacre's, since he had to beat his breast about typing Institute when he meant Institution. As if we care about that kind of trivia when it's clear that computer games might have - it's an interesting thought don't you think, though there's nothing conclusive just yet - produced the wild and reckless behavior that led to the great depression and world war II.

But we will introduce a corollary to our own hypothesis, which says that the impact of pseudo science will be increased by a factor of ten in the minds of gullible commentariat columnists when delivered by a baroness who is a member of the House of Lords and heads an institution and comes from Oxford England and is an adept at media management, and travels to Australia and is thereby in a position to talk at a lunch, and so hugely impress colonial members of the antipodean commentariat with her dazzling imprecision and alarming evocations. Because in the end we are a monarchy, and that results in permanent brain damage because of the alarming social questions which always come to the fore. Like ...

Oh dear, do I fawn or do I curtsy? And why isn't there a computer game showing the correct response?

(And by the way while reading Goldacre's Bad Science blog, you might care to drop in to his piece on Facebook causes cancer, which is an incisive hoot. There's more links there, and vigorous comments, and it might just help put commentariat fear and loathing in the colonies into perspective).