[Reading-hall-of-fame] Re: neuroscience

Brian Cambourne bcambrn at uow.edu.au
Thu Feb 25 17:23:20 GMT 2021 

Thanks again Colin.
These are compelling facts about the claims being made by groups like S of R advocates.

Our difficulty down here in Oz is that they just ignore or deny such evidence and continue to get air space in our pathetic print and TV media. It’s Trumpism  applied to our profession’s issues.
 Brian C

On 26 Feb 2021, at 1:29 am, Colin Harrison <Colin.Harrison at nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:Colin.Harrison at nottingham.ac.uk>> wrote:

Hi Colleagues

I was asked for a citation to Shaaron Ainsworth's paper on fMRI imaging. We had a valuable chat, and she has very kindly sent us three references, for which I provide links below. Thanks to everyone for your participation on this thread.

These are some of the key points that come out of the three papers:

  *   fMRI does not measure brain activity in real time: it is a ‘sluggish, indirect measure of neural activity’, based on blood oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) data (Ashby, 2002), which provides approximately 140,000 data points over the three-dimensional cortical area for each scan, commonly collected once every two seconds over a period of up to half an hour, depending on the experimental task. It is important to understand that BOLD data lags a 3-5 seconds behind the neural activity that causes changes in BOLD activity.
  *   The grey and red ‘photographs’ that we commonly see of presumed neural activity are not fMRI images: they are representations of data generated by researchers using statistical generalisations.
  *   there is a massive amount of pre-processing before a ‘smoothed-out’ representation of neural activity can be analysed: this is due to noise caused from miniscule head movements, differences between participants’ neuroanatomical brain structure, and distortions in the magnetic field of the fMRI, but it is also a function of the statistical decisions made by the researcher.
  *   New statistical techniques are being developed that can search for task related patterns of activity, (broadly derived from different types of factor analysis) that attempt to locate clusters of parallel-processing neural activity. But with hundreds of possible clusters in each scan, and perhaps 900 scans from a single participant in an experimental run, the processing and interpretation challenges are seriously complex.
  *   It has been estimated that even using only the most common suite of analytical parameters, every fMRI image that is published is only one of about a thousand possible images that could have been generated from the same data. In determining the nature of the image that we see, the statistical decisions made by the researcher are as important as the data.
  *   fMRI research is not accepted by all psychologists as a stable basis for making confident claims about cognition; it’s been called ‘the new phrenology’ by some.


I asked Shaaron Ainsworth what she thought about my saying ‘current fMRI research is precisely as valuable as papers in the 1970s on quantum mechanics- i.e. they are unproven theories- but unlike CERN, we haven't yet built our equivalent of the Large Hadron Collider for brain research.’

Her reply was ‘But what we need is not a more powerful fMRI machine to give us better data. What we lack, and what they clearly do have at CERN, is a community of practice that agrees on how to process and interpret the massive amounts of data that are generated, in ways that are widely accepted. That is what is needed to move the field forward.’

Best regards

Colin

1.  A valuable background paper:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285245634_An_introduction_to_fMRI<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285245634_An_introduction_to_fMRI>
 2. This one talks about common problems – frmi is not a photograph of a lit-up brain:
https://www.dartmouth.edu/~adinar/Adinas_homepage/CV_files/neuroimages%20like%20photographs.pdf<https://www.dartmouth.edu/~adinar/Adinas_homepage/CV_files/neuroimages%20like%20photographs.pdf>
3. This one is about the brain of a dead salmon and the dangers of poor fMRI work
https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/140/8/e53/4032512<https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/140/8/e53/4032512>


________________________________
From: david.olson at utoronto.ca<mailto:david.olson at utoronto.ca> <david.olson at utoronto.ca<mailto:david.olson at utoronto.ca>>
Sent: 23 February 2021 16:58
To: Colin Harrison <ttach at exmail.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:ttach at exmail.nottingham.ac.uk>>
Subject: Re: [Reading-hall-of-fame] Re: neuroscience

It is to be published this summer by CUP with the title: Making sense:
What it means to understand.

Best, David

Quoting Colin Harrison <Colin.Harrison at nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:Colin.Harrison at nottingham.ac.uk>>:

> Hi David
>
> Always good to hear from you.
>
> Thanks for your positive response to my posting, and for the offer
> of your paper (or just a citation- these days our libraries seem to
> be able to pull over any published paper that has ever been made
> available electronically). I'd very much like to read it.
>
> Best regards
>
> Stay well,
>
> Colin
> ________________________________
> From: david.olson at utoronto.ca<mailto:david.olson at utoronto.ca> <david.olson at utoronto.ca<mailto:david.olson at utoronto.ca>>
> Sent: 22 February 2021 19:49
> To: Colin Harrison <ttach at exmail.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:ttach at exmail.nottingham.ac.uk>>
> Subject: Re: [Reading-hall-of-fame] Re: neuroscience
>
> Dear Colin:
>
> Good. You may remember our man who could write but not read. He could
> recognize letters and name them and slowly work out what the word was.
> But he could not recognize words and consequently insisted that he
> coould not really read. His name was Howard Engel, now deceased and he
> wrote a book with the above. An fMRI showed a big hole in the cortex.
> We publish the study in a brain journal. I could did up the reference
> if you are interested. Meanwhile, we have to do the research on
> reading and cannot pass it over to the brain sciences or the
> computational sciences either, I think. David Olson
>
>   title.Quoting Colin Harrison <Colin.Harrison at nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:Colin.Harrison at nottingham.ac.uk>>:
>
>> Hi all
>>
>> Thanks so much for sharing some great insights on neuroscience.
>>
>> Here is my one cent's worth (or to be more forward-looking,
>> 0.00000017463588 Bitcoins-worth).
>>
>> Here at the University of Nottingham, we are justly proud of
>> Professor Sir Peter Mansfield's Nobel Prize-winning work to develop
>> MRI in the 1970s, and of course our Psych department has worked with
>>  the Med School and Physics departments on fMRI brain imaging. One
>> important fact to note is that the latest hardware delivers no fewer
>>  than 400,000 pieces of imaging data a second, and it can produce a
>> 'slice' of multicoloured imaging showing neurone activity in any
>> plane. Our colleague Professor Shaaron Ainsworth, does a telling
>> presentation that shows an image of the brain activity of a person
>> who is reading, and guess what? As we expect, there are lovely
>> highlighted spots in the left superior temporal and bilateral
>> supplementary motor regions, etc, etc, but hold your applause-
>> Shaaron then showed other 'slices', from the same instant of
>> imaging, and these suggested that during one instant (not even 'one
>> second') of 'reading' there are about fifty areas of the brain that
>> are active, and they are all flashing like an over-decorated house
>> at Christmas. In other words, you can use the 'slice' you prefer,
>> and then superimpose multiple shots of the same area, to increase
>> the 'activity' profile, and then create your own 'simplified' image
>> for your presentation...
>>
>> In an interesting Damascene conversion, Prof Ahmad Hariri at Duke
>> has questioned 15 years' worth of his own publications on MRI,
>> basically revealing that when you do replication studies, even with
>> the same participants, you not only get different results, you get
>> correlations that are not only weak, they are
>> poor<https://today.duke.edu/2020/06/studies-brain-activity-aren%E2%80%99t-useful-scientists-thought<https://today.duke.edu/2020/06/studies-brain-activity-aren%E2%80%99t-useful-scientists-thought>>. He went so far as to say "The bottom line is that task-based fMRI in its current form can't tell you what an individual's brain activation will look like from one test to
>> the
>> next".
>>
>> So of course fMRI will continue to be valuable for generating
>> hypotheses about cognition and learning, but with Hariri, I would
>> suggest that at present such research is precisely as valuable as
>> papers in the 1970s on quantum mechanics- i.e. they are unproven
>> theories- but unlike CERN, we haven't yet built our equivalent of
>> the Large Hadron Collider for brain research.
>>
>> David, you now have a nickel, or a total of 0.0000008731794
>> Bitcoins. O darn it, by now those bitcoins are probably now worth 6
>> cents!
>>
>> As ever,
>>
>> Colin
>>
>> From:
>> <reading-hall-of-fame-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:reading-hall-of-fame-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk><mailto:reading-hall-of-fame-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk>> on behalf of P
>> Pearson
>> <ppearson at berkeley.edu<mailto:ppearson at berkeley.edu><mailto:ppearson at berkeley.edu>>
>> Date: Saturday, 20 February 2021 at 04:57
>> To: Carol D Lee <cdlee at northwestern.edu<mailto:cdlee at northwestern.edu><mailto:cdlee at northwestern.edu>>
>> Cc: Shirley B Heath
>> <sbheath at stanford.edu<mailto:sbheath at stanford.edu><mailto:sbheath at stanford.edu>>, reading hall of
>>  fame
>> <reading-hall-of-fame at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:reading-hall-of-fame at lists.nottingham.ac.uk><mailto:reading-hall-of-fame at lists.nottingham.ac.uk>>
>> Subject: [Reading-hall-of-fame] Re: Walter MacGinitie
>>
>> Interesting perspective from Carol in response to Shirley's concern
>> that neuroscience is lined up on the context-free cognitive side of
>> the ledger and will end up casting doubt on sociocultural and
>> sociocognitive understandings of literacy and language.
>>
>> Because I have been working on a project (the NAEP Reading
>> Assessment Framework) in which this very issue is prominent, I have
>> been, through Carol, introduced to a completely different
>> neuroscience perspective from the one that those of us in reading
>> research see so prominently displayed in the so-called Science of
>> Reading debate, which is focused on the neuroscience (read FMRI)
>> research demonstrating that even (maybe especially) expert readers
>> recode orthographic representations into a phonemic/phonological
>> representation in the journey to a semantic representation of meaning.
>>
>> The neuroscience perspective that Carol has brought to my intention
>> is well documented in the Science of Learning and Development
>> literature that is carefully reviewed in several papers by Carol and
>>  others AND featured prominently in the 2018 How People Learn II
>> volume. The fundamental move in these accounts is to demonstrate
>> that context, culture, and situation actually shape the physical and
>>  neural processes that learners use in the search for coherent
>> understandings of phenomena, including those inscribed in text.
>>
>> So rather than think of neuroscience as aligned with a narrower view
>>  of cognitive, language, and literacy development, we should think
>> of  neuroscience as reflecting the same tensions we encounter in
>> developmental and pedagogical accounts of these three phenomena.
>>
>> That's my 2 cents worth in support of Carol's.  And endorsement
>> would bring us up to a nickel.
>>
>> Pdp
>>
>> P David Pearson 510 543 6508
>> ppearson at berkeley.edu<mailto:ppearson at berkeley.edu><mailto:ppearson at berkeley.edu>
>>
>> On Feb 19, 2021, at 6:41 PM, Carol D Lee
>> <cdlee at northwestern.edu<mailto:cdlee at northwestern.edu><mailto:cdlee at northwestern.edu>> wrote:
>>
>> Hi All,
>> So I always find interesting these generational distinctions between
>>  who is old guard and not.  At 75 I like to push elderhood, except
>> when I talk to Edmund Gordon, who will turn 100 in June,  for whom
>> I'm still a youngin.   However, because I didn't enter the academy
>> until I was in my mid-forties, I guess I'm somewhere in that in
>> between generational space.
>>
>> So thinking in response to Shirley's comments --- I think emerging
>> work in the neurosciences opens up interesting opportunities for
>> more traditional language and literacy folks, just as the cognitive
>> revolution and attention to the role of schema played a useful role
>> in research around reading comprehension.  The uptake of that
>> cognitive work was less so taken up by strict cognitive
>> psychologists.  In the same vein, emerging findings from the
>> neurosciences have deep implications for the practice of reading or
>> the practice of teaching others to comprehend texts, it is not
>> likely that they will be the folks to take up the implications of
>> that work.  Dan Schwartz co-authored several articles a few years
>> ago on the limitations of basic research in the neurosciences around
>>  brain functioning for the teaching of mathematics.
>>
>> I think the task of the emerging generation of language, literacy
>> and culture researchers is to spread their wings to understand the
>> basic research in relevant areas of the neurosciences, spread their
>> wings to understand fundamental propositions in the field of human
>> development, and then to test empirically the implications of
>> foundational work in these areas.
>>
>> I have been deeply interested in the last decade in the implications
>>  of physiological processes we inherit from our evolution as a
>> species for what it means on the ground to think about the design of
>>  robust learning environments - in my own area with regard to
>> literacy.  I initially begin to explore these ideas in my 2010 AERA
>> Presidential Address.  That was the time when Dick Anderson and I
>> were great dance partners at my presidential party !!!!  Since that
>> time I've spread my wings to co-author a handbook chapter with two
>> folks in the neurosciences (Andy Meltzoff and Pat Kuhl).  Boundary
>> crossing is challenging but really interesting.
>>
>> So Shirley I don't think the neurosciences will take over our field.
>>   Rather I think they will make substantive contributions to our
>> understanding of the sheer complexity of text comprehension, but we
>> need to support and encourage upcoming generations to learn to cross
>>  intellectual borders.
>>
>> My 2 cents!
>>
>> Carol
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Carol D. Lee, Ph.D.
>> Professor Emeritus
>> School of Education and Social Policy
>> Northwestern University
>>
>> Member, National Academy of Education
>> Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
>> Fellow, American Educational Research Association
>> Fellow, National Conference on Language and Literacy
>> President-Elect, National Academy of Education
>> Member, Reading Hall of Fame
>>
>>
>>
>> From:
>> <reading-hall-of-fame-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:reading-hall-of-fame-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk><mailto:reading-hall-of-fame-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk>> on behalf of Shirley_Brice_Heath
>> Heath
>> <sbheath at stanford.edu<mailto:sbheath at stanford.edu><mailto:sbheath at stanford.edu>>
>> Date: Friday, February 19, 2021 at 4:34 PM
>> To: Richard Anderson
>> <csrrca at illinois.edu<mailto:csrrca at illinois.edu><mailto:csrrca at illinois.edu>>, "Leu, Donald"
>> <donald.leu at uconn.edu<mailto:donald.leu at uconn.edu><mailto:donald.leu at uconn.edu>>
>> Cc: reading hall of fame
>> <Reading-hall-of-fame at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:Reading-hall-of-fame at lists.nottingham.ac.uk><mailto:Reading-hall-of-fame at lists.nottingham.ac.uk>>
>> Subject: [Reading-hall-of-fame] Re: Walter MacGinitie
>>
>> You are so right, for he was such a gentleman, ever ready to help
>> younger scholars.  I first met him in that role after I began seeing
>>  my work interpreted as related to reading research.  He seemed
>> puzzled by that, as was I in many ways, but he was so helpful to me
>> and many other scholars.
>>
>> Yes, I see the "old guards" leaving us with greater frequency than
>> we could have imagined.  What we do not know is what will replace
>> what we now think of as the "old guard" along with their ideas.  I
>> predict it will be neuroscience research with more and more
>> revelations about how the brain works in both oral language and in
>> written texts.  That work now appears in many different journals, so
>>  we will see further division within that field, all to our
>> advantage  in learning more about the many miracles of just how we
>> learn by  taking in information from very varied sources.
>>
>> Thanks to all willing to share memories about the full humanity of
>> the "old guard."  What will happen now that much of the research on
>> reading and related activities has gone to neuroscience will be
>> increasing divisions within that field.  Keeping up will get harder
>> and harder, for sure.  My fear is that those working within
>> departments with titles such as "language, literacy, and culture"
>> will begin to feel either left behind or pushed in new and exciting
>> (though challenging) directions.  I wonder if others are seeing
>> similar patterns within their departments and among their colleagues
>>  in the age bracket of 40s-60s.
>>
>> Best to all, and thanks for the memories!
>>
>> Shirley
>> ________________________________
>> From:
>> reading-hall-of-fame-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:reading-hall-of-fame-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk><mailto:reading-hall-of-fame-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk> <reading-hall-of-fame-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:reading-hall-of-fame-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk><mailto:reading-hall-of-fame-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk>> on behalf of Richard
>> Anderson
>> <csrrca at illinois.edu<mailto:csrrca at illinois.edu><mailto:csrrca at illinois.edu>>
>> Sent: Friday, February 19, 2021 1:59 PM
>> To: Leu, Donald <donald.leu at uconn.edu<mailto:donald.leu at uconn.edu><mailto:donald.leu at uconn.edu>>
>> Cc: reading hall of fame
>> <Reading-hall-of-fame at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:Reading-hall-of-fame at lists.nottingham.ac.uk><mailto:Reading-hall-of-fame at lists.nottingham.ac.uk>>
>> Subject: [Reading-hall-of-fame] Re: Walter MacGinitie
>>
>> I first met Walter MacGinitie in the late 1950s at a conference for
>> graduate students held at Northwestern. He represented Teachers
>> College. I represented Harvard. Another person I got to know at the
>> conference was Gordon Bower, then a grad student at Yale. My first
>> job was at New York University. We saw Walter and Ruth a couple of
>> times in New York and I saw him at conferences in subsequent years.
>> With the passing of Walter and other giants in the field, it seems
>> we are at the end of an era. Or maybe just the end of my era.
>>
>> Dick
>>
>> Richard C Anderson
>> University Scholar and Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois
>> Member, National Academy of Education
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Feb 17, 2021 at 2:53 PM Leu, Donald
>> <donald.leu at uconn.edu<mailto:donald.leu at uconn.edu><mailto:donald.leu at uconn.edu>> wrote:
>> Sadly, I report that another member, Walter MacGinitie, has passed.
>>  I never knew Walter personally, only his important work, but word
>> travels among members of the environmental communities concerned
>> about the San Juan Islands of Washington. Walter lived on San Juan
>> Island and he and his wife, Ruth, hadgifted 13 acres of important
>> land to the San Juan Preservation Trust, an organization that my
>> wife and I, as boaters who enjoy the islands, contribute to.    A
>> tribute recently appeared in the SJPT newsletter:
>> https://sjpt.org/remembering-walter-macginitie/<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/sjpt.org/remembering-walter-macginitie/__;!!DZ3fjg!uaQMx0MjECCG-H9dbMd8mJz9YP89SfkKyjksfaPQBvoVAsBA_a_1YG6sVnuNLOFe$<https://sjpt.org/remembering-walter-macginitie/<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/sjpt.org/remembering-walter-macginitie/__;!!DZ3fjg!uaQMx0MjECCG-H9dbMd8mJz9YP89SfkKyjksfaPQBvoVAsBA_a_1YG6sVnuNLOFe$>>
>>
>> Be well.
>>
>> Don
>>
>> --
>> Donald J. Leu, Ph.D.
>> "Every  one of us is given the gift of life, and what a strange gift
>>  it is.  If it is preserved jealously and selfishly, it impoverishes
>>  and saddens. But if it is spent for others, it enriches and
>> beautifies."
>>   -- Geraldine  Ferraro.
>>      Acceptance speech at the 1984 Democratic Party National  Convention.
>>
>>
>>
>>
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