“NEUROBULLSHIT?” Good practices and mischief in neuroscience

Thursday, April 13th 2017

9h30 – 18h

INVITED SPEAKER : Franck Ramus The brain has undeniably become the most popular and mysterious organ of the body. (The European Union has launched a massive project to model the human brain from scratch while the US “BRAIN initiative” has injected billions of dollars in neuroscience research). At the system level, we are now being able to decode perceptions or dreams and predict decisions from human brain patterns of activity. In parallel, at the single-cell level, we are now able to stimulate or silence single neurons with light patterns or record online neuronal activity in a wide range of contexts and in many organisms. All these incredible breakthroughs have unfortunately come with a price: “neurobullshitted” transfer of knowledge such as well-known neuromyths, fake brain training programs, and erroneous extrapolation of neuroscience theories to other fields such as education, marketing or economy have developed in the same time as these marvelous scientific discoveries. Inside the lab, the urge to publish gave rise to a different kind of “neurobullshitting”: bad practices in the design, biased interpretation of the results, gangnam style brain networks, abusive reverse inferences and alarming rates of false positives (highlighted by brain activations found in a dead salmon!). In this workshop, we will address in parallel both exciting new discoveries in the field and dangerous/distrustful practices that result from them.

Timetable 9h-9h30 Coffee - Welcome 9h30 Opening - Introduction to neurobullshit thematic workshop 9h30-10h30 Session 1 – « Structure - function, relationship »

Master AIV presentation : Anastasia Osoianu PhD student FdV presentation : Ignacio Rebollo

10h30-10h45 Coffee Break 10h45-11h30 Session 2 – « Computational modelling in neurosciences » PhD student FdV Presentation : Maxime Maheu Workshop : Open discussion : #Stats #Biases #Hypothesis #ExperimentalDesign 11h30-12h45 Session 3 – « Neurobullshit in scientific research and in science

communication »

Guest talk : Franck Ramus

12h45-14h00 Lunch break 14h00-14h30 Poster session during coffee/desserts 14h30-16h00 Session 4 - Cognitive neuroscience – Education and mediation »

Master EdTech presentation : Lamprini Chartofylaka Master EdTech presentation : Olga Velazquez Arenas

Cog’innov presentation: Judith Lenglet and Théo Besson : “Mediation in cognitive sciences and its limitations”

16h-16h15 Coffee break 16h15-17h15 Session 5 – « Unconference & Hold-up » : Collaborative problem solving 17h15-18h00 Neuropéro

Poster prizes (for all participants)

Animated SURPRISE on the talks : Stay with us !

Drinks / Goodbye buffet.

Speakers and abstracts :

Franck Ramus http://www.scilogs.fr/ramus-meninges/ Franck Ramus is a CNRS senior research scientist at the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, Institute of Cognitive Studies, Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. His research focuses on the development of language and social cognition, and their disorders (developmental dyslexia, specific language impairment, autism). He has ample experience on the dissemination of knowledge of cognitive science to the general public and he has done an extensive contribution to this issue by raising awareness of the problems of misinterpretations and biases, specifically in the field of female-male differences, genetics contributions to behavior autism and other developmental disorders.

Cog’innov http://coginnov.org/ Cog’Innov est un collectif pluridisciplinaire réuni autour d’une conviction commune : les connaissances sur le cerveau et le comportement issues des sciences cognitives constituent des outils de questionnement et de changement pour le quotidien des individus et des organisations. Pour tisser des liens directs entre la recherche en sciences cognitives et la société, nous proposons un modèle d’action qui allie partage de connaissances et applications concrètes de ces connaissances et des modes d’investigation scientifique : de la médiation scientifique aux projets de collaboration avec des acteurs économiques. En facilitant et en créant sans cesse de nouveaux modes de partage, d’interaction et de collaboration entre différents univers (académique, artistique, entrepreneurial,…), Cog’Innov participe ainsi à

l’évolution des manières de penser et d’appréhender le monde qui nous entoure.

Ignacio Rebollo PhD Student Lab : Laboratoire de Neuroscience Cognitives PhD supervisor : Catherine Tallon-Baudry

“The gastric network: A new resting state network revealed by brain-stomach phase synchrony” The monitoring of visceral signals by the brain could contribute to the neural basis of the self by generating an egocentric reference frame. Here we study brain-stomach coupling. The stomach contains a specialized set of cells that constantly generates a slow rhythmic electrical activity at ~0.05 Hz (20 seconds period) which can be recorded by placing electrodes over the abdomen (Electrogastrography, EGG). We recorded simultaneously the EGG and 3T BOLD-fMRI in 30 human participants during resting fixation and analyzed phase synchrony between the two. We then applied randomization statistics to extract significant synchronized regions at the group-level, defining the gastric network. The gastric network is composed of somatotopically organized areas that have classically been associated with different modalities: Primary and secondary somatosensory cortices, cingulate motor regions, supplementary motor area and extra-striate body areas. These somatotopically organized regions are active when sensing, moving, viewing or imagining the body. The other regions we found coupled with the stomach are either active during spatial navigation tasks like the dorsal precuneus and the retrosplenial cortex, or involved in the generation of the alpha-rhythm like the parieto-occipital sulcus. These results are specific to the frequency and phase of each participant’s gastric signal and cannot be explained by head micro-movements.

Maxime Maheu PhD Student Lab : Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit PhD Supervisor : Stanislas Dehaene “Drawing conclusions in experimental science through hypothesis testing: from statistics to models” In science, more particularly with the experimental approach, we struggle with multiple levels of uncertainty. First, the measure instruments that we use suffer from measurement noise (i.e. two different measures of the same phenomenon will not lead exactly to the same measurement). Second, there is uncertainty about the nature and the exact parameter(s) that characterize the process we are interested in (e.g. information processing in the brain), which may even reveal to be fully intractable in some cases. Last, but not least, even for a dynamical system that we have reached a perfect knowledge of, we may not be able to entirely predict its dynamics because of the intrinsic stochasticity that characterizes it (e.g. a geyser eruption). As scientists, each single piece of data that we collect is therefore marred by these multiple uncertainties that prevent us from drawing exact inference from it. To allow conclusions to be drawn from such uncertain observations, modern science has developed standardized inferential procedures, namely "statistics". In this talk, we will first begin by reviewing the epistemological foundations of the use of statistics in experimental science. We will then discuss the drawbacks that people have raised against the statistical approach that is the most commonly used (i.e. null hypothesis significance testing, or NHST) and see why others (but not necessarily new) approaches (e.g. Bayesian statistics, or BS) are progressively preferred. We will specifically build upon the case of psychology and neuroscience in which these drawbacks are exacerbated mostly because of the small samples that we tend to use in those fields. Finally, we will argue that the raise of BS is the symptom of a general evolution in neuroscience – and more generally in biology – that aims at a systematic and explicit modeling of our processes of interest that precisely allows to account for some of the multiple uncertainties we described above.

Anastasia Osoianu Master AIV Labs : Institut Pasteur, « Human Genetics and Cognitive Function » Supervisor : Roberto Toro « Fake Tensor Imaging » Polarized light imaging (PLI) as well as the tractography of high angular resolution diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) data reveal a geometry of striking regularity. This makes the neuroanatomist wonder whether it would be possible to generate a connectome based exclusively on a small set of hypotheses: more than 90% of white matter connections are cortico-cortical; the density of fibres is homogeneous throughout the white matter; fibres are oriented perpendicular to gyral crowns and parallel to sulcal fundi; fibres are sticky, which makes them aggregate in bundles of similar orientation. How much of a real brain connectome would be recovered by such a simple and reductionistic model?

Lamprini Chartofylaka Master EdTech Labs : ENS, « BabyLab» Research experiment for bilingual children, cognitive neuroscience and developmental psychology

Olga Velazquez Arenas Master EdTech Labs : CRI Olga is working on a project "neurodiversity" which is about how to integrate people with mental disabilities and different brain functions and normalize their presence to give them the possibility of a dignified and happy life like any other “normal” person. She's prototyping right now scenario with virtual reality here at CRI.

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