Wiring the Brain

--> “ Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent ” - Wittgenstein That’s a maxim to live by, or certainly to blog by, but I am about to break it. Most of the time I try to write about things I feel I have some understanding of (rightly or wrongly) or at least an informed opinion on. But I am writing this post from a position of ignorance and confusion. I want to discuss a fairly esoteric and technical statistical method recently applied in human genetics, which has become quite influential. The results from recent studies using this approach have a direct bearing on an important question – the genetic architecture of complex diseases, such as schizophrenia and autism. And that, in turn, dramatically affects how we conceptualise these disorders. But this discussion will also touch on a much wider social issue in science, which is how highly specialised statistical claims are accepted (or not) by biologists or clinicians, the vast majority of whom are unabl

--> Synaesthesia – a “mixing of the senses” – was a popular scientific topic in the late 19 th century, but fell out of favour during the mid-20 th century, mainly due to the influence of behaviorism, which held that subjective experience was not a suitable subject for serious science. The start of this century has seen resurgence in interest in the topic, partly fuelled by the hope that neuroimaging would provide objective measures of what is happening in the brains of people during synaesthetic experiences. We (Erik O’Hanlon, Fiona Newell and myself) have recently published our own neuroimaging study of synaesthesia, combining structural and functional analyses. Some of what follows is pulled from that paper, which contains references to the many studies cited below. Many of the ideas below are also discussed in a chapter I wrote for the new Oxford Handbook of Synaesthesia : Synaesthesia and cortical connectivity – a neurodevelopmental perspective. The term synae