Tens of thousands of Americans die from drug overdoses every year around 50,000 in 2015 and the number has been steadily climbing for at least the last decade and a half, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Yet a team of Stanford neuroscientists and legal scholars argues that the nations drug policies are at times exactly the opposite from what science-based policies would look like.

Professor Keith Humphreys is one of the leaders of the Stanford Neuroscience Institutes Neurochoice Big Idea initiative. (Image credit: L.A. Cicero)

Drug policy has never been based on our scientific understanding, said Robert Malenka, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and a coauthor on the paper. Instead, it is based mostly on culture and economic necessities and a misguided desire to punish drug users harshly.

The time has come, he and coauthors write June 22 in the journal Science, to do better.

We have an opioid epidemic that looks like its going to be deadlier than AIDS, but the criminal justice system handles drug addiction in almost exactly opposite of what neuroscience and other behavioral sciences would suggest, said Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and one of the leaders of the Stanford Neurosciences Institutes Neurochoice Big Idea initiative.

A central problem, the authors argue, is that drug use warps the brains decision-making mechanisms, so that what matters most to a person dealing with addiction is the here and now, not the possibility of a trip up the river a few months or years from today.

We have relied heavily on the length of a prison term as our primary lever for trying to influence drug use and drug-related crime, said Robert MacCoun, a professor of law. But such sanction enhancements are psychologically remote and premised on an unrealistic model of rational planning with a long time horizon, which just isnt consistent with how drug users behave.

What might work better, Humphreys said, is smaller, more immediate incentives and punishments perhaps a meal voucher in exchange for passing a drug test, along with daily monitoring.

The environment in which individuals live matters, too, Humphreys said especially when that environment pushes alcohol, cigarettes and prescription painkillers hard. Cigarette advertising, for example, works to make smoking seem like a pleasant escape from the grind of daily life. Meanwhile, drug companies advertising campaigns helped push American doctors to prescribe painkillers at much higher rates than in other countries, a fact that has likely contributed to the countrys growing epidemic of opioid addiction.

The scientists argue that basing policy on science rather than on a desire to punish addicts would improve lives, including victims of drug-related crime.

To learn that addictive drugs distort the choice process is not the same as showing that addicts are incapable of making choices. Addicts already know full well that their behavior is inappropriate and stigmatized, MacCoun said. But mostly I think questions of morality distract from very practical questions about what works and what doesnt work to reduce drug-related harm.

And, the researchers say, the costs of current policy are staggering: on average 78 Americans die every day from opioid overdoses.

The new commentary is timed to appear four days before a much-anticipated report from a presidential commission on drug addiction. While it may not have an impact on that particular report, Humphreys and his coauthors say they hope the commentary and the Neurochoice Initiative it is part of will make a difference in a critical area of public policy.

To that end, Neurochoice brings together neuroscientists, psychologists, public policy scholars and others to tackle drug addiction and find better treatments and policies for dealing with the problem. It has already produced some intriguing results. Professor of Psychology Brian Knutson and colleagues, for example, recently showed that brain scans could help predict which adolescents would initiate excessive drug use in the future. Those are the kinds of results, the authors write, that might guide better laws and practices in the future.

Each of the authors is a member of the Stanford Neurosciences Institute and its NeuroChoice project, which funded the research. Malenka is a member of Stanford Bio-X and the Nancy Friend Pritzker Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science. Knutson is a member of Bio-X and an affiliate of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. MacCoun is a senior fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the James and Patricia Kowal Professor of Law.

Read the original post:
U.S. drug policy needs a dose of neuroscience | Stanford News - Stanford University News

Seema Sueko, 44, is deputy artistic director at Arena Stage. She was born in Pakistan and lives in Columbia Heights.

A deputy title is very Washington, like our welcome to you. Youll get an undersecretary next.

It is a title thats also used at the Royal Shakespeare [Company]and the National Theatre in London. As far as I know, its the first usage at an American nonprofit theater.

You developed a strategy called consensus organizing for theater. What does it look like in practice?

I first developed it in San Diego at Mo`olelo Performing Arts Company. CO, consensus organizing, is about mutual self-interest. For theater its about building stake in multiple pockets of communities and those communities building stake back in the theater by organizing around mutual self-interest. With Smart People, the play I just directed at Arena, I want this play to be as artistically excellent as possible. I needed to learn about neuroscience, how an EEG machine works. I needed a deeper dive into theories about implicit bias and the science and psychology of racism. We look at what are our assets, dramaturgically searching the greater Washington area. One example of an asset is the Brain and Behavior Initiative at University of Maryland. I asked them what do they really want, which is the heart of consensus organizing. Theyre a multi-disciplinary initiative. They wanted to further embrace working across disciplines. They wanted to get their students off campus. They wanted to have their students have a creative experience.

Yay!

Two hundred students and faculty members from a diversity of disciplines came to the show and did a pre-show workshop and a talk-back with the cast. Now were talking about what well do next season together.

Whats CO look like for an upcoming show?

For Native Gardens by Karen Zacaras, we are beginning conversations with communities engaged in Latinx studies, neighborhood associations, plant science and landscaping, American studies, women in science and engineering, among others. Theyre still early stages.

What was your first big moment of theater?

I was in the eighth grade in Hawaii. I saw my sister playing the lead in the musical Little Mary Sunshine. My sister was very shy, so introverted. To see her transform onstage and just bring so much joy to the audience really moved me.

She became somebody unlike herself in real life?

I think she just revealed all of the magnificent-ness, if thats a word, about herself. All the things that I, as her sister, knew and saw but she kept hidden from others because she was shy. There it was, all for everyone to see.

More Just Asking

For stories, features such as Date Lab, Gene Weingarten and more, visit WP Magazine.

Follow the Magazine on Twitter.

Like us on Facebook.

Email us at wpmagazine@washpost.com.

More here:
An Arena Stage director on neuroscience for research and inspiration - Washington Post

As the tech industrys well-documented gender disparity once again enters the spotlight, even Michelle Obama is calling for men to make room at the table for women and other underrepresented groups.

While some people attribute the lack of women in tech to a host of issues (from social biases in childhood education that discourage women from analytic fields to a culture that silently condones sexual harassment in the workplace), others believe the answer is a little more...primal. Maybe mens brains are genetically more adept at logical reasoning. I read a study that showed that boys are better at mentally rotating cubes when theyre younger.

And there are indeed quite a lot of studies that show that men and boys are better at mentally rotating cubes, that boy babies prefer mobile toys to dolls, and other experiments that hint at a genetically predetermined male advantage in STEM.

There is also little question that currently, more men are involved in STEM fields, and that mens and womens brains are different. So its easy for people to put two and two together and assume that these differences are hardwired. That the reason that there are so few women in tech is *neuroscience*.

Thankfully, there is also Cordelia Fine. In her book Delusions of Gender, Fine dissects the various neuroscientific theories behind an intrinsic male superiority in STEM abilities and the landmark studies that supported them. A neuroscientist and researcher by trade, Cordelia Fine examines how social ideas about gender have influenced the hypotheses and methods used to study gender in as it relates to the brain. She then points out major logical faults.

Delusions of Gender illustrates how gender bias leads researchers to make flawed neuroscience conclusions that then reinforce gender bias. Ive created a brief timeline to offer a taste of how this dynamic has played out over the last 130 years:

Fines response: Did he really know not a single weedy intellectual, nor one muscular chump, to provoke him to wonder whether physical strength really was correlated with tenacity of brain action? We now have evidence to show that neither sheer brain size nor brain-to-body mass ratio are predictive of intelligence. In short, those missing five ounces mean nothing.

Again, here is a neuroscientist merely listing the observed differences between adult male and female brains. Dana does not offer a reason why these differences would lead to the conclusions he draws. The power of shared preconceptions was so overwhelming that nobody questioned the lack of real scientific evidence. Instead, scientists and readers alike accepted that if X (the observed physical differences between male and females) is true, and they believed Y (the superiority of male intellect) to be true as well, then X must cause Y.

In additional to this logical fallacy, Fine points out that observed physiological differences between male and female brains do not necessarily result in differences in brain function: some differences offset each other, and others are different means to the same behavior end.

Modern ideas of men as rational/unemotional and women intuitive/irrational seem to arise from a theory by Norman Geschwind and his colleagues in the 1980s.

In 1982, Geschwind and Behan published a short paper proposing a complicated theory behind brain lateralization. The implications for gender went something like this: during development, male fetuses experience a surge of testosterone. Geschwind suggests that this surge slows the boys left hemisphere growth, leaving male babies with greater potential for superior right hemisphere talents, such as artistic, musical, or mathematical talent.

This theory spurred decades of research into fetal testosterone, leading scientists to draw conclusions between factors like digit ratios and math abilities (again--for a more detailed dive into individual studies, read the book!).

Meanwhile, it is widely ignored that neurophysiologist Ruth Bleier points out that a premise of the fetal testosterone hypothesis, that fetal testosterone leaves boy babies with cramped left hemispheres, is inconsistent with post-mortem studies of fetal brains. So if male fetuses do not actually have smaller left hemispheres (and for that matter, expanded right hemispheres), there is no reason to believe that fetal testosterone grants them superior right hemisphere talents.

The Fetal Testosterone Hypothesis hasnt gone away, but a new generation of researchers has put forth a new theory of genetically determined male dominance in STEM abilities: The Spotlight/Floodlight hypothesis, as coined by Ruben Gur in 2005. The general idea is that women, as observed by Ruben and his wife Raquel Gur, have larger corpus callosum, the area that connects the two brain hemispheres. They pinpoint the splenium, to be specific. Because of this enlarged splenium, women have greater inter-hemispheric traffic, leading to a floodlight mind better for multitasking, whereas men, they posit, have less inter-hemispheric traffic, creating a spotlight mind better for focusing, specifically on visuo-spatial tasks deemed essential for developing STEM skills.

Hmm...women are better at multi-tasking? At first, this hypothesis seems to empower women! But then, as Fine notes, we realize that this is just new marketing copy for an idea that continues to justify the segregation of women from math and science.

But by creating and emphasizing any distinction between the functions of mens and womens brains, we open ourselves to a world in which neuroscientists can say that one genders brain is better for something than the brains of others. It was creativity in the Victorian age, judicial thought at the turn of the 20th century, and it is STEM abilities now.

Simon Baron-Cohen, a longtime champion of gender-based neural differences, demonstrates how this unintentionally sexist dynamic plays out. Baron-Cohen quoted the Spotlight/Floodlight hypothesis in Science, noting that the increased local connectivity of male brains makes them better for understanding and building systems, whereas womens long range brains make them better for empathizing.

Unfortunately for Baron-Cohen and the Gurs, meta-analyses conducted in 2004 and 2008 have showed that there is little evidence to support the idea that a female brain has on average a larger splenium. Studies that conclude this tend to suffer from small sample sizes.

A small sample size alone is not the problem. A study can have a small sample size and be perfectly valid. The problem is that studies that show difference are more likely to be published. So if 20 studies are conducted and only one shows a difference, that one will be published because it causes a stir. But by looking at all twenty studies in a meta analysis, we see that the one published study was only significant because of its small sample size.

So lets recap: the Spotlight/Floodlight hypothesis posits that 1) because women have a larger splenium (part of the corpus callosum, which connects the two hemispheres), the hemispheres in womens brains do more talking; 2) men have less hemispheric talking because of a smaller splenium; and 3) less hemispheric talking is better for building systems e.g. engineering abilities, therefore men are better at engineering. Even disregarding the dubious nature of claim #3, meta analyses show that women do not on average have a larger splenium, which eliminates this entire hypothesis as a possible neuroscientific explanation for the abundance of Y chromosomes in tech startups.

In addition to the lack of evidence to support the hypothesis that a woman has a larger splenium, the Gurs themselves found evidence that contradicted the Spotlight/Floodlight hypothesis. The Gurs and their colleagues found that in some parts of the brain, men show more bilateral (cross-hemispheric) activation than women on certain visuo-spatial tasks. As a result, they edited the Spotlight/Floodlight hypothesis to the following: optimal performance on these STEM-skill-determining visuo-spatial tasks now requires unilateral activation in primary regions AND bilateral activation in associated regions.

At this, Cordelia Fine delivers one of the best passages in the book:

Basically, the Gurs coined Spotlight/Floodlight when they found evidence for less bilateral activation in male brains, then claimed that less bilateral action = STEM brain. Then they found more bilateral activation in male brains for other STEM tasks, which prompted them to change their hypothesis. The Gurs reformulation now claims that an optimal STEM brain has unilateral (spotlight) activation and some bilateral (floodlight) activation.

Cordelia Fine pokes fun at their shifting stance while suggesting again that certain scientists are so determined to find evidence for male STEM superiority in the brain that they will label anything they find as the cause.

Fine is not saying that its impossible that there is something inherent in males that could make them more suited for math and science. She simply argues that the current support for this idea is poorly substantiated.

To reiterate: the debate in question is not about whether there are differences between men and women. At every level of behavioral science, from the brain to behavior, differences are well-documented. The debate is over whether or not these differences are predetermined by genetics, or if they are the result of brain plasticity and stereotype threat in a society where, from infancy, we see messages that men=mars=science and women=venus=empathy.

In the end, Delusions of Gender has two calls to action: 1) Scientists should have more rigor when conducting and reporting on studies that have implications as serious as the origins of gender differences. 2) Readers should be vigilant when presented with such studies and not be dazzled by the use of neuroscience simply because it is neuroscience.

For anyone who is interested in the brain, research methods, applied science, gender, parenting, the workplace, human nature, or general sass, this book is an absolute must read.

Cyndi Chen writes about jobs, women, and technology. She is currently pursuing her MBA at Yale University. Interests include human narratives, the brain, pop culture, art, the Bachelor, and railing against the wedding industry. Follow Cyndi on Twitter at https://twitter.com/cyndithinks

The Morning Email

Wake up to the day's most important news.

Excerpt from:
Summer Reading: how biases influence neuroscience research on gender - HuffPost