Junk science, with a purpose

I spit my coffee:

Disputed signs of consciousness seen in babies’ brains 

Infants display neural responses linked to visual awareness by 5 months of age

By Bruce Bower
Web edition: April 18, 2013


Babies’ brains emit electrical bursts that signal a budding awareness of the visual world by the time they are 5 months old, a new study concludes. But some researchers are skeptical that these neural surges correspond to conscious experience. 

From age 5 months to 15 months, the brain begins to develop the ability to register and remember sights, according to the research by cognitive neuroscientist Sid Kouider of École Normale Supérieure in Paris and his colleagues. The researchers showed babies images that included faces flashed increasingly slowly on a screen. They started at a speed so fast that even adults wouldn’t consciously notice the images, and then the researchers increased the amount of time each image appeared. Infants displayed a sequence of rapid brain responses that first signaled unconscious and then conscious perception of faces, Kouider’s team reports April 18 in Science. 

“We weren’t expecting to see any evidence of a neural marker for consciousness in 5-month-olds,” Kouider says. Babies at that age exhibited a weak, delayed version of a brain response that occurs when adults report seeing a face flashed just long enough to be consciously perceived, Kouider asserts. 

Stronger and faster brain responses corresponding to visual awareness emerged in 12- and 15-month-olds, Kouider found, although older infants still fell well short of the adult pattern. 

If further research confirms the existence of a neural marker of consciousness in babies, scientists could adapt their visual task to evaluate whether infants show brain indications of feeling pain during medical procedures or after receiving numbing drugs, he suggests.
But cognitive neuroscientist Charles Nelson of Harvard Medical School sees no clear connection between the findings in infants and the electrical responses in adults’ brains. “I would be reluctant to attribute the same mental operation, such as consciousness, to infants and adults simply because of similar patterns of brain activity,” Nelson cautions. 

Electrical responses in the brain linked to sensations, thoughts and behaviors change dramatically over the first few years of life, Nelson says. The brain responses proposed by Kouider’s group as underlying infant consciousness don’t clearly correspond to those linked to visual awareness in adults, Nelson holds. 

In the new study, 5-month-olds, 12-month-olds and 15-month-olds sat on their mothers’ laps while wearing an electrode-studded cap that measured electrical activity on the brain’s surface. The babies saw three scrambled images and a woman’s face, flashed on a computer screen for various amounts of time, accompanied by bell sounds for each image that created a simple melody to attract the infants’ attention. 

In the same setup, adults don’t report seeing a face and don’t display a neural marker of consciousness until each image appears for nearly one-third of a second. For 12- and 15-month-olds, each image had to be presented for about three-quarters of a second — and for almost one second for 5-month-olds — for the children to indicate conscious perception by looking toward the faces and generating the proposed brain signature of visual awareness. 

No one has yet confirmed that a string of electrical responses in the brains of either adults or children reflects a transition from unconscious to conscious perception, remarks cognitive neuroscientist Teodora Gliga of the University of London’s Birkbeck College. But Kouider’s team has designed a way to investigate conditions under which infants, and possibly nonhuman animals, respond to and learn from their environments, an important achievement in itself, Gliga holds. 

That’s not to say that babies can’t be aware of their surroundings, as some researchers have argued. “Five-month-olds and even younger infants probably have many real-life opportunities to consciously process information,” Gliga says.

Disputed signs of consciousness? Disputed? What malicious crap. 

Of course babies are conscious. Fetuses are conscious, at least at a certain age. They do purposeful things, they learn (even in the womb), they respond to pain and pleasure. Babies-- even premature babies-- are obviously conscious. Such consciousness is part of the routine neuro exam that I do on young children, even on premature infants at 25 weeks of gestation. I evaluate consciousness in children professionally. Babies are conscious. 

You don't need to be a brain surgeon to know that babies are conscious. No parent denies that babies are conscious. Obviously babies are cognitively immature, but they are obviously conscious. 

Why would crap like this-- disputed signs of consciousness in babies-- make it into the scientific literature? What editor in his right mind would accept a paper like this for publication?

The reason for this garbage is obvious. It is making straight the path for "post-natal abortions". Expect to see a lot more of this evil. Peter Singer has famously said that it should be legal to kill babies up to three months or even a year of age if parents don't want them. 

But first we have to dehumanize them. That's where the junk science comes in. "Research" that denies consciousness in infants is an effort to provide a scientific basis for "post-natal abortions"-- our next holocaust. 

Calling out arrogant abuse of power...

GOP congressman Trey Gowdy chokes up when he delivers a riveting takedown of IRS arrogance and abuse.

Eloquent.

Spam break-out!

Sorry!

I've just released a bunch of comments (>20) unrighteously snared in the spambox. I need to check it more often. If comments disappear, please tell me.

But of course, your comment to tell me might get snared in the spambox.

:-/

I'll have to talk to the NSA about this. They need to have a lighter touch on my surveillance. 

Rush Limbaugh: "America in the Midst of a Coup d'Etat"

Yep. A peaceful one, so far, but a left-wing coup. Systematic, illegal, unconstitutional.

Rush:

It's a point that I've made here about the IRS. They say, "Well, you can't link it in to Obama." You don't need to link Obama to it. He hired these people. Lois Lerner and everybody at the IRS who's doing this is doing everything they can to please Obama. There's not gonna be a smoking gun, but you don't need a smoking gun to know where this administration's doing what it's doing. 

Obama puts people in positions that mirror him. Eric Holder, you name it, they're doing Obama's bidding. Everybody. Susan Rice and Samantha Power, they are Obama, and there's a context for what's happening. Herbert Meyer, if I may quote him again, asserted that essentially what's taking place in the United States right now is a coup, not a violent coup, and not a million artistic coup, but nevertheless a takeover of a government, and it's being done by the Obama administration.

You must read the whole thing. Brilliant. Rush nails what is happening to our country.

Rush:

How does that sound now, by the way: "I hope he fails"?

Let us pray that Obama fails. I'm not sure he will.

One thing has really bothered me about these scandals: they are so blatant, so easily discovered. Obviously these gangsters knew that they couldn't keep what they were doing quiet for long. But they did the stuff anyway.

Could it be because they know that they have already won, and there's nothing really that we can do about it?

"like a dead frog whose legs are still kicking"

John Hinderaker:

GLOBAL WARMING ALARMISM IN TWILIGHT

The curtain is coming down rapidly on global warming alarmism, as evidence of the AGW theory’s falsity accumulates on nearly a daily basis. Of course, the global warming machine grinds on, like a dead frog whose legs are still kicking... 

This chart, via Watts Up With That, sums up the hopelessness of the warmists’ position as well as anything. It charts the various projections generated by the models relied on by the U.N., etc, against actual global temperature data as observed via satellites and balloons. The black line represents the mean of the model projections, the green circles represent the average of four balloon data sets, and the blue squares are the average of two satellite data sets. The chart is set so that the mean model projection intersects with empirical observations in 1979: 

Any model must either pass or fail the test of empirical observation. The warmists’ models, on which the entire edifice of global warming alarmism stands, fail the test. The warming they predicted just isn’t happening. The alarmists like to say that the science is settled. We are rapidly approaching the point where they are correct: the science is, indeed, settled, only not the way they intended. If you put aside the trivial proposition that it is warmer now than it was during the Little Ice Age, there is no empirical basis for climate alarmism. 

Dr. Roy Spencer says: 

In my opinion, the day of reckoning has arrived. The modellers and the IPCC have willingly ignored the evidence for low climate sensitivity for many years, despite the fact that some of us have shown that simply confusing cause and effect when examining cloud and temperature variations can totally mislead you on cloud feedbacks (e.g. Spencer & Braswell, 2010). The discrepancy between models and observations is not a new issue…just one that is becoming more glaring over time. 

Scientific failure will not, of course, put the warmists out of business; not quickly, anyway. There is too much money in it. But the taxpayers’ patience with subsidizing pseudo-science is rapidly running out.

The scam's up, but the warmist frauds will keep kicking until the next green apocalypse gravy train comes along. 

In the meantime, the academic discipline most apropos to climate alarmism will continue to be not climate science but forensic science.

Fulton Sheen on Satan

From Father William Saunders:

Archbishop Fulton Sheen provided us with a keen insight into Satan. "Do not mock the Gospels and say there is no Satan. Evil is too real in the world to say that. Do not say the idea of Satan is dead and gone. Satan never gains so many cohorts as when, in his shrewdness, he spreads the rumor that he is long since dead. Do not reject the Gospel because it says the Savior was tempted. Satan always tempts the pure—the others are already his. Satan stations more devils on monastery walls than in dens of iniquity, for the latter offer no resistance. Do not say it is absurd that Satan should appear to our Lord, for Satan must always come close to the godly and the strong—the others succumb from a distance."

It is basic Christian teaching that Satan is real, and is active in the world. His fingerprints can be seen everywhere-- in atrocities, in fear and despair, in licentiousness, in temptations, in ennui. People who are seriously trying to live with Christ are often particular targets-- saints are greater labor for the father of lies than are dissolute sinners, who succumb at a distance.  

I love this dog

Let him in, for goodness sake!