How Smart Are Brain Surgeons?

That brain surgeons are very smart has found its way into a rarified spot in our culture: it’s become a cliché so obvious that no one doubts it. It’s right up there with rocket scientists.

Alas, what we cognitive psychologists know about both these professions, but especially brain surgeon, is that you don’t really have to be very smart to be successful.

Ben Carson is a classic example. Every issue that comes up on the campaign trail reveals his lack of serious intellectual chops. He’s not curious. He’s devoted little thought to complex issues and routinely accepts the most paltry evidence as somehow affirming some crackpot idea he got in his head — like his conclusion that prisons make people gay (yeah, he said this) or that Islamic principles are unconstitutional (said this too).

His cleaving to creationism demonstrates a serious lack of intellectual ability. To be a creationist and a doctor is professional oxymoronism. Medicine is founded on principles of evolutionary biology. Every element in it from the underlying neuro-physiological mechanisms that operate within the body to the models that provide insights into how to develop newer and more effective procedures is based on Darwinian mechanisms. To ignore these is, in a word, embarrassing.

Carson is a Seventh Day Adventist, an adherent of a fundamentalist, biblical literalist faith that butts its head against modern science and is utterly discoordinate with modern medicine and contemporary science.

And, it’s not just religion. He shows the same failure to test reality when it comes to climate change. Again, the data are overwhelming. Only the truly stupid or willfully ignorant can deny the reality of climate change or fail to grasp our role in it.

Similar analyses apply to his total lack of empathy for women and his failure to understand, even remotely, the rather simple notion that everyone gets to make the decisions about their own bodies.

Of course, no one doubts that he has remarkable surgical skills. He was one of the finest brain surgeons in the country, perhaps the world. He graduated from the best schools and his academic record was outstanding. He is also circumspect, careful in his manner of speaking and almost everyone who knows him likes him.

But … is he smart, “brain-surgeon” smart?

By now I hope you’re seeing the problem here. “Smart” isn’t just a simple thing. Intelligence isn’t a single entity. IQ tests, for example, hide a host of complications, buried under a single number. We’ve seen this before when we looked at Ted Cruz, another supposedly high-IQ guy who routinely makes statements that only a truly stupid person could make.

So, how could Carson, this not-very-smart guy, end up being one of the world’s top brain surgeons? The answer is that you don’t have to be all that smart to be a brain surgeon. In fact, you don’t have to be very smart to be a doctor. You do need scholastic skills, the ability to read a book, absorb its contents in a superficial way and be ready to answer questions about the material.

You need motivation and a certain stick-to-it quality because there’s a lot of information you need to commit to memory. But it’s not complicated stuff. It’s mainly material about anatomy, biochemistry, neurophysiology, structural features of bodies, basic biophysics. Anyone with a slightly above average academic intelligence, good social skills and high levels of motivation can pull it off.

To become a top surgeon you also need some other abilities, among them excellent sensory-motor skills, patience, a calm demeanor and, importantly, an ego and a deep belief in your own abilities. But you do not need to be very smart. You do not need to be creative or curious. You can pull it off without a probing intellect; have little interest in searching for new knowledge or new ways to understand issues. You don’t have to have a willingness to rethink issues when the evidence calls for it or an uncomfortablness with ambiguity and contradition and a desire to repair it.

Andy Borowitz, political town-crier had an excellent piece of political satire on Carson saying, in a much more amusing way, what I’m trying to get across here. Go read it.

Oh, in case you’re wondering, you don’t have to be all that smart to be a rocket scientist either.

Ding, Ding, Ding: We Have a Winner!

Fans of the fantastic, we have a winner in this week’s Absurdity Sweepstakes. Well, we have today’s offering. It does “Trump” the one from last week which arrived the other day courtesy of Ben Carson. But hell, it’s only Monday.

The winner is Marco Rubio, the junior Senator from Florida who may (or not) be an “anchor baby.” He seems to have finally realized that the long-standing argument that Planned Parenthood runs abortion mills using “your tax dollars” wasn’t going anywhere. For one, someone must have whispered to him that abortions make up just the tiniest sliver of their services (around 2%) and, for another, no Federal monies can be used for abortions. So he went back to those tapes that purportedly show Planned Parenthood personnel talking about harvesting baby parts and fetal issues and selling them for a profit.

Rubio seems to have grasped that the tapes were doctored. There were no fully formed fetuses with beating hearts waiting to be cut up for their brains and, presumably, other parts because you can’t use someone else’s brain for anything (Carly, are you listening?).

But, alas, he bought the lie that a profit was being made from the sale of fetal tissue and that this financial gain would somehow encourage women to have abortions.

In an interview with KCCI, a Des Moines, Iowa CBS affiliate, he said that Planned Parenthood has created “an incentive for people to be pushed into abortions so that those tissues can be harvested and sold for a profit.” The video can be see here.

It’s gonna be hard to top this — certainly no woman will since only a man could say something so stupid, heartless and brutal.

No woman undergoing an abortion is happy about it. It is a trying, difficult and stressful situation.

Every woman using Planned Parenthood abortion services provides informed consent for the use of fetal issues from the procedure. No consent and the tissues are not used. Most give consent often stating that it helps balance to struggle. It’s like organ donor cards that many of us sign hoping that our body parts will extend someone’s life or return their eyesight.

No profit is made by anyone. The fees are paid by the laboratory or research unit receiving the tissue to cover expenses and transportation.

The very idea that women might intentionally become pregnant specifically so that they can have an abortion and make monetary gain from it is today’s winner.

Mr. Rubio, who’s been walking a tight line lately with idiotic nonsense denying climate change, dodging evolution and shifting from his once-reasonable stance on immigration to the GOP’s standard xenophobia, has now disqualified himself from the presidency, just as Ben Carson did the other day and Donald Trump on so many occasions….

Eventually the only one left will be Jeb! and we’ll all end up where we knew we would: Bush v. Clinton redux.

So sad.

The Truth Behind the WSJ's Lie About Sanders

I don’t normally import other’s words — all us egocentric writers with academic backgrounds prefer our own — but this column by Robert Reich gets to the point so clearly and makes the case so succinctly that there’s no sense in trying to say it any better. As noted, this originally appeared on Reich FB page. Reich wants the truth spread. I’m spreading it.

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The Wall Street Journal’s $18 Trillion Dollar Lie About Bernie

By Robert Reich, Robert Reich’s Facebook Page

17 September 15

‘ve had so many calls about an article appearing earlier this week in the Wall Street Journal — charging that Bernie Sanders’s proposals would carry a “price tag” of $18 trillion over a 10-year period — that it’s necessary to respond.

The Journal’s number is entirely bogus, designed to frighten the public. Please spread the truth:

(1) Bernie’s proposals would cost less than what we’d spend without them. Most of the “cost” the Journal comes up with—$15 trillion—would pay for opening Medicare to everyone. This would be cheaper than relying on our current system of for-profit private health insurers that charge you and me huge administrative costs, advertising, marketing, bloated executive salaries, and high pharmaceutical prices. (Gerald Friedman, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, estimates a Medicare-for-all system would actually save all of us $10 trillion over 10 years).

(2) The savings from Medicare-for-all would more than cover the costs of the rest of Bernie’s agenda—tuition-free education at public colleges, expanded Social Security benefits, improved infrastructure, and a fund to help cover paid family leave – and still leave us $2 trillion to cut federal deficits for the next ten years.

(3) Many of these other “costs” would also otherwise be paid by individuals and families — for example, in college tuition and private insurance. So they shouldn’t be considered added costs for the country as a whole, and may well save us money.

(4) Finally, Bernie’s proposed spending on education and infrastructure aren’t really “spending” at all, but investments in the nation’s future productivity. If we don’t make them, we’re all poorer.

That Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal would do this giant dump on Bernie, based on misinformation and distortion, confirms Bernie’s status as the candidate willing to take on the moneyed interests that the Wall Street Journal represents.

Dalai Lama's Conundrum and a Solution

The Dalai Lama has a problem. He’s getting along in years and must begin the preparations for his eventual reincarnation. The Chinese know this. They are waiting. As soon as the child who is identified as the 15th reincarnation of the Dalai Lama is known, they will swoop in and kidnap him.

There’s no secret about this. They already pulled off this child snatching thing back in 1995 when the 6 year-old Gedhun Choekyi Nyima was identified as the reincarnation of the Panchen Lama (the Lama just below the Dalai in Tibetan Buddhism). The Chinese claimed that Gedhun was not the true Panchen Lama (they had nominated one Gyaincain Norbu as their candidate) and they spirited him away for “his own safety.” He has been in captivity since then and the folks who know where he is being kept aren’t talking.

In 2011 the Dalai Lama, anticipating a similar move by Beijing, began deliberations about whether he should reincarnate. Westerners generally don’t “get” Tibetan Buddhism. It’s quite complex with many rituals and regulations and, as is typical of sophisticated philosophies and religions that have been around for extended time, there is much debate and deliberation about tradition and text, their meanings and interpretations. In an extended public statement Tenzin Gyatso, the current Dalai Lama, outlined the nature of reincarnation, examined tradition and text and concluded that “… the person who reincarnates has sole legitimate authority over where and how he or she takes rebirth and how that reincarnation is to be recognized.”

He announced that around the time of his 90th birthday he “will consult the high Lamas of the Tibetan Buddhist traditions, the Tibetan public, and other concerned people who follow Tibetan Buddhism, and re-evaluate whether the institution of the Dalai Lama should continue or not.”

Clearly, this will be a significant moment, not only in Tibetan Buddhism but for Buddhists everywhere and for millions of non-Buddhists who have come to view the Dalai Lama as a significant figure in international affairs, the United Nations and, intriguingly, among cognitive neuroscientists whose research he strongly supports.

While Tibetan Buddhism is Tibetan, while the Lamas have all been Tibetans, nothing I have seen requires that the Dalai Lama be Tibetan. In fact, as Gyatso notes, the individual has “sole legitimate authority of where and how he or she takes rebirth.”

The solution to the problem, then, is obvious. Reincarnate somewhere other than Tibet, somewhere outside the reach of Chinese authorities. They can get away with a swift kidnapping in Lhasa but they’re not going to be able to pull one off in Toronto or Portland.

Do the usual leg work. Identify a young boy from a Buddhist background who has displayed the chops to fill the role. Make appropriate proclamations and raise the child with the requisite education in a Buddhist monastery. As he grows he can, as the 15th incarnation of the Dalai Lama, slowly assume the same role that the current one has, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists in exile.

Not only would this save the position of the Dalai Lama, it would piss off the Chinese and that, in and of itself, may be enough. Their behavior with regard to Tibet and Buddhism has been disgraceful.

Still Here

Whew. Dodged another bullet. Back soon with thoughts about reincarnation. Seriously. Serious thoughts. It’s a big issue.