A scientific paper entitled "Laser Ablation of Human Guilt" gives us an example of poor work by neuroscientists. The title is nonsense, and the authors did nothing to document that any such thing as a laser ablation of guilt has occurred. The paper seems to have examples of embellishment and distortions, and claims about what a patient experienced that are not justified by any data presented.
Here is the narrative presented by the paper (I will later explain why some of these claims are probably embellishments not to be trusted).
(1) A 14-year-old girl "began to notice brief but distinct episodes of guilt and distress."
(2) The patient had a seizure.
(3) Electrodes were inserted into the patient's brain, and regions of the brain were electrically stimulated. In one area such electrical stimulation produced "feelings of intense guilt and distress."
(4) A tumor was discovered, and the girl underwent laser ablation treatments. But "after a few weeks the guilt episodes returned."
(5) Additional laser ablations treatment was directed at the tumor. "Five years later, the patient remains free of these guilt episodes or any other seizure phenomena and is off anti-seizure medications."
The authors try to suggest a narrative that the tumor was causing the girl's guilt, and that by zapping the tumor, the guilt episodes were fixed. Under the neuroscientist's belief that the brain is the source of the mind, the idea that a brain tumor might cause guilt makes no sense. Guilt requires high levels of cognition. First there is the recall of some action that a person took. Then there is an insight into ethics, a realization that the action you took was morally faulty. In guilt there is often the subtle mental faculty of empathy, in which you "put yourself into the shoes" of someone who was harmed by your bad deed. The idea that the advanced cognition involved in guilt would be caused by a brain tumor makes no sense. You might as well believe that a brain tumor would cause you to originate a new physics theory or cause you to solve some math problem you could not solve.
The paper seems to have various examples of untrustworthy statements suggestive of embellishments or misstatements. The paper claimed the girl "began to notice brief but distinct episodes of guilt and distress." It provides no data supporting this claim in any convincing fashion. The data that it provides fails to back up such a claim. The only data it provides backing up this claim is found in its Supplementary Table 1, which looks like this in the paper (I won't correct the misspellings):
Supplamentary Table 1: Patient’s description of events associated with guilt episodes
No. | Patient’s description |
1 | "Maybe I’ve offended someone […] something that happened in class […] maybe fighting with someone" |
2 | "I didn’t like the person I talked to […] I didn’t really listen" |
3 | "I was taking a photograph of a large group, and felt I am at a place I am not supposed to be" |
4 | "After I argued with my mother" |
5 | "I was supposed to meet somebody but did not" |
6 | "I said goodbye to my brother before a long journey" |
7 | "I felt I was getting punsihed for lying, usually in the context of "white lies"" |
Notice the carelessness in which both "Supplementary" and "punished" are misspelled. Can we have any confidence in scientists writing so carelessly?
As it happens, none of these statements is a description of guilt. There is a header mentioning "guilt episodes," but we have no statements by the girl referring to guilt. Second-hand statements about a person's emotions have no value as evidence unless they are backed up by observations of facial expressions or first-hand reports coming directly from the person having such emotions. Guilt has no unique facial expression. So for us to have any reliable evidence that this girl was experiencing guilt, we would need to have quotations coming from her, in which she describes guilt. No such quotations have been provided by the authors.
The authors tell us that "for nearly a year the patient kept these episodes to herself." So the claims that there were these episodes of guilt are based on a 14-year-old girl recollections of what emotions she was feeling a long time ago. That does not qualify as good evidence, particularly given the emotional turmoil that adolescents so often experience. We do not even have evidence that were such recollections, as we are not given quotes by the girl describing such experiences.
We have no reliable evidence provided in this paper that the girl was experiencing "distinct episodes of guilt." Also no reliable evidence is provided that the girl experienced "feelings of intense guilt and distress" after having parts of her brain electrically stimulated. We have a Supplementary Table 2 in which once again the word "Supplementary" is misspelled. We have a two-column table. The first column lists regions of the brain stimulated. The second column is labeled as "Patient Response." We have words in quotation marks, but it is unclear whether the words actually are words spoken by the girl having her brain electrically stimulated. Among these alleged "patient responses" are many phrases that sound like something a 14-year-old girl would never say, but a neuroscientist might say. These include phrases such as "beginning of detachment, without other sensations" and "detachment, distress, a light nausea."
We can rather safely assume that this Supplementary Table 2 is a mixture of quotes coming directly from the girl being brain zapped, and also statements written by observers summarizing what she said. But such summaries may be inaccurate, written by observers eager to report some evidence of emotional effects from brain zapping.
Referring to five years after the laser ablation treatment of a brain tumor, the paper claims, "Five years later, the patient remains free of these guilt episodes or any other seizure phenomena and is off anti-seizure medications." But it provides no data backing up such a claim. How do the authors know that the subject has experienced any less guilt in those five years than before? They don't. In order for the quote above to have any value as evidence, you would need to have quotations from the subject. No such quotations are given.
Needless to say, no decent evidence has been provided for any such thing as a "laser ablation of human guilt." The paper gives us another example of what is super-abundant these days in neuroscience papers: scientists writing titles that are groundless boasts not backed by any reported data.
Looking at the discussion of this paper by other neuroscientists, I found another example of how neuroscientists embellish, embroider and exaggerate. In an interview neuroscientist Christof Koch discusses the "Laser Ablation of Human Guilt" paper, and double-stretches its story beyond anything the paper authors stated. Discussing the paper, Koch claims they "got 13 or so of intense episodes of feeling guilt." The paper never claimed the girl had intense episodes of feeling guilt, nor did it claim that there were 13 episodes of the girl feeling guilt. Koch also incorrectly describes the results of brain-zapping the girl. He states, "Every time you stimulate in the brain of this girl you invoked intense feelings of guilt." No, that is not at all what was reported in Supplementary Table 2 of the paper, which mentions "guilt" as a response in only 3 out of 23 brain stimulations, and never mentions "guilt" as the only response, giving us 3 responses such as "guilt, nausea, distress." We get in that no mention of "intense guilt" as a response. Any mention of guilt might have been the result of someone asking leading questions such as "Did you feel some guilt when I did that?"
Koch says this:
"Furthermore then they did the resection. They removed the tumor and … the girl never had these episodes of guilt again. … So here you have a you have a really nice causal study where a social emotion that is often associated with religious practice — feeling guilty about a sin you committed or something that you did or didn’t do inappropriate — that seems to have a very concrete correlate in a particular brain area of the brain."
The truth is this:
(1) No solid evidence was provided in the paper that the girl ever had "episodes of feeling guilt," because the paper failed to provide any quotations from the girl backing up such claims. The paper made a claim that the girl had episodes of guilt (without describing such episodes as intense), but failed to back up such a claim with any relevant quotation by the girl. Reliably documenting the claim that there were such episodes would require statements by someone recorded when the feelings occurred, not someone recollecting emotional states they had kept secret for a year.
(2) No evidence was provided in the paper that the girl felt guilt less frequently after the surgery. We merely have a claim by the authors that "Five years later, the patient remains free of these guilt episodes," which is not backed up by any evidence or quotations from the subject.
(3) Under the theory that the brain makes the mind, it is ludicrous to attempt to explain guilt (a subtle cognitive effect) as something that might be produced by a brain tumor. Conversely, if you showed that a lack of guilt was produced by a brain tumor, that might support such a theory.
(4) No robust evidence has been provided that the brain-zapping produced any guilt, because (a) the quotes in Supplementary Table 2 seem to be a mixture of quotes from the subject being brain-zapped and notes taken by some observer who might have been motivated to report a guilt response, and who may have asked leading questions designed to get a response that could be recorded as a response mentioning guilt, and (b) none of the responses are listed as guilt alone.
(5) Were you to show a case in which there was a reduction of guilt after some brain operation, that would do nothing to show that brains produce guilt. You never establish a causal relation between one thing and something else that preceded it by showing a single case. For example, I may cut a flower in the morning and then start to feel sick in the evening; but that does nothing to show that cutting flowers makes people sick. A scientific study never shows a causal relation unless it has a large sample size. For example, if you do a scientific study showing that 25 subjects who lived near a factory got cancer, at rate 300% higher than average, than might establish a cause and effect relation. But doing a case study documenting only one person getting cancer after living near some factory does nothing to establish a causal relation between the factory and cancer occurrence.
(6) There is no good evidence from the work of other scientists that guilt can be caused by brain stimulation. Wilder Penfield's book The Excitable Cortex in Conscious Man discusses at great length his experiments in electrically stimulating all different parts of the brain. The book makes no mention of any subject reporting guilt as a response to such electrical stimulation, nor does his paper here on the effects of brain stimulation.
Once again, we have here evidence that many neuroscientists cannot be trusted to give reliable accurate titles to their papers, and that many neuroscientists cannot be trusted to accurately describe research done by other neuroscientists. The term "AI slop" is being used nowadays to describe poor outputs from AI programs. We can use the term "science slop" for low-quality research efforts, which are super-abundant these days in the world of neuroscience.
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