Here’s a pet peeve moment, you’ll have to forgive me.
It just drives me nuts when big science news splashes all over the headlines and just about everyone who reports on it gets it wrong.
For example, a Dutch group recently published a lovely article about how a blood pressure drug, propanolol, removes the fear associated with bad memories. Participants who were trained to have a fear response to an image of a spider using electric shocks lost that fear when under the effects of the drug, though they had no trouble remembering being shocked, remembering the spider, and fully expected to be shocked again when they saw the spider. This effect persisted even after the drug was out of their system.
So how does this get reported?
Painful memory? Forget it. Take a pill, re-invoke a bad memory and it disappears. The Guardian
Blood Pressure Drug May Erase Fearful Memories, Web MD
Study Finds Blood Pressure Pill Could Erase Bad Memories, Fox News
What’s worse is these don’t even mention that it doesn’t actually erase the memory – if anything, they make it sound like the study did completely remove memories. “A blood pressure pill could help people forget bad memories” starts off the Fox News article. That’s not what happened – very specifically stated by the study, in fact. Is it really so hard for journalists to report on a study’s actual findings? Heck, Why pills to remove bad memories are the stuff of science fiction nightmares, from the Daily Mail, is a whole diatribe about how bad it if our memories are “obliterated from the mind” and how “a drug eradicating bad memories is one step away from taking a drug that makes us feel happy all the time.” I mean, HELLO, read the damned study!
Though the headlines are misleading, at least Heart pill to banish bad memories, from the BBC News, and Drug Erases Fearful Memories, from the MIT Tech Review, note that it doesn’t actually erase the memory itself.
Cheers to ABC News and Scientific American for actually getting it right – they’re few and far between.
Then, of course, since news agencies can’t seem to get it right, neither can the bloggers, for the most part – except the good ones, like Ed Yong, who actually read the published papers.
It just bugs me when reporting gets it so wrong…
In honor of the recent post on the nature of network comments, I feel the need to point out that the drug was actually propanolol (propanol may have similar effects, though, because if you’re intoxicated, what do you care about spiders and potential electric shocks anyway?)
But now seriously, if they are misrepresenting the study or not depends on the particular definition of memory you’re using. You can say that that particular association between the spider and the electric shock lost its emotional component in the subjects of the study. After all, since animals can’t actually tell us what they are thinking about, it is common to deduce it from their reactions, and when they are trained to associate a particular environment with a shock, scientist regularly declare that they have a “memory deficit” if they do not show fear when they are re-exposed to the same environment. How do we (scientist) know that they do not remember the environment and/or the shocks? We simply don’t. Should we change the terminology? perhaps…
Oops! Mistyped that… fixing now.
Sure, these things are irritating, and in an ideal world people would get things right all the time. But in my capacity as extremely aged
old fartjournalist who’s been in and out of more radio studios and has written more articles than most people have changed their socks (we’re talking Norfolk here), I take thejadedpragmatic view that it is better to have some science reported, even if badly, than no science at all.I hav a theory of science news based on the concept of stochastic resonance – a little bit of ‘noise’ might actually aid the propagation of the ‘signal’.
Here’s an analogous example. My parents lived in La France Profonde for twenty years. My mother, who had studied French to an advanced level, was afraid to say anything in French unless she’d parsed it correctly, and as a result said very little. My father, who had studied French hardly at all, had no worries about launching right in, even if he got it wrong, and found that he could make himself understood, and get things done.
What I find particularly annoying is that most of these news reports don’t cite the actual reference. You’ll have to do some guesswork and digging to find the original paper. I think this is very unprofessional and seems to me like they are trying to hide their incompetency by not offering the sources.
I wonder whether a press release was issued, and if so whether it sowed the seed of the misreporting? The version on Reuters quotes the researcher saying We could show that the fear response went away, which suggests the memory was weakened. Of course they could have made up that quote, but I’m not really clear about the difference between the fear and the memory there.
I can’t see this story in Alphagalileo or Eurekalert but there must be a PR somewhere since it’s had such wide coverage.
Henry, I hesitate to write this because I don’t like to generalise or to be politically correct, but what you write about your parents – sounds to me like a man-woman thing?
In job interviews, ask a male candidate for his weak point and he will cheerfully say he has none. As woman candidate and she’ll give you an honest answer.