Before the Bank Holiday
First of all I would like to say a big thank you to the staff here at RSA for burning the midnight oil for the past week in the final push to launch the new website. It went live yesterday evening, but apparently takes 24-48 hours to propagate around the world to all the different servers. So keep checking the site, it will soon have a fresh face and greater functionality.
Thinking about brains, as I have been this week, I was interested in the Thought for the Day on the Today programme this morning. Abdal Hakim Murad explored the Muslim take on the Academy of Medical Sciences report about the use of brain enhancing drugs.
The issue of psychoactive substances is not a new debate in the Muslim tradition. For example, coffee is allowed because it enhances brain function, but alcohol is not because it impairs the mind. In his three minute slot Abdal Hakim Murad moved from this issue to a broader perspective arguing that humanity is distinguished by the God given miracle of consciousness.
Many scientists and philosophers would replace ‘God-given miracle’ with ‘evolution-given illusion’. One of the challenges in debates about the brain is the way empirical and policy questions about advances in neurological research jostle up against what philosopher Owen Flanagan has described as ‘the really hard problem’ of meaning and consciousness.
This week I’ve been interviewing some excellent candidates for a new Fellow outreach coordinator for Scotland. It is clear that the Scottish Fellows are going full steam ahead, delivering not only the RSA mission, but thinking hard about how to build a distinctively Scottish brand identity and agenda.
So it was perhaps not surprising that at our excellent new Fellows evening last night, a Welsh Fellow was astonished to hear from me that the Welsh fellowship is subsumed into our West and Wales region. Of course, this reflects the pre-devolution development of the RSA and I don’t sense any unhappiness in the region with its current configuration. But I guess it’s only a matter of time before our Fellows in Wales are seeking to develop their own relationship with the devolved administration.
I’m on holiday next week for the school half term – but between my holiday postings and contributions of colleagues the daily blog will continue.
Cognitively enhanced
Over recent blogs I’ve been rehearsing some thoughts about what I call neurological reflexivity. The idea being that instead of a world in which what matters is what we think increasingly we are engaging with the question of how we think.
So it was timely to wake up this morning to hear on the Today programme about the report of the Academy of Medical Sciences’ report on Brain science, addition, and drugs. Following on from the Government Foresight project, Drugs Futures 20205, this commission was set up to investigate the societal, health safety and environmental issues raised by the Foresight report. It analyzes the scientific and ethical issues of drug development, use and abuse.
While there are some interesting findings about drug misuse and treatment, which are gratifyingly in line with the RSA Drugs Commission, what interests me here are the implications, both scientific and ethical, of using cognitive enhancement drugs on otherwise healthy individuals.
What the report argues is that because cognitive enhancement drugs are developed for use on unhealthy individuals (victims of stroke, Alzheimer’s or other degenerative neurological conditions) not enough is known about the long term side on healthy brains.
They argue that further research into this is necessary, particularly as the current drugs are increasingly available on the grey-market, and could be misused, for example, by students seeking to enhance exam results. Playing with brain chemistry must be an exact science given the scope for unpredictable and long term side effects.
There are major ethical implications of cognitive enhancement. John Harris, who spoke here last year,and others have powerfully attacked the superstition that we shouldn’t ‘unnaturally’ enhance our physical capacity. What he argues is the categorical difference between eye glasses and brain supplements? The more pressing dilemmas concerns equality of access and ‘devaluing unaided achievement’.
People who can afford to pay for their daily dose of cognitive enhancers will have an extra unfair advantage over those who cannot. These will probably tend to be the same people who already benefited from the environmental factors that seem to most enhance IQ.
The point about unaided achievement is that we have a strong – albeit complex and tacit – belief that achievement should result form the combination of talent and effort (we are also, according to opinion polls, happy to recognise the role that luck can play). But if performance in education, athletics, perhaps one day relationships, is dependent less on ability and effort than on access to drugs or on the interaction of these drugs with our personal physiology then, notwithstanding equity issues, this seems to challenge our most basic assumptions about human endeavour and status.
These are deep waters. They require a discourse that brings together scientists, social scientists, philosophers and policy makers. The public needs to understand and engage with dilemmas that have quickly moved from science fiction to pharmaceutical reality. And these are some of the key purposes of the RSA cognition project that we will be launching in a few weeks.
New website launch
Thursday, 21 May 2008, 16.30 is when
we will be initiating the go-live procedure for the new website
enshrined in the diaries of all the staff here at JAS and beyond and
I’m immensely proud of the web team for their Herculean efforts in
making this new website possible.
There are many new features which will enable Fellows and the wider
public to gain a better understanding of our work. The blogs, of which
mine will be but one, are windows our different areas of work. This
blog will become much more of a test bed for my thoughts and ideas
regarding new enlightenment thinking, pro-social behaviour,
neurological reflexivity and new collectivism: in short how we become
the people and society that we need to be in order to respond to the
challenges of progress.
One of the great things about the RSA is our fantastic lecture series. Just this week we’ve had, Matt Frei, Jon Ronson, Misha Glenny, Philippe Sands QC and Darius Rejali.
Because of the high quality our lectures are almost always full, though
it’s always been possible to do audio podcasts on our site, we are now
launching Vision. These will be videos of our best speakers, enabling
more people to see our amazing public lecture series and join in the
debate about issues raised there.
Another video feature that Meet a Fellow, where we showcase the
diversity of our Fellowship, allowing a wider audience to see the work
that they do and the issues close to their hearts.
There might be some ‘downtime’ tomorrow afternoon, during the
transition from the old to the new site. So if you can’t see it please
try again after a little while. Any please send any comments or feed
back to webmaster@rsa.org.uk.
Rationally irrational
Yesterday in writing about my ideas regarding neurological reflexivity I highlighted the work of behavioural economists in demonstrating the weakness of the homo economicus model, or the myth of rational man. This is the idea that citizens with perfect knowledge will behave in a perfectly rational way.
Of course in the real world people do not have perfect information, but are often bemused by the flood of this imperfect information. Secondly, behavioural economists have pointed out the seemingly irrational nature of the decisions we make based on this partial (in both senses) information.
There has been a massive explosion in books on this field of study, the latest is by Dan Ariely discussed in today’s Guardian.
The relevance of this to my fundamental argument is that these economists are not focusing on what we think, but as I said yesterday, how we think. What are the psychological and neurological processes that affect our decisions? And that is why this field of study forms such an important component of my thinking on how we become better at dealing with the challenges of progress. By understanding our decision making processes, by recognising that they are not entirely rational as we would sometimes like to believe, we can begin to make better choices.
Volunteering at Surrey Docks Farm
Last week several RSA colleagues volunteered at Surrey Docks Farm. I asked Anna Leikkari who organised the day to tell us more -
“Last Friday the RSA organised its first ever Volunteering Day on Surrey Docks Farm in South East London.
The idea of the day was not only to make a positive and hands-on difference in the city of London in a small but scalable way, but to build team spirit and shared purposes across the organisation and unite Fellows with other Fellows and like-minded people, making new connections and potentially come up with ideas for new networking initiatives and projects (see current ones on the RSA Networks platform).
We picked Surrey Docks Farm as our project site as it has been recognised as one of the most innovative and successful city farm education projects in England, and was in great need of voluntary help as it relies on voluntary sector grants and donations, and does not employ many full-time staff.
The day was brilliant. 10 RSA staff and 13 Fellows arrived at the farm at 10.00 am and after a thorough briefing we divided ourselves into three groups and set to work.
The projects we were given were varied: carrying and organising heavy concrete slabs, wooden beams and bricks, clearing a large shed for bee keeping materials and the grounds free of rubbish and broken equipment and materilas, filling a large skip, turning hard ground around for planting vegetables and flowers, weeding a massively overgrown children’s storytelling area… and many other jobs that, at the end of the day, had visibly transformed the site. The farm manager said we were the best volunteering group she has ever had and was extremely pleased with the results!
Everyone who participated on the day said they would love to do it again and would love to see it become a regular occurrence. It was a great way to get Fellows and Staff together and some of the conversations we had during the day and afterwards in the Wibbley Wobbly riverboat pub were truly inspiring.
Personally, I felt elated at the end of the day as I think we had really made a difference on site, thus affecting many lives – especially those of children and young adults with learning disabilities who regularly come to the farm to learn about sustainability, the environment and farm animals. My most vivid memories will be of Jonathan (Deputy Director, Programme) lifting gigantic concrete slabs off the ground with a wrecking bar, of Rosie (Ideas Assistant) dancing her way through the site with a bee-keeper dummy and of all the happy faces of the volunteers when they were giggling at the little piglets and kid goats.
The fact that everyone was already talking about the “next RSA volunteering day” halfway through the day told me that it was a success and that we should do it again soon.
A massive vote of thanks to William Wong who, as a Fellow and colleague helped organise the day!”
RSA Pamphlets
RSA Vision
RSA Animate
RSA Comment
- Twitter @RSAMatthew
RSA Bookshop
The RSA Bookshop, in partnership with Blackwell's the UK's leading academic bookseller, offers Fellows and friends an opportunity to purchase books and to explore our speakers’ ideas in greater detail. Visit the RSA Bookshop.