Break-throughs in brain science
Elizabeth Gould’s talk here last night was succour for those who yearn to return to a time when the RSA’s events were more expertise and less opinion. We had asked Elizabeth, the winner of the 2009 RSA Benjamin Franklin Medal and the scientist who proved that the adult mammal brain generates new neurons, to focus on the implications of her work for society. She did a bit of this in the Q and A and in a short interview I did with her (see below), but like many scientists she preferred to stick to the facts in her talk.
This is worth hearing or watching for several reasons, including fascinating insights into the process of scientific discovery. As often happens when science makes a leap forward, Gould made her discovery by accident because something else she was observing didn’t make sense; how was it that an animal brain which had something removed ended up over time weighing as much as one which had not. In common also with other ’discoveries’, it turned out that individual scientists had made the case for adult neurogenesis in the past, but in the face of prevailing orthodoxy their work had been ignored or explained away. I suspect that in his lecture tonight on neuroplasticity Norman Doidge will similarly highlight the way that for years – before the evidence became irrefutable – evidence for plasticity was ignored by the neuroscience establishment.
Gould’s work has excited people ranging from developmental psychologists to social policy analysts because it shows that adverse circumstances inhibit the capacity of the brain to generate new neurons, something which in turn seems to reduce resilience and the capacity for learning. The implications for social policy and the case for action to address poverty and exclusion seem powerful.
But the picture is complex. There are three important qualifications to the core finding that aversive circumstances and events do inhibit neurogenesis:
1. These circumstances have to be severe and continuing. One-off events do have an effect on the brain (as does all experience) but not, on their own, a long lasting impact on capacity
2. We are good at adapting. Even if something bad is happening to us we adjust or alter our expectations so that the impact on us is reduced
3. Damage to our neurogenerative capacity can be reversed. Although – obviously – the worse the damage, and the later the remedial intervention, the harder it is
After the lecture we retired for dinner with a number of experts in neuroscience, behavioural science, and even a philosopher of mind. Conversation turned to our Social Brain project, and in particular to our attempt to develop an accessible synthesis of recent insights into the brain and behaviour.
Getting to stage one in the project is proving tough and we faced more hard questions last night. One guest questioned the possibility of integrating neuroscientific knowledge with psychology and sociology. Take a chair; we can think about it aesthetically, functionally or at the level of its physical properties but why would we integrate these levels? Why would anyone thinking about how a chair looks, or what it does, need to know about the molecular structure of the metal from which its legs are made? We may know that everything in our universe is ultimately made up of some combination of four particles but what use is that knowledge to anyone but those interested in the big bang?
These are big questions and ultimately I am a bear with a small brain (there I go again talking about myself and causing hilarity in IPPR!). But what does seem powerful in current conversations about the brain is the capacity to move backwards and forwards from examining behaviour to exploring the processes of the brain. The emergence of new disciplines (like neuroeconomics and social neuroscience) that cross the boundary between natural and social science provide more opportunities to spot things that don’t add up. And as Elizabeth Gould reminded us last night this is often the starting point for new discoveries.
Here is my interview with Elizabeth .
‘The progressive consensus’ – and me, me, me ….
Filed under: Credit crunch, Politics, Social brain, The RSA
Back to Number Ten this morning to discuss ‘the progressive consensus’. With only an hour for discussion, four presentations and 30 very clever people (plus me) round the table it was hardly surprising that the conversation comprised little more than the identification of a list of issues. But looking at what I found the most interesting points there is a line of connection.
• We are at an important moment in history. The goal must not simply be to mange the crisis and get back to business as usual. It is important to talk about what we might call the national ethos. In the face of uncertainty will people opt for greater individualism or greater social solidarity?
• Policy matters but so does culture – in institutions, in communities and in nations. Fascinatingly, research on values indicates that, despite globalisation and immigration, values are converging within nations but diverging between them (despite the event being under Chatham House rules I can attribute this point to David Halpern who is soon publishing a book about it). To take one small example, what Brits and Germans mean by equality and social justice is very different.
• One characteristic of contemporary British values is that we are hostile not just to the state but also to the market, or at least to big business. The over-riding national mood now is one of powerlessness in the face of events and big power of various forms. Adding to this, the credit crunch and the Government response may cement oligopoly in key markets – banking, supermarkets, mobile phones, energy companies.
• Government likes to talk about empowerment both as a good in itself and as a means towards more efficient and more responsive public services. But it is not clear the public want to be empowered (if this means transferring more responsibility to them) or that central Government has any clear account of who, realistically, is to do the empowering
• In all of this, conventional politics and the jargon-laden language of economic management and public service reform leaves people cold. Politicians need to find a way of speaking to people’s worries but also to their resilience, to their aspirations – and to their altruism. This is a time for leadership, people are open to new understandings and possibilities but leaders are not using a vocabulary people can understand, let alone be inspired by.
Interesting stuff.
Not that this is what I will remember from the morning. Before we went into the seminar one of the directors of my old haunt, the IPPR, said to me: ‘we all have a good laugh about your blog – it’s all me, me, me’.
Can this be true? I am shocked. I have decided to spend a lot more time thinking about whether it is true that I am obsessed with myself. Maybe it’s something I should blog about? I have also resolved to stop talking so much about myself, for how else can I create the space for other people to say what they think of me?
Despite this terrible blow to my frail self esteem, I was given some comfort when David Aaronovitch (whose column today is particularly brilliant) told me that my pals over at the Times Comment pages enjoy my blog.
It’s the stuff on the brain they like best so they can rest assured that with Elizabeth Gould here tonight and Norman Doidge (whose new book is stunning) here tomorrow, it will be the brain and not progressivism, nor even me, me, me, that will be my focus over the next couple of days.
Inequality and the realignment of the right
This blog repeats an argument I made a couple of weeks ago, but, for once, the more I hear, the more sure I am…
A few years ago, when I was Director of IPPR, I developed what I thought was a ‘big idea’. Sadly, I was almost alone in thinking this. But this week I have found myself returning to the same idea.
My argument five years ago was with the left. I suggested that its obsession with inequality was a mistake – my view was that what people want is to live in ‘the good society’ which will tend to mean a place that is fair, safe, pleasant etc. The left, I reasoned, needed to demonstrate that greater equality was necessary to have such a good society. In doing this, it also needed to recognise that the public’s commitment to fairness is not the same as the left’s definition of equality: people may well feel that ‘unequalness’ is fair if, for example, it’s based on merit or effort. By taking it for granted that equality was something everybody signed up to, the left was in danger of distancing itself from the public’s priorities.
So, it has been fascinating this week to hear a powerful argument that ‘the good society’ must be reasonably equal. This is the core thesis of Richard Wilkinson’s and Kate Pickett’s book, The Spirit Level, which we discussed here at the RSA yesterday.
Furthermore in the work of Elizabeth Gould (speaking here in two weeks’ time) and in the answers given to me by Jonah Lehrer at our event last night, we can now see a strong causal argument linking inequality, status anxiety, and a variety of social problems.
So now my question is to people on the political right: given the strength of the argument that high levels of inequality are socially pernicious, will the right accept that reducing inequality is a valid and important policy objective? If so, there is a perfectly valid argument between left of centre strategies to achieve more equality, and right of centre.
The electoral triumph of New Labour came in part from a willingness of the centre left to see that markets are a powerful tool and are not inherently socially divisive. Just as Labour was able to grab the political centre ground by saying ‘markets work’, can the right do the same by saying ‘inequality matters’?
Here is a brief video of Jonah Lehrer speaking about his ideas
Jonah Lehrer and the social brain
I am even more excited than usual about our forthcoming lecture programme. In two weeks we award the RSA Benjamin Franklin Medal to Elizabeth Gould, the discoverer of neurogenesis, the process by which the brain generates new neurons. Professor Gould is one of the world’s leading neuroscientists but tonight we have a world leading populariser of research on the brain and behaviour: Jonah Lehrer. As well as his two fantastic books, ‘Proust was a neuroscientist’ and ‘The decisive moment’ (the latter of which he is in town to publicise) Lehrer has his own website and blog, The Frontal Cortex, and is editor at large of SEED magazine.
As I’ve said in past blogs, I am working away with my colleague Matt Grist on the RSA Social Brain project. We are still at the stage of identifying the conceptual framework for the project. The aim now is to distil what we see as being the key insights from recent neuro-scientific and behavioural research as we try to develop an integrated model to challenge a cluster of myths about human agency derived from the overlapping perspectives of Cartesian philosophy, neo-classical economics and common sense.
This was in part the focus of my annual lecture in 2008 but we need to move beyond myth-busting, and citing of individual bits of research, into the development of a model which could be of practical use to decision makers, organisational leaders or anyone else interested in influencing behaviour and developing human capability.
For myself I already have a sense of some of the key broad insights that we need to be using as the foundations for our new model:
- Human decision making takes place on many levels. Although the conscious level is much less important than common sense tells us, one of the things that makes human beings different is that we can, within limits, determine which bits of our mental apparatus does which job. For example, learning a skill is about making something we start off trying to do through conscious effort – and as a consequence do badly – into something that becomes automatic and effortless (like learning a language or musical instrument) by hard wiring our learning
- Our personalities are much less fixed than we tend to think they are, but our sources of well-being are much more constant. In a recent blog Lehrer quotes philosopher Alva Noe “Consciousness is not something the brain achieves on its own,” Noë writes. “Consciousness requires the joint operation of the brain, body and world. … It is an achievement of the whole animal in its environmental context.”.
- More controversially, human decision making strategies in organisations (defined simply as a group of people trying to achieve something together) derive neither from a single way of viewing the world (as is asserted in neo-classical economics) nor by an infinite number of possibilities but by way of a limited array of (antagonistic but mutually reinforcing) paradigms.
By the end of the month I hope we will have developed and refined a list of about ten of these broad foundations and then started to look at how they link together, or possibly, are in tension.
Social mobility, the brain and good news for the RSA
Filed under: Public policy, Social brain, The RSA
As I write I’m listening to the Today programme item about the social mobility white paper. The RSA will soon be hearing from someone whose work may be one of the most important contributions to this debate.
After yesterday’s discussion on this site it is interesting that the Government is leading with the idea of paying the best teachers to teach in the most deprived schools. This is a straightforward piece of public service redistribution, and no bad thing for that. As always, the success of such an initiative will depend on the way it is implemented; just because someone succeeds as a teacher in a middle class school in Richmond upon Thames doesn’t mean they would do as well in a school like Lilian Bayliss, which includes my younger son amongst its pupils. Indeed, arguably, in a school like Bayliss, which is overwhelmingly made up of working class children from minority ethnic families, it is important to inspire the pupils with successful teachers with a similar background to the pupils.
Liam Byrne has just disagreed with David Willetts that the Government is putting too much emphasis on early years in seeking to tackle entrenched inequality. Whether the Government’s interventions work is one question but the evidence that infant experience does have a major impact of future prospects does seem to be getting stronger. Yesterday we heard the fantastic news that our nominee for the Benjamin Franklin Medal (awarded to an international figure who has contributed to enlightenment thought) has accepted; she is Professor Elizabeth Gould from Princeton University.
Professor Gould is responsible for one of the recent decade’s most important breakthroughs in neuroscience. Taking on one of the most established and dogmatically adhered to nostrums of her discipline, Gould painstakingly demonstrated the existence of neurogenesis – the generation of new neurons – in mammals. And, even more significantly for social policy, she found in her work with monkeys that the scope for neurogenesis - in other words the ability of the brain to generate and repair brain cells – was significantly affected by the circumstances in which the monkey was reared. Mothers who had experienced high stress and suffered from being low in the dominance hierarchy produced offspring with a lower capacity for neurogenesis.
The good news, and why David Willetts may be right to question too great an emphasis on the early years, is that these effects can be corrected in later life. If monkeys brought up in deprived circumstances were then transferred to stimulating environments, their capacity for neurogenesis recovered, over time, to the average.
It is fantastic that Professor Gould will soon be sharing her latest research findings and their social implications with an RSA audience; we’ll be sure to invite Liam Byrne and David Willets.
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