Decision Time
No sooner do I finally get my article about human nature and political values published in Prospect than a key piece of research cited in the piece gets challenged. A study undertaken in New Zealand has questioned the conclusions of the work of Benjamin Libet, conclusions which had become the cornerstone of how we have come to think about the workings of our brain.
Put simply, Libet’s research, which has been repeated and refined by other neuroscientists, seemed to show that the part of the subject’s brain associated with a physical action, for example, pressing a button, showed activity significantly earlier (a few tenths of a second) than the subject became aware of making the decision to act. This research seemed to show that the idea of conscious choice is often an illusion. Whilst we do make conscious decisions which involve forward planning, our day to day actions are automatic. The sense we have of making conscious choices reflect the deep seated need of human beings to make meaning, but it is an illusion. As Robert Heinlen put it ‘man is not a rational animal but a rationalising one’.
But now research by Judy Trevena and Jeff Miller, neuroscientists based in Otago, has questioned Libet’s work. Their research involved replicating Libet’s experiment but with an important modification. While Libet asked his subjects to press buttons, the New Zealand team allowed subjects to choose whether or not to press. Trevena and Miller then found that the brain activity identified by Libet (so called Readiness Potential) occurred after the subjects had been prompted and before they were aware of making a choice – whether or not they then decided to press the botton. In other words, it is not that the automatic brain ‘decides’ to act before the conscious brain but that it creates a readiness to act which only gets turned into action by conscious intervention. Furthermore ,Trevena and Miller claim to show that the brain activity specifically associated with ‘deciding’ to act takes place after the conscious awareness of that decision.
Unsurprisingly, the New Zealand study is causing waves in the neuroscience community. Those who have always been sceptical about Libet are seizing on the new research, while others who claim to have undertaken experiments reinforcing Libet’s conclusions are questioning Trevena ands Miller’s methodology.
Although it can all get quite technical, this is a fascinating debate with social and philosophical as well as scientific ramifications. We are exploring whether we can host a debate here at the RSA. Indeed, if someone would just give us a few tens of thousands of pounds we would love to modernise an old RSA tradition and work with neuroscientists at UCL to replicate the research with a live video link to a Great Room audience.
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 .
Can humans respond to crisis? More or less …
The economic crisis is an opportunity to think afresh about the good society. To learn from this disaster and to avoid the next crisis means not just deciding what we think but understanding how we think.
Phillip Blond has every right to call himself very influential. Writing just a few days ago in Prospect, the self styled ‘red Tory’ advocated turning the Post office into a people’s bank – which Peter Mandelson has now apparently agreed - and the break up of massive private sector corporations, which is in keeping with George Osborne’s suggestion yesterday that wholly or part privatised banks be dismantled when they are fit to return to the private sector.
But the part of Phillip’s engaging article that caught my attention was this line:
‘The current political consensus is left-liberal in culture and right–liberal in economics. And this is precisely the wrong place to be’
Until recently I was fond of describing the last three political decades in the West through the following aphorism (although I never could find the source):
‘The right won the economic argument, the left won the social argument and the centre won the electoral argument’
Blond turns this on its head. Whatever the substantive view of his argument, there are three broad categories of response: first, he is wrong; second, he is right; third, he is right (or wrong) but only in relation to how things are now.
It is the third of these possibilities I find most interesting, the implication being dialectical: three decades ago we may have needed to liberalise social attitudes and to free up markets but now we need to reassert common values, hierarchal authority and the need for business to serve the interests of society.
At our joint seminar with the neuroscience folks at UCL on Friday we had a presentation from Professor Nick Chater. His research supports the thesis that the human brain has a very limited capacity to organise immediate perceptions in relation to an objective index. Instead, he argues, when we are asked to compare perceptions along an axis (such as brightness or loudness) we have only five categories: basically, much less, a little less, the same, a little more and much more. This may help to explain some of the idiosyncrasies in the ways human beings value things, for example the way comparison (over time and between people) seems more important to us than absolute measures.
Is this true also of human affairs? Instead of human societies reaching higher levels of wisdom as we learn from past mistakes, we simply move from wanting more of one view of the world until it becomes excessive, at which point we want less of it and more of something else. The human race does advance but only through a succession of failures, which can sometimes turn into disasters.
There is nothing new about this kind of gloomy dialecticism, indeed this world view is neatly captured in common parlance (for example, ‘plus ca change plus c’est la meme chose’). But in cultural theory, psychology and neuroscience we may find a richer insight into how we might find less painful and dangerous forms of learning.
Cultural theory is one of a family of theories arguing that human decision making is neither, on the one hand, explicable on the basis of a single logic (as in the model of homo economus) or, on the other, impossibly complex and indeterminate. Instead social problem solving derives from a limited array (in most theories between three and six) of basic responses, each of which is largely defined in terms of its antagonism to the others.
The social dialectic (which may underlie Phillip Blond’s call for a reversal of the conventional wisdoms of the last three decades) could be partly rooted in the collective expression of our cognitive predisposition to a limited array of comparative responses to the social world: ‘What we used to want more of, we then had too much of, and now we want less of.’
The point here is not to succumb to some kind of historical, much less neurological, determinism. Instead it is to argue that our capacity to learn from the past and plan realistically for the future is (in this year of Darwin) enhanced by better understanding of the predispositions and limitations of our species.
Has President Obama already made black Americans ‘more intelligent’?
I am spending the day at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Imaging Neuroscience. The all day seminar will explore what implications the insights of neuroscience and the newly emerging discipline of neuro-economics will have for policy. (By the way, there was a discussion of neuro-economics on the Today Programme this morning.)
Running throughout the day will be discussion of a key spectrum for understanding what shapes human decision making; this can be expressed as the distinction between the sub-conscious adaptation and conscious choice or between ‘pull’ factors (that shape our behaviour though environmental context and sand social norms) and ‘push factors’ (attempts explicitly to persuade people to behave in particular ways).
There have been over several decades many attempts to push up the educational performance of black Americans, but Jonah Lehrer (coming soon to the RSA) reports this week that the pull factor of President Obama’s election seems to have had a remarkable effect. Read his fascinating post here.
Neuroscience and lifelong learning – some impressions from an RSA / NIACE event
We co-hosted (with NIACE) a great event here last night on neuroscience and lifelong learning. For me it confirmed a few earlier impressions:
• Awareness of the basics of neuroscience, and of the big and undisputed discoveries it has made in recent years, is spreading more and more widely. It is becoming a branch of science that many non-scientists in areas like education and social policy feel they need to understand.
• This is also true of the general public. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore talked about the ‘seductive allure’ of neuroscientific explanations and Paul Howard-Jones told us that teenagers were not just fascinated but motivated when they better understood the relationship between learning and brain function.
• However, the main thing that will stop the insights of neuroscience making a major impact on society is hype about neuroscience. For example, I have Mark Earls to thank for a link to some research reported in the New Scientist which exposes the ‘voodoo correlations’ underlying claims that certain emotional traits and pre-dispositions are hard-wired into specific and identifiable parts of the brain.
• A good example of this is the brain training industry. There is some evidence that some methods have some effect on cognitive capacity but nothing that justifies the claims made by the retailers of the various devices on the market.
• The contribution of neuroscience to policy and everyday life is better understood and less subject to exaggeration when its insights are explored alongside those coming from areas such as developmental and social psychology.
These aren’t just random insights but they are shaping our social brain project here at the RSA.
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