Break-throughs in brain science

March 18, 2009 by · 3 Comments
Filed under: Social brain, The RSA 

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 .

Share

Tags: , , , ,

Jonah Lehrer and the social brain

March 5, 2009 by · 4 Comments
Filed under: Public policy, Social brain, The RSA 

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.

Share

Tags: , , , ,