CounterpointStimulating debate with the British Council

It may be a case of collective narcissism, but the past couple of years have seen us all enthralled by the extraordinary insights of neuroscience.  Stem-cell research and human enhancement drugs may revolutionise what we can be and do in the near future, but neuroscience makes a special play for our affections by promising to revolutionise our self-understanding.  This is compelling stuff in the context of a deep recession and against the recent backdrop of a failed climate summit, both of which highlight our incapacity to properly gage risk, our fundamental misunderstanding of how and why we experience fear and generally how terrible we are – both individually and collectively – at planning for what we need. In other words, we’re still in the dark ages when it comes to understanding how emotions interact with the very systems and institutions we have created for ourselves.  But the darkness is dispelling.  Fast. Against the prevailing gloom, comes the steady flow of hypnotically flickering imaging and scanning, rainbow-like colours and shades lighting up the darkest reaches of our cerebral cortex alongside acronyms whose ability to span no more than the reassuring 26 letters of our shared alphabet, hold the bright new promise of a solid, nearly accessible bedrock of self-knowledge.

Neurons in the  human brain, Dr Jonathan Clarke

To say that progress in neuroscience is rapid is an understatement: research pours out of university departments, conclusions are superseded in the space of six months and any article written over a year ago is (probably) already obsolete.  Hampered as I am by a day-job, I’m not able to devote my life to the pre-frontal cortex, so I’ve been playing catch up in this incredible field of inquiry.  However, I am not alone in trying to digest and domesticate the insights of a set of neuroscientific experiments which are steadily colonising the social sciences and, through them, the world of public policy.  The success of a volume such as The Political Brain by Drew Westen, and projects such as the RSA’s Social Brain (http://socialbrain.rsablogs.org.uk/ ), are an indication of the power that the field of neuroscience and its attendant imagery and metaphors have on our current understanding of human beings.

Making sense of what neuroscience tells us and looking to apply its insights, is crucial.  Indeed a few years ago the complete black-out over the progress made in that field – a black out that led to the widespread use of that paragon of backwardness and twee, the phrase ‘hearts and minds’ (welcome to the 18^th century folks) and still led commentators to neatly separate reason on the one hand and emotion (read, ‘irrationality’) on the other – was something that amazed me.  At the time, I called for more attention to be paid to what neuroscientists were telling us about how we make decisions, the function of emotions and the deep intertwining of rationality and emotion in reason(http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2008/06/emotions-politics-davis http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2005/10/emotionalconfusion).

A few years down the line, I’m beginning to think we may be in danger of throwing a little soft-wired baby out with the bath water of past obscurantism.  My real concern here is with 2 key issues. The first of these is a general concern that neuroscience’s insights, misused or, rather, simplistically applied, could serve as the ultimate technocratic trip.  A set of cast iron justifications which preclude the kind of interpreting and negotiating that is the stuff of politics.  In this scenario we don’t so much move away from Homo Economicus, as move toward Homo Neurologicus.  It’s the swapping of one form of rationality fetishism for another—divorcing policy from politics and dressing it up as no more than the application of evidence-derived experimentation.

The social sciences and more particularly the world of public policy  – and hence our political world views – are gradually sliding into the grip of a certainty that one is hard-pressed to find in the world of neuroscience and social neuroscience.

The great casualty here is our fundamental need– cumbersome though it may be – for a measure of contextualisation and interpretation.  It seems that even those commentators who are most wary about over-generalising from neuroscience, are incapable of objecting in an interesting or coherent way, stuck as they are in a debate that overlooks some key components of reality.   This takes me to my major concern, a perhaps predictable one on the part of someone who runs an outfit that thinks and talks about the role of culture in shaping identities–the danger of marginalising the role of culture entirely by falling into the trap of the ‘hard-wired’ metaphor.  I agree that for far too long we were far too recalcitrant to re-admit ‘nature’ into our den (thereby keeping Stephen Pinker in the black for many years I suspect), but we are now in danger of marginalising contextual variables completely and thereby ignoring two of neuroscience’s and social neuroscience’s main contributions, namely 1) the fact that we are all, to begin with, soft-wired.  This means that the context in which hard-wiring (such as it is) occurs is extremely important.  And 2) as the work of John Caccioppo in social neuroscience shows, that social and emotional systems share some neural mechanisms. This is a rather complicated way of saying that the  cultural context has a huge impact on the neuroscience of emotions and in shaping emotional mechanisms (here ‘emotional’ means short-lived physiological and psychological phenomena that coordinate adaptation to our environment—in other words, things that happen in the mind and help us to actually live and survive and on a day to day basis by allowing us to react to the world). (It must be said that a lot of this literature feels slightly counter-intuitive at first glance because after decades of the emotions being the soft, cuddly ill-defined partner, we are now faced with a world in which the emotions are the hard-core physiological partner to the soft social scientific interpretations of sociology and psychology. In this realm, the emotions are the ‘hard-stuff’ and the social and the cultural are the ‘fluffy stuff’).

Equally, the work of Marco Iacoboni , suggests that social neuroscience offers a very different view of the brain: ‘that brain needs a body to exist in a world of social norms in which meaning originates from being in the world’.  This is hugely important as it highlights social neurosciences’s concern not to abstract the neurological from the contextual.

This is where we, non neuro-scientists, should be able to take over and help to make sense of neuroscience’s findings and fill in what the social is.  But in fact it turns out out that no one is terribly good at it.  Neuroscience tells us some fascinating and potemtially immensely useful things, but we need to overcome some blind-spots to make the most of them.

In the next few months, Counterpoint will be taking part in and hosting a number of debates around the theme of culture and the brain.  In preparing for the first of these with my fast-talking colleague Matthew Taylor from the RSA later this week at Prospect (Counterpoint will be jointly publishing a supplement with Prospect magazine in its March issue), I listened to Matthew’s latest RSA lecture on what recent advances in neuroscience tell us about our capacity for being good democrats—in other words whether we’re well equipped to face the trade offs and compromises of democratic politics given the rather sad combination of our short attention spans, poor numeracy skills and propensity to hold contradictory beliefs.  Matthew remains upbeat about the kind of public policy transformations we can hope to implement in light of our recently discovered limitations.  And since I agree with his – uncharacteristic -  up-beatness, but I become sceptical of some of our rushed interpretations of, and utter infatuation with, these (still partial) findings, I was expecting to agree with Tim Hartford’s rebuttal.  Tim was cast in the role of sceptic—dashing Matthew’s optimism about what those things we’re finding out about the brain should lead us to do in public policy terms. Yet it was Tim’s bit that really set my alarm bells ringing: though I may not share all of Matthew’s optimism, Tim’s response was the kind of a-cultural, non-contextual response that highlights the problems at the heart of this discussion.

The well-founded aspect of Tim’s objection was that as neuroscience is constantly evolving, results are therefore constantly being superseded.  This is a perfectly valid point – there is no over-stating the speed of progress and the constant revision of experiments and results.  So it is true that we need to be careful about how much stock we put in any one set of results.  Where things got worrisome is when Tim decided to go one step further and argue that because results fluctuate they tell us nothing.  Tim’s explanation for why this tells us little, are just as wonky as the explanations used by those who tell us these experiments tell us everything–because both completley lose sight of cultural context.  Specifically, Tim referred to the experiments carried out around the notion of the ‘paradox of choice’.  According to the PoC, while people like to have a choice, they, in fact, can only deal with so much choice before they get confused or switch off.  The experiment was carried out using a selection of jams in California about 10 years ago.  And the results were rather striking.  When faced with the choice of 6 jams, 30% of people bought jam.  When faced with the option of 24 jams, only 3% of people bought jam.  This, as pointed out by Tim, is ‘a big effect’.  It would tend to confirm the paradox and suggests that more choice can confuse people or quite simply put them off choosing altogether. Puzzled by such remarkable fluctuations, scientists repeated the experiment in Berlin.  In Berlin the experiment gave rise to different results; In Berlin, there was no effect.  The size of the selection of jam did not seem to have an impact on people’s capacity or willingness to choose a jam.  How bizarre says Tim, this must mean that these experiments don’t tell us anything.

Really? or does it suggest that results alone don’t tell us much, that cultural context might matter and that the interesting work begins precisely when an otherwise identical experiment yields vastly different results in Berlin and in California? This is when we need to get our fascinating brains in gear: use history, previous knowledge and experience to actually make use of the science.  The degree to which we tend to lose the plot here is well illustrated by Tim’s repeated shrugs and facial expression (check it out for yourself)—California? Berlin? Could that matter?…. pfff’ quizzical shrug. Naah.

Why does it not occur to Tim that choice is largely a cultural construction and that, maybe, just maybe, Berliners have a different relationship to an abundance (of anything, let alone) of jam? Whilst Californians, on the other hand, might interpret the possibility of choice in a somewhat more blasée manner? Just a guess. Whatever the reason, the notion that such a series of experiments tell us nothing reliable is ludicrous.  It simply means that we’re hypnotised by the results and not looking at what matters: brains in context rather than brains on screens. This blind-spot – the abstracting of the neurological calculation from the cultural and social context – doesn’t bode terribly well for the possibility of drawing conclusions about human motivation for choice.  And in fact the better neuroscience is at pains to point out that context matters.  What worries me is not what neuro-scientists are doing but rather what cognate disciplines are failing to do with that knowledge.  For those social scientists who are keenest on connecting with it (and with good reason) the leap into social neuroscience often involves a huge blind spot when it comes to the cultural components of that that social context.  A very reductionist view of context operates here and even much of psychology’s input in this field – whilst welcome in many ways – remains strangely reductionist in terms of what constitutes ‘context’ or makes for ‘the social’.  As if these could simply be reduced to interaction with others without much reference to where that interaction occurs and how that affects responses – both cognitive and automatic.  This in fact applies to commentators and researchers who may not even be convinced by the applicability of neuroscience’s current work, as evidenced by Tim’s response.   My point is that unless we incorporate such cultural insights we will always be limited  and hampered in what we do with results that can be of paramount importance for policy decisions.