Small Gray Matters

There’s an interesting discussion (at least, it looks interesting; so far I’ve only read two of the posts, and have skimmed the rest) going on over at The Immanent Frame about the so-called “cognitive revolution” predicted by David Brooks in a recent New York Times Op-Ed piece. Brooks’ argument, in a nutshell, is that emerging neuroscience findings are going to reverse the recent trend towards what he terms ‘hard-core materialism’, and will eventually combine with mystical views to “lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation”. That’s a pretty bold claim, and one that, as far as I can tell, Brooks provides no good support for. Both the basic thrust of the argument and its central flaw are nicely summarized in the following quote:

Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.

This paragraph is interesting, because it provides a nice summary of recent trends in neuroscience (everything but the first sentence is true) while simultaneously betraying a deep misunderstanding of the materialist worldview. Brooks holds up constructs like meaning, belief, and consciousness as if they were antithetical to the “hard-core” materialist worldview; but should it surprise anyone that meaning and belief emerge from “idiosyncratic networks of neural firings”? Do materialists quake in their boots at the thought that love plays a role in brain development? It shouldn’t, and they don’t. A good materialist (not just a ‘hard-core’ materialist, whatever that means, but any good one) takes these observations as self-evident. If you believe, as materialist neuroscientists do, that the brain is the proximal source all thought, feeling, and action, then you must believe that meaning and belief arise through the actions of neurons chattering with one another; you must believe that the nurturing effects on love on human development are mediated by changes in the brain. For Brooks, the notion that love might influence brain development appears to come as an epiphany; but really, what alternative is there? Does he suppose that the real materialists are the ones who would deny the existence of meanings, beliefs, consciousness, and love? If so, there aren’t any. Maybe there used to be, briefly, in the 1980s heyday of eliminative materialism; but those materialists were philosophers (e.g., the Churchlands), not neuroscientists, and it appears they’ve long seen the light and backed away from their stronger claims (e.g., that terms like “belief” are just conveniences of folk psychology, and don’t map onto anything real).

This fundamental misunderstanding of the central tenet of materialism gets played out repeatedly in Brooks’ op-ed (despite the fact that it’s only one page long). Consider the following assertion, which Brooks seems to take as evidence against ‘militant’ materialism:

First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions.

These points are hard to dispute, but they certainly don’t constitute an argument against “militant atheism” or “hard-core materialism”, unless one takes these militant atheist materialists to be people who not only don’t believe in meaning, belief, consciousness, and love, but also think the self is a fixed entity and that there’s no such thing as a moral intuition. Now, I haven’t met any of these people, but they sound like fascinating individuals, if a bit odd.

Or take the following statement, which accurately describes ongoing research in certain areas of cognitive science, neuroscience, and genetics:

Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment.

Or this one:

Scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania has shown that transcendent experiences can actually be identified and measured in the brain (people experience a decrease in activity in the parietal lobe, which orients us in space). The mind seems to have the ability to transcend itself and merge with a larger presence that feels more real.

From a descriptive standpoint, “Brooks gets the research essentially right,” as Kelly Bulkeley notes in a commentary over on the SSRC blogs. But why Brooks thinks such findings will soon lead to militant materialism falling by the wayside, I don’t know. I would have thought precisely the opposite, and so it seems, does Bulkeley:

To begin with, neuroscientist Andrew Newberg’s brain-imaging studies of meditation, highlighted by Brooks, can easily be used to confirm rather than disprove a materialist worldview. Newberg’s finding that people who are meditating have measurable decreases in parietal lobe activity fits perfectly with the idea advanced by Richard Dawkins and others that religious experience is a product of altered or abnormal brain functioning. Contrary to the popular view that Newberg’s research supports religion, it can readily be taken as supporting the “militant atheism” Brooks wants to reject. The mind may, as Brooks says, have “the ability to transcend itself,” but we didn’t need Newberg’s SPECT scanners to tell us that.

This conclusion seems exactly right to me. After all, it would surely be better for non-materialists if it turned out that religious experiences didn’t have some identifiable neural correlates. “Look,” one could imagine them saying then, “visual perception, motor control, and speech production… all of these things depend on the brain. But transcendental experiences don’t!” Unfortunately, it doesn’t work out that way. Religious experiences turn out to have underlying neural representations, just like every other psychological state or process that’s been investigated. That includes meaning, belief, consciousness, and yes, love. Such findings aren’t inconsistent with materialism; they’re necessary for materialism to hold. Why this simple observation baffles Brooks so, I don’t know.

Having said all that, I do think there’s one redeeming point to Brooks’ Op-Ed. I think he has it basically right when he suggests that “we’re in the middle of a scientific revolution” that’s going to have “big cultural effects”. But I suspect that he’s banking on the wrong revolution. Instead of modern neuroscience giving rise to “neural Buddhism”, what’s much more likely to happen is that, as our understanding of the brain increases and we learn more and more about precisely those aspects of human behavior and cognition that were once thought to be resistant to material explanation, it’ll become increasingly difficult for non-materialists to adhere to their dogmas in the face of reductive explanations. In a world where religious experiences are scientifically mysterious, a dualist worldview is defensible, because there’s no better explanation than “God did it”. In a world where such experiences unfold as, say, a sequence of attractor states in a temporoparietal network that mediates the experience of agency, one has a choice between “God did it” and “the brain did it”. My bet is that, for many (though certainly not all) people, the brain will beat God.

This week’s issues of Science and Nature each have very nice commentaries on the limitations of fMRI, a topic I’ve written about a few times before. The Nature piece is a review by Nikos Logothetis entitled “What we can do and what we cannot do with fMRI“. Logothetis is uniquely placed to comment on these matters; a very large chunk of what we know about the BOLD signal (the primary vehicle of fMRI studies) is due to his seminal work. While the review is pretty expansive (particularly for Nature, at 10 pages!) and somewhat technical, the take-home message is that the most serious limitations of fMRI are due to massive aggregation over distinct populations of neurons rather than to any technical limitations per se. Or, as he puts it much more eloquently:

The limitations of fMRI are not related to physics or poor engineering, and are unlikely to be resolved by increasing the sophistication and power of the scanners; they are instead due to the circuitry and functional organization of the brain, as well as to inappropriate experimental protocols that ignore this organization.

That’s not to say that all is lost, of course. On the whole, Logothetis is pretty optimistic about the value of fMRI, even going so far as to suggest that “MRI is currently the best tool we have for gaining insights into brain function and formulating interesting and eventually testable hypotheses”; it’s just that it’s not perfect by a long shot.  But anyway, there’s much more to the review than I can convey coherently in my current sleepy state, so if you have access to Nature, it’s definitely worth reading.

The Science piece (“Growing Pains for fMRI”) is a much lighter news article by Greg Miller, and it focuses mostly on a controversy that played out in the pages of the New York Times last year. The thumbnail sketch is  that one group of fMRI researchers did some very shoddy “research” on the way people view the different election candidates, and another (larger) group of researchers called them on it.  The exchange then led to a period of widespread soul-searching amongst cognitive neuroscientists, until ultimately, in March 2008, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society imposed a moratorium on publication of all fMRI data until a common set of guidelines for rigorous and ethical research conduct was agreed upon.  Ok, that last part is completely made up. But the point is that the article is a good read, and you should check it out if you can.  It’s not often you hear one scientist say that another scientist’s study was “really closer to astrology than it was to real science” (for the record, I agree with that assessment in this case).

In many areas of the social sciences and humanities, authored books are the pinnacle of scholarly achievement. That’s not to say that peer-reviewed journals don’t exist in fields like History and English Literature; they just don’t carry as much weight as books do (bad pun intended). If you want to receive tenure as a professor of History or English lit, you need to write at least one book. (At least, that’s what the few historians and literary folks I know tell me; it’s possible they’re stringing me along.)

On its face, writing a book doesn’t seem to be a high priority in psychology. Very few psychologists can claim to have an authored book on their vita, and these select few individuals still typically list books under a separate heading well below the almighty “Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles” section. I can count on one hand (well, maybe two) the number of times another psychologist has said something to me along the lines of “you should really read so-and-so’s book”. Books don’t play much of a role in day-to-day psychological research, and if anything, many researchers seem to harbor a slight contempt for them. Psychologists typically write books for laypersons, so that research-wise, the level of detail often leaves much to be desired. When psychologists want to know about fancy new experiments, they read fancy new research articles in journals like JEP and Psych Science; when they want to get a bird’s-eye view of a field, they read review articles in journals like Psych Review and Psych Bulletin. Books like Stumbling on Happiness or The Blank Slate may make for great reading before bed, but they’re rarely cited as a primary source in research articles (with a few notable exceptions, e.g., Antonio Damasio’s “Descartes’ Error”, which everyone and their grandmother cites).

Now, given academic psychologists’ general apathy toward authored books, you might expect that the authors of popular books on psychology would tend to be writers first and foremost, and that well-known researchers would rarely if ever take time out of their schedule to write a 400-page volume. That would be my intuition, at least; but it turns out to be the wrong one. In fact, a disproportionate number of popsci psychology books are written by very eminent researchers. People like Dan Wegner (The Illusion of Conscious Will), Dan Gilbert (Stumbling on Happiness), Dan Schacter (Searching for Memory), Paul Bloom (Descartes’ Baby), Steven Pinker (a zillion bestselling books on language and/or evolution), Antonio Damasio (several books nominally about old dead white guys but really about emotion), Michael Gazzaniga (The Mind’s Past), and Joseph LeDoux (The Emotional Brain) have all had extremely productive, well-respected research careers independently of their popular output.

The interesting question, of course, is why. Why are popular psychology books more likely to be written by eminent researchers?  Broadly speaking, I think there are three classes of explanations (I’m sure I’m leaving many out, though). One possibility is that popular books aren’t actually more likely to be written by famous psychologists; rather, psychologists are more likely to become famous if they’re written popular books. This would be interesting if true inasmuch as it would suggest that the conventional wisdom is wrong: rather than focusing single-mindedly on publishing peer-reviewed journal articles, young academics might do better to divert at least some of their time to popularizing psychology by writing full-length books (then again, most of the aforementioned authors wrote their first book after receiving tenure). Of course, this still wouldn’t explain why psychologists become famous after writing popular books. Perhaps there’s a familiarity effect: psychologists who publish popular books are likely to have their names repeated widely and often, which might subsequently bias researchers to assign more weight to those authors’ empirical research, regardless of its actual merit. Or perhaps hiring committees at schmancy universities use popular fame as an explicit criterion when evaluating candidates (though that seems unlikely, because many of the people listed above–e.g., Wegner, Gilbert, and Schacter, all currently at Harvard–published their major popular works after moving to elite universities).

Another possibility is that there’s a kind of selection effect: lots of psychologists publish (or try to publish) popular books, but only books by famous psychologists are widely read. Other things being equal, one would expect that books by Harvard professors sell more copies than books by professors at third-tier schools, so a bias may emerge at either the publishing stage (famous psychologists are more likely to get book deals) or the consumer stage (people are more likely to buy books that say Harvard or Yale on the cover).

The final possibility, which I personally find most interesting, is that there’s something characterological about good researchers–or at least, a subset of good researchers–that makes them more likely to publish popular works. There are a number of traits that come to mind here. One is simply intelligence: while popular science books are often maligned for their lack of depth, synthesizing a broad research literature into a clear, readable package can be a considerable feat of intellect. Another relevant dimension is creativity and/or the ability to see the big picture. Researchers who are good at integrating diverse ideas maybe both more likely to produce good research and more motivated to paint a discipline with broad strokes in a popular book. Or, it could be a matter of drive: writing a book takes persistence and hard work, and persistent, hard-working people are likely to be more productive in general. Of course, one could also cast this all in a more negative light, as simply a result of egomania: if you’re highly driven to be respected and admired by your academic peers, you might also be driven to show the public at large how cleverly you can write a book.

If I had to put money on it, I’d guess the reason book authors tend to be respected researchers is a little of column B (selection) and a little of column C (character). In theory this is a pretty easily testable hypothesis (the question being, essentially, what factor(s) mediate the relationship between (a) book authorship and (b) research eminence)–in fact, there’s a sizeable literature on the personality of highly successful scientists (e.g., Dean Simonton’s work). In practice, you’d probably be hard-pressed to get Steven Pinker to sit down with you for two hours of psychological testing. Which is fine, because it’s really not that informative a question anyway. The bottom line is just that there’s a interesting discrepancy between what many academic psychologists think about popular psychology books (negatively, or not at all) and what they think about the people who tend to write those books (positively).