Body axes of cattle (Bos primigenius) of 308 evaluated herds/pastures (displayed on satellite images in Google Earth) showed a significant deviation from random distribution (Rayleigh test, P < 0.00001) with a preference for a rough N-S direction (mean vector: 5.4°/185.4° with geographic north as reference).

Translation: Begall et al. (note: PNAS online; restricted access) used Google Earth to show that cows like to face North/South, an observation that (as far as we know) none of the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people who have good reason to interact with cows on a daily basis had ever noted before. The modern ability to conduct cutting-edge science from the comfort of one’s laptop (cf. The HapMap Project, fMRI data center, etc.) continues to amaze…

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.

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).

The really striking thing about the program is the sheer amount of money it throws at a select number of students—a projected 8,000 in 2014, with the number of awards gradually increasing over the next six years. It funds graduate students in natural science and engineering disciplines at a level up to $60,000 annually for three years, with applications renewable up to four times. Why the dramatic increase in funding over such a protracted period? From the article:

Critics complain that allowing graduate students to secure major funding for up to 12 years of predoctoral work will encourage complacency and clog up universities with ‘lifers’. Others see it is a necessary step if the US wishes to remain competitive with emerging Asian countries. Dr. Ron Sekubus, chair of the department of public policy at George Washington University, notes that without the funding, American universities would be forced to admit an ever-increasing number of international students in order to buffer against the loss of American students to more lucrative fields such as medicine and law. When international students complete their degrees, they are almost invariably unable to find legal work in the US, leading them to return to their home countries. The long-run outcome of this perpetual ‘brain drain’, Sekubus suggests, is that the US will fall in scientific productivity relative to rapidly-developing countries such as India and China.

When I ask him whether the government couldn’t just solve this problem overnight by allowing more trained foreign scientists to stay in the US once they’ve completed their doctorate, Sekubus’ responds aggressively. “Immigration is not the solution,” he says. “Increasing funding for American citizens via merit-based and non merit-based programs is the solution.”

The reasoning seems pretty straightforward. But as always, the story isn’t as clear cut as the above quote suggests. Here’s another relevant bit from the article:

Tovaz Shikarti, a program officer at the NIH, points out that high levels of predoctoral funding in the sciences make sense within the current cultural context:

“When we sat down to look at it, we couldn’t really understand why the top 5% American graduate students are getting paid less than the bottom 1% of American faculty. American culture is built on the promise of potential; it’s a foregone conclusion that this generation of top students is going to do some pretty remarkable things in a few years. The Pell-Mell grant program is our way of equalizing the situation by honoring the American tradition. You could think of this as an NBA draft for scientists.”

Others don’t see it that way. John Jacobson, a professor of history at The College of Wooster, complains. “I certainly don’t object to students making a livable wage. I was a graduate student once too. But when a first year physics graduate student at Wisconsin makes more than I do as an Associate Professor of Historical Arts at Wooster, I don’t think that’s right. My wife and I are giving serious thought to respecializing in materials science just so we can get a piece of the pie. It’s almost like the government’s goal is to get rid of the humanities and social sciences altogether.”

One of the caveats to the program is that the awards are highly selective–more so than existing NSF and NIH fellowships. There’s a three-stage selection process. The first two are fairly standard: First, would-be Pell-Mell grantees send in an application similar to the one required for the current NSF predoctoral fellowships. In fact, applicants to the NSF program are automatically entered into the Pell-Mell competition if they fill in several new fields on the NSF forms. Second, successful first-stage applicants are subjected to a still more rigorous screening, including close scrutiny of applicants’ transcripts, letters of recommendation, and current institution.

But it’s the final stage that sets the Pell-Mell grants apart from other programs. Successful applicants must not only demonstrate their academic prowess, but must also pass muster in the eyes of a newly-created Human Excellence Review Board (HERB). One of the novel requirements implemented by HERB is that applicants must designate a non-academic hobby as their “special skill”. The goal of this requirement is to encourage applications from well-rounded students with broad interests, instead of automatons who spend all day in the lab living and breathing one narrow discipline.

“What you list as your special skill is flexible,” says Tovaz Shikarti. “There’s no strict criterion our applicants have to live up to.” He notes that when the NIH conducted a limited test run with graduate students at Darthmouth College and the University of Pennsylvania, it received applications from people with skills like lizard hunting, karaoke, and cheese making. “There was even one trapeze swinger,” he says.

If this all sounds a little bit cock-eyed, don’t worry, the government is on top of that too.

When prompted as to whether the Pell-Mell program might not produce bad press for the NIH and NSF at a time when American scientists are complaining about flatlining funding, administrators demur. “We had a serious discussion about that at HERB,” says Aashish Patel, a board member. “Some people wanted to kill the program, to stub it out. But it’s not like we’re sitting around smoking up when we come up with these ideas. They’re serious policy proposals.”