It's been an interesting week for mind and psychology articles in the news. From the effectiveness of psychology and psychiatry to moral psychology to neuroscience and literature and beyond, here are a few of the best articles I found this week (in no particular order), with some relevant quotes and a little commentary.
Homo mobilis: As language goes, so does thought, from The Economist.
Spelling is in decline today, she thinks, not because of the rich diversity of dialects, as in Chaucer's day, but because the dominant mindset of nomadic culture is that language does not matter. We are entering, as she puts is, an age of “linguistic whateverism”. One reason is that people today are writing vastly larger amounts of text than ever before, and “the more we write online, the worse writers we become.” In the eras of quills, pens or even manual typewriters it was hard to write a lot, so people took time and care in clarifying their thoughts. Many nomads today are convinced that they don't have the time to think and care, so they concentrate on speed alone.
Because language is the primary vehicle for thought, this has consequences. Already, Ms Baron detects a new and widespread intellectual torpor among her students. Young Americans used to cut corners before an exam on “Hamlet” by reading the CliffsNotes. Teachers hated them, but they were pedagogic wonders compared with today's method of Googling the passage in question, then using the computer's “find” function to get to the exact snippet. Ms Baron thinks that these days her students even think in snippets, which is to say incoherently. And that is how they write essays. Having internalised the new whateverism, they launch in and stumble through, with nary a thought for what they actually want to say.This criticism dovetails strikingly with what other sociologists and psychologists are observing in the interpersonal behaviour of some nomads. Older people use their mobile phones to “micro-co-ordinate” with partners during the day in order to run their errands more efficiently and perhaps to spend more time together as a result. But many younger people, who have never known paper diaries or an unconnected world, micro-co-ordinate in order to avoid committing themselves to any fixed meeting time, location or person at all. After all, a better opportunity might yet present itself.
The concern, therefore, is that young nomads not only write without thinking or leave home in the morning without planning but also enter relationships without tying themselves down. Large parts of human interaction, especially the awkward subjects of rowing and separating, can now be relegated to virtual, as opposed to physical, interaction. A worrying trend in recent years has been adolescents' practice of dumping their lovers by text message or, worse, by changing the status of their Facebook profile from “in a relationship” to “single”. This is efficient and instantaneous, but potentially traumatic.
On one hand, the purpose of language, in whatever form, is communication, and as long as people still can understand each other, it's all good. On the other hand, the decline of precise language will likely result in the decline of precise thought, and we already have too little good thinking in this culture. In this case, as in most cases involving language and the arts, I am pretty conservative and tend to think that over time culture will suffer from the over-reliance on electronic media.
The Brain: A Mindless Obsession?, from The Wilson Quarterly.
A team of American researchers attracted national attention last year when they announced results of a study that, they said, reveal key factors that will influence how swing voters cast their ballots in the upcoming presidential election. The researchers didn’t gain these miraculous insights by polling their subjects. They scanned their brains. Theirs was just the latest in a lengthening skein of studies that use new brain-scan technology to plumb the mysteries of the American political mind. But politics is just the beginning. It’s hard to pick up a newspaper without reading some newly minted neuroscientific explanation for complex human phenomena, from schizophrenia to substance abuse to homosexuality.
The new neuroscience has emerged from the last two decades of formidable progress in brain science, psychopharmacology, and brain imaging, bringing together research related to the human nervous system in fields as diverse as genetics and computer science. It has flowered into one of the hottest fields in academia, where almost anything “neuro” now generates excitement, along with neologisms—neuroeconomics, neurophilosophy, neuromarketing. The torrent of money flowing into the field can only be described in superlatives—hundreds of millions of dollars for efforts such as Princeton’s Center for the Study of Brain, Mind, and Behavior and MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research.
Psychiatrists have been in the forefront of the transformation, eagerly shrugging off the vestiges of “talk therapy” for the bold new paradigms of neuroscience. By the late 1980s, academic psychiatrists were beginning literally to reinvent parts of the discipline, hanging out new signs saying Department of Neuropsychiatry in some medical schools. A similar transformation has occurred in academic psychology.
A layperson leafing through a mainstream psychiatric journal today might easily conclude that biologists had taken over the profession. “Acute Stress and Nicotine Cues Interact to Unveil Locomotor Arousal and Activity-Dependent Gene Expression in the Prefrontal Cortex” is the title of a typical offering. The field has so thoroughly cast its lot with biology, and with the biology induced by psychoactive drugs, that psychiatrists can hardly hope to publish in one of the mainstream journals if their article tells the story of an individual patient, or includes any personal thoughts or feelings about the people or the work that patient was engaged with, or fails to include a large dose of statistical data. Psychiatry used to be all theories, urges, and ids. Now it’s all genes, receptors, and neurotransmitters.
I find this troubling. Mental health is being reduced to materialism, treating the complexities of the human mind as though there is nothing but biology and chemistry. But we are subjective creatures. As much as we can learn from fMRIs and other methods of looking at the brain, we can also need learn a great deal from the first-person experience of what it is to be a conscious being.
Further, we need to recognize that human beings are not singular organisms existing in a vacuum. We are social beings, existing in cultural contexts, and as such we are embedded in a collective mind as much (or more?) as we are singular beings. On that note, on to the next item.
The Collective Mind, at The Frontal Cortex blog.
One of the tremendous biases and blind spots of modern neuroscience is that it's almost always forced to see the mind in a social vacuum. While there have been some rudimentary attempts to study human interaction, or what happens to the cortex when it's not by itself - see, for instance, some of the work by Read Montague - our theories of the brain are almost entirely based on brains in isolation. The reasons for this are straightforward: other people are confounding variables. They make everything too complicated. Nevertheless, even a cursory glance at human existence is a reminder that we are profoundly social animals, that our minds are largely shaped by the minds of others.
I am in total agreement. This would obviously be part of an integral approach to mind and consciousness, which is what we need -- seemingly the opposite of where the field is heading based on many of these articles (and my sessions at Toward a Science of Consciousness).
The Emerging Moral Psychology, in Prospect.
A pillar of the new synthesis is a renewed appreciation of the powerful role played by intuitions in producing our ethical judgements. Our moral intuitions, argue Haidt and other psychologists, derive not from our powers of reasoning, but from an evolved and innate suite of “affective” systems that generate “hot” flashes of feelings when we are confronted with a putative moral violation.
This intuitionist perspective marks a sharp break from traditional “rationalist” approaches in moral psychology, which gained a large following in the second half of the 20th century under the stewardship of the late Harvard psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg. In the Kohlbergian tradition, moral verdicts derive from the application of conscious reasoning, and moral development throughout our lives reflects our improved ability to articulate sound reasons for the verdicts—the highest stages of moral development are reached when people are able to reason about abstract general principles, such as justice, fairness and the Kantian maxim that individuals should be treated as ends and never as means.
But experimental studies give cause to question the primacy of rationality in morality. In one experiment, Jonathan Haidt presented people with a range of peculiar stories, each of which depicted behaviour that was harmless (in that no sentient being was hurt) but which also felt “bad” or “wrong.” One involved a son who promised his mother, while she was on her deathbed, that he would visit her grave every week, and then reneged on his commitment because he was busy. Another scenario told of a man buying a dead chicken at the supermarket and then having sex with it before cooking and eating it. These weird but essentially harmless acts were, nonetheless, by and large deemed to be immoral.
Further evidence that emotions are in the driving seat of morality surfaces when people are probed on why they take their particular moral positions. In a separate study which asked subjects for their ethical views on consensual incest, most people intuitively felt that incestuous sex is wrong, but when asked why, many gave up, saying, “I just know it’s wrong!”—a phenomenon Haidt calls “moral dumbfounding.”
It’s hard to argue that people are rationally working their way to moral judgements when they can’t come up with any compelling reasons—or sometimes any reasons at all—for their moral verdicts. Haidt suggests that the judgements are based on intuitive, emotional responses, and that conscious reasoning comes into its own in creating post hoc justifications for our moral stances. Our powers of reason, in this view, operate more like a lawyer hired to defend a client than a disinterested scientist searching for the truth.
Our rational and rhetorical skill is also recruited from time to time as a lobbyist. Haidt points out that the reasons—whether good or bad—that we offer for our moral views often function to press the emotional buttons of those we wish to bring around to our way of thinking. So even when explicit reasons appear to have the effect of changing people’s moral opinions, the effect may have less to do with the logic of the arguments than their power to elicit the right emotional responses. We may win hearts without necessarily converting minds.
This is an interesting article in many ways. Most importantly, we may have to reconsider the moral hierarchy of development that Kohlberg and Gilligan have made so famous, and which plays a central role in integral psychology.
Perhaps, we also need to reconsider the integral notion that intellect is leading line in determining the evolution of other developmental lines. It may time to give equal (or greater?) weight to the emotional line. And if we make that adjustment, we might also need to reconsider the somatic line, since nearly all emotions are body-based.
The article raises a whole series of other issues, including the difference in response to two different moral problems -- the Trolley and Footbridge problems. Different brain regions are activated in each of these dilemmas:
This pattern of activity suggests that impersonal moral dilemmas such as the Trolley Problem are treated as straightforward rational problems: how to maximise the number of lives saved. By contrast, brain imaging of the Footbridge Problem—a personal dilemma that invokes up-close and personal violence—tells a rather different story. Along with the brain regions activated in the Trolley Problem, areas known to process negative emotional responses also crank up their activity. In these more difficult dilemmas, people take much longer to make a decision and their brains show patterns of activity indicating increased emotional and cognitive conflict within the brain as the two appalling options are weighed up.
We seem to have emotional reactions (and make decisions accordingly) when we are personally involved in the situation. When we can merely look at an impersonal decision, we are more likely to be rational. However, most moral decisions we have to make are not abstract, they are personal, so we aren't very likely to take a rational approach.
Be sure to read the whole article -- this is a great summary of what we currently know about moral behavior in human beings.
Why Humans Bother With Emotions, at Live Science.
Why do we have emotions? Wouldn't it better to have the heart and soul of a lizard and feel nothing at all?
It's easy to understand why we have good emotions. Happy people live happy lives and make for happy mates. Presumably, all that happiness translates into passing on genes. Other positive emotions such as love and attachment are, in fact, essential for bringing up children, those little packets of genes.
Harder to explain are the "bad" emotions such as fear, anxiety, anger and hate. Why would evolution fill our heads with such negativity?
It may be that emotionality comes as an all-inclusive package and so you have to take the good with the bad; with love comes its evil twin hate, with happiness comes the flip side of sadness.
But evolutionary psychiatrist Randolph Nesse of the University of Michigan thinks that individual emotions are actually adaptations selected by evolution to help us cope with specific situations.
Nesse calls emotions "the mind's software." Faced with a sad situation, the mind brings up the sadness program to cope, and when the situation brightens, the mind get into the happiness loop.
For Nesse, it's not so much about the specific emotions, as the situations, because many emotions have similar cognitive, psychological and physiological effects. Faced with a situation, our feelings ratchet up and any number of emotions can, for example, put the body on alert, shut it down, change thinking patterns or motivate behavior. What matters is not so much the name of some emotions as what the mind and body does with it.
The relatively new field of evolutionary psychology tries to bridge the gap between neuroscience, subjective experience, and cultural embeddedness -- not always successfully. In this case, they are building on some of the findings from social psychology.
When faced with a stressful situation, our interpretation of the physiological state we experience (increased pulse rate, sweating, anxiety, etc.) will be determined to some extent by the social and environmental cues around us. For example, a man on a high footbridge will interpret his physiological state as fear in the absence of other cues. Put a beautiful woman on the bridge and he will interpret his state as arousal or attraction.
Evolutionarily, this would be a definite advantage.
How Much Progress Have Psychology and Psychiatry Really Made? A Freakonomics Quorum, from The New York Times.
The debate about the effectiveness and safety of psychiatric drugs rambles on while new (if not conclusive) psychological studies come out with the frequency of fad diets.
We invited some people who think a lot about such issues — David B. Baker, John Medina, Dan Ariely, Satoshi Kanazawa, Peter D. Kramer, and Laurie Schwartz — and asked them the following:
How much progress have psychology and psychiatry really made in the last century? Do we know enough about the human psyche to prescribe the medication that we do?
Here are their answers. Thanks much for their participation and insights.
Interesting, but heavily biased toward the materialist perspective.
The neuroscience delusion, from The Times (UK).
A generation of academic literary critics has now arisen who invoke “neuroscience” to assist them in their work of explication, interpretation and appreciation. Norman Bryson, once a leading exponent of Theory and a social constructivist, has described his Damascene conversion, as a result of which he now places the firing of neurons rather than signifiers at the heart of literary criticism. Evolutionary theory, sociobiology and allied forces are also recruited to the cause, since, we are reminded, the brain functions as it does to support survival. The dominant model of brain function among cognitive neuroscientists is that of a computer, and so computational theory is sometimes thrown into the mix. The kinds of things critics get up to these days are illustrated by a recent volume, Evolutionary and Neurocognitive Approaches to Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts, edited by Colin Martindale and others (New York, 2007), with chapter headings such as “Literary Creativity: A Neuropsychoanalytic View”, and a call for papers for a congress this year on “Cognitive Approaches to Medieval Texts” (cognitive science, neuroscience and evolutionary psychology all welcome); and the emergence of “Darwinian literary criticism” which approaches the Iliad and Madame Bovary through the lens of theories about the evolved brain. Evolutionary explanations of why people create and enjoy literature, “neurocognitive frameworks” for aesthetics, and neural-network explanations for the perception of beauty are all linked through the notion that our experiences of art are the experiences of a brain developed to support survival. Byatt’s approach to Donne’s poetry through neuroscience, therefore, is not unique, nor even unusual.At first sight, the displacement of Theory, with its social constructivism and linguistic idealism, by talk of something as solid as “the brain” of the writer and “the brain” of the reader may seem like progress. In fact, it is a case of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The switch from Theory to “biologism” leaves something essential unchanged: the habit of the uncritical application of very general ideas to works of literature, whose distinctive features, deliberate intentions and calculated virtues are consequently lost. Overstanding is still on the menu. In many of the critical approaches that reached their apogee in the 1980s, there was a denial of the centrality of the individual consciousness of the writer; in approaches that purport to be neuroscience-based, the consciousness of the writer (and of the reader, as we shall see) is reduced to neurophysiology. Indeed, the reductionism of neuro-lit-crit is more profound. While aficionados of Theory regarded individual works and their authors as, say, manifestations of the properties of texts, of their interaction with other texts and with the structures of power, neuroscience groupies reduce the reading and writing of literature to brain events that are common to every action in ordinary human life, and, in some cases, in ordinary non-human animal life. For this reason – and also because it is wrong about literature, overstates the understanding that comes from neuroscience and represents a grotesquely reductionist attitude to humanity – neuroaesthetics must be challenged.
Yep. This simple strikes me as daft. And useless. And, well, you get the point.
Literature is a subjective experience for the author and the reader. Attempting to analyze it through reductionist, objective neuroscience is just plain wrong-headed, and unproductive, and, well, you get the point. Nuf said.
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