The Divided Brain: Can we agree about where we differ?

I am bored by reading people who are allies, people of roughly the same views.  What is interesting is to read the enemy; because the enemy penetrates the defences. – Isaiah Berlin

While seeking advice on whom to invite to a workshop examining the potential practical relevance of the ideas in Iain McGilchrist’s critically acclaimed book, The Master and his Emissary, Matthew Taylor recommended writer, lecturer and broadcaster, Kenan Malik. In addition to significant media profile as a broadcaster and award winning writer, Kenan has informed opinions on a wide range of social and cultural issues, and a relevant background in Neurobiology, and in the History and Philosophy of Science. 

(Image via scoopweb.com)

So it’s a pity he couldn’t make it! But thankfully Kenan expressed an interest in receiving our recently released report Divided Brain, Divided World and over the last few days he has generously given his time and web platform to discuss some of the questions arising from it. I am very grateful for this contribution, and read Kenan’s initial posting in the spirit in which I think it was intended, namely critical inquiry; being interested in the substance of the work, but sceptical about the conclusions reached. 

Iain McGilchrist swiftly responded with an extended comment(4000+ words, plus a reference to another 4000+ word piece – the final feedback piece from John Wakefield, on pages 71-76 of our report) that he asked Kenan to promote to a full posting. Kenan kindly did so, and added his response to Iain’s comment in a fresh post Split Brains, Split Views: Debating Iain McGilchrist which led to a further comment from Iain and a further response from Kenan….which all sounds good.

However, as somebody who gets on well with Iain and broadly believes in both the soundness and importance of his ideas, I was surprised by the combative tone he took in his responses to Kenan’s points, which felt much too strong, and which Kenan nonetheless generously accommodated and responded to in detail.

 

 

In Iain’s defence, Kenan’s first post could be viewed as provocative, not so much for the substance, but for the sources he chose to quote in support of his position. It makes sense that he drew upon the thoughts of Neuro-Nemesis Ray Tallis, whom I was very glad to include in the RSA workshop and report, and who wrote an extended critique of Iain’s work for our report (pages 51-53) but I suspect what Iain reacted to most vehemently was quoting (with tacit approval) Owen Flanagan’s review for the New Scientist magazine which I think Iain rightly refers to as ‘shameful’ (in this first reply to Kenan). This review featured a very strong negative judgement about a significant work of scholarship in a high profile magazine, and yet it appears to have been written very casually, without any significant attempt to engage with the book’s content. However, attacking Kenan for drawing upon that source does feel a bit like shooting the messenger.

Iain’s response might look odd to those not familiar with the ideas, so it’s worth remembering what is at stake is the coherence and relevance of a grand theory that might (or might not!) help to inform how we understand and tackle some of the major issues of our time. In our report we focus mostly on climate change, mental health and education, but from the 14 response pieces we published, you can see it also has potential relevance to, inter-alia, Behavioural Economics, Art, The Patent System and NGO campaigning.

I trust the minor contretemps will be swiftly forgotten, and I am glad the ideas generated by it have been useful. 

Four Questions to help people agree on where they differ:

On substance, I imagine there is limited appetite for further qualifications on the thousands of words already written about the matter in Iain’s book, in our report, and now on Kenan’s site. However, as I say in the introduction to the report, the issue is not just about appraising Iain’s book, but trying to develop a relatively mature discussion on the relevance of neuroscience to social, cultural and political questions. In this respect, I see four useful questions emerging from the discussions on Kenan’s site. These are all relatively philosophical in nature, but feel to me like the key sources of disagreement. 

 

 

The Big Idea: Rick Hall FRSA is lighting sparks all over the shop!

The Big Idea: to develop creative free spaces for young people to be inspired and educated by science, technology, engineering and maths.  

3-2-1-Ignition* is a new type of shop.  Not one where you go to buy things from but one that you go to acquire knowledge, inspiration and enjoyment. Led by Rick Hall FRSA and Ignite!  a science pop up shop was created to enhance curiosity amongst the people of Nottingham.  Although Nottingham has been designated a ‘Science City’, research showed Rick that young people and their parents did not see science, technology, engineering and maths as careers paths for the future. (STEM for short; just like the RSA it’s a bit of a mouthful). 

I first met Rick Hall briefly at the East Midlands Annual Conference before I was an RSA staff member, talk about keen!  We did not meet again until I popped into the shop prior to its grand opening.  Rick was conducting an evaluation with the design and build volunteers.  He was full of energy and enthusiasm and could not wait to open the shop.  It wasn’t long before I was helping try to solve the mystery of the multiple light switches.  Rick is a writer and consultant in the arts, education, creativity and youth sectors.  He has a passion for developing partnerships that promote creativity and learning for young people.  Through Rick’s hard work at Ignite! 25 organisations gave their support to 3-2-1-Ignition* Rick also persuaded a panel of Fellows that 3-2-1-Ignition* was also worth support from the Catalyst scheme which helped to make the project a reality.  Critical to its success was the work of a wide range of volunteers.  Students from Nottingham Trent University helped design and curate the shop in just 8 days turning it from an empty shell into a wonderful den of curiosity.  You can watch the transformation of the shop via a selection of videos by Hasmita Chavada.  Volunteers also spent time on the streets of Nottingham doing stints of science busking where they played drying racks and made marmite turn white!  Young people who run Lab_13’s in their schools also came to use the space and inspire others.  By partnering with Nottingham Hackspace the shop attracted 250 young people who soldered, drilled, made and even got to play Pong powered by a bicycle.  There were also opportunities to connect to the British Geological Survey and the Royal Society of Chemistry – the list goes on.

Over 3300 people visited the 3-2-1-Ignition* and didn’t pay a penny to do so.  100% of young people surveyed asked for the shop to remain open longer.  Not willing to disappoint the public they listened to their audience and stayed open for a further 2 weeks meaning the shop was open for 27 days.  Its aim was to inspire, teach and entertain people from all walks of life about STEM and to show young people that you can go into STEM careers and be creative.

Next Steps

Following from 3-2-1-Ignition* in the Broadmarsh shopping centre in Nottingham the team had to decide what to do next.  They have produced an evaluation of the project that will tell you all about the activities, projects and partners but more importantly they are moving ahead spurred on by comments from participants who said ‘It’s the funnest place on earth’ ‘I was enthused and enthralled to see how much my grandchildren, boys aged 8 + 11, responded to interactive displays, They loved it all.’  They will be taking the concept south of the Watford Gap to the Barbican’s Festival of Neurosciences Weekender and the Wonders Street Fair on the 2 – 3 March & 7 – 9 April.  Go take a look and ‘tempt your curiosity and your mind to do some making. There’ll be jars to peer at and sniff, thoughts to create and space to ask the brain-related questions you’ve always wanted to know’.  It’s all about doing, touching and getting involved.

How Can You Help?

Rick and Ignite! have also been busy exploring how Ignite! can develop the 3-2-1-Ignition* model further.  As Rick says they have a ‘proof of concept for programmes like Lab_13 and the 3-2-1-Ignition* pop up shop, but lack the resources and know how to convert these successes to wider adoption.’  Is this something you can help with?  The one-off travelling sparks of 3-2-1-Ignition* will be tested at the Barbican events but they won’t be able to attract such an audience and will not reach as wide a demographic as they did in the Broadmarsh.  They are considering setting up a 3-2-1-Ignition* Hub in Nottingham and could use  similar  models used by Pirate Supply Store of 826 Valencia a US creative writing project and Hoxton Street Monster Supplies that supports the Ministry of Stories. One of Rick’s grand plans is to support Leeds to be free of NEET (Not in education, employment or training) young people by 2020, an idea that can only be done in collaboration.

One thing is for sure Rick will be busy making plans and talking to people so if you are interested in this agenda and think you could help please be in touch.  You can contact Rick at: rick@ignitefutures.org.uk or follow him on twitter where he is @Rick_Hall

Aren’t you being a little, y’know, Dystopian?

The Argentinian genius, Jorge Luis Borges once described Utopia as “a Greek word meaning ‘there is no such place’”

Could the same thing be said for Dystopia?

There have been plenty of dystopic visions of the future, most famously Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Huxley’s Brave New World. Huxley’s vision of happiness pills and pervasive virtuality now feels closer to the truth than the ‘Big Brother’ of Orwell’s oppressive State, but I might feel differently if I lived in Russia or China.

More recently, towards the end of his epic book, The Master and his Emissary, Iain McGilchrist presents a non-fiction account of a world he believes we are, unwittingly stumbling towards. Later this month The Social Brain Centre will be publishing a critical examination of this work as a whole, featuring a dialogue with the author and reflections from various thinkers on the strength and significance of the ideas.

The central claim is that our phenomenal experience is gradually colonised through the left hemisphere’s preference for, broadly, familiar, non-living and measurable things that can be used for instrumental purposes. On this account we are gradually losing touch with what Iain calls ‘sources of intuitive life’, as our societies become a virtual ‘hall of mirrors’ in which that which is re-presented is ubiquitous, and that which is genuinely unique has less air to breathe. If you are not familiar with these ideas, you can enjoy a very pleasant introduction by watching the RSAnimate which now has over a million viewers, and please watch this space for our report later this month.

So is the world slowly becoming more dystopic? On the one hand, people like Hans Rosling, Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley help to guard us against reflex pessimism, reminding us that we have never been healthier, wealthier, less violent and more innovative respectively. On the other hand you have fears of “the destructive power of a warming planet” (Obama) in Climate Change, fears for food and water security, the ever-present threat of terrorism, terrifying public health scenarios in which we all catch a deadly and hyper-contagious bug, and, relatively benignly, the sense that worldwide financial collapse is only ever a few bad decisions away.

However, such legitimate fears are not really what is meant by dystopia, which usually involves a vision of a world that is over-organised, and too sure of itself to realise that it has gone horribly wrong, and that it may have lost something of enormous value.

Indeed, chillingly, McGilchrist suggests that in so far as the world is becoming more dystopic, many of us are likely to remain oblivious:

“If I am right, that the story of the Western world is one of increasing left hemisphere
domination, we would not expect insight to be the key note. Instead, we would expect a sort of insouciant optimism, the sleepwalker whistling a happy tune as he ambles towards the abyss.”

These thoughts of dystopia were prompted by watching the astoundingly brilliant satirical series, Black Mirror for the first time, just last night, over a year after most people were raving about it. I was particularly affected by the second episode, 15 Million Merits which can still be viewed on Four on Demand.

I felt this dystopia was a particularly good illustration of McGilchrist’s view of what a world dominated by the left-hemisphere might look like. The picture is of a world almost completely dominated by screens, scores, adverts, and devoid of almost anything  natural or meaningful, in which everybody knows what they are supposed to be doing, but nobody really seems to know what is going on.

Painting such pictures of the future should induce constructive thought and action rather than despair. Gramsci famously said we need to have pessimism of the intellect but optimism of the will, while in our forthcoming report McGilchrist calls himself a hopeful pessimist.

Just as we accuse people for being ‘utopian’ when they are being naively optimistic about how things could be, so we should call people ‘dystopian’ when any of these visions of dystopia are taken too literally as predictions. The point of thinking dystopically is rather to shed light on our lives as they are currently lived, and the direction we are taking, or more to the point, the direction on which we are being taken.

Changing our minds about changing the brain.

When I first learned of ‘neuroplasticity’ I was very excited by the idea that we might be able to understand the brain well enough to change it in precise and purposeful ways.

That was about ten years ago (In 2002-3 I completed a masters degree in Mind, Brain and Education at Harvard University) when I felt that the key to solving the world’s problems was to know the brain better, which would (‘somehow’) lead to incisive educational methods, integrated humans and happy, functional societies.

It was ‘a false dawn’. I gradually realised that we didn’t know enough about the brain, nor enough about the myriad of complex connections between brains and minds and learning and society. Moreover, at some point it struck me forcibly that even if we knew everything there was to know in this respect, there would always be a huge value judgement involved in making sense of the implications. (A recent report I wrote for the RSA makes this case in detail).

My belief in the promise of neuroscience, as is the case for many I think, was grounded in a kind of ontological insecurity – the felt sense of lack, a need for firm foundations to make sense of who and what we are and, consequently, how we should live our lives. Alas, while Neuroscience may, in time, give a clearer sense of bio-chemical foundations, that will not, in turn, give us foundations for difficult social and ethical decisions that rely on judgements of value.

However, while it is important to keep such qualifications in mind, and not to get too carried away with the latest brain-related findings, I also think it is a huge mistake to think that neuroscience has nothing to offer in practice. For instance, I came across a very powerful example in the Guardian that made me think again about the importance of neuroplasticity.

Barbara Arrowsmith Young was a very bright child but with very distinct cognitive limitations. She struggled to make sense of the meaning of things like analogue clock times, even though she could, for instance, recite a recent news broadcast verbatim. By taking an active interest in exactly what she could and couldn’t do, she developed a sophisticated set of cognitive exercises to gradually develop parts of her brain that were not previously functioning the way they should.

In the Guardian article her training is described as follows:

“So she started devising brain stimulation exercises for herself that would work the parts of her brain that weren’t functioning. She drew 100 two-handed clockfaces on cards, each one telling a different time, and wrote the time each told on the back of the card. Then she started trying to tell the time from each, checking on the back each time to see if she was right. She did this eight to 10 hours a day. Gradually, she got faster and more accurate. Then she added a third hand, to make the task more difficult. Then a fourth, for tenths of a second, and a fifth, for days of the week.”

Barbara herself describes her breakthrough as follows:

“I was experiencing a mental exhaustion like I had never known,” she says, “so I figured something was happening. And by the time I’d done that for three or four months, it really felt like something had shifted, something had fundamentally changed in my brain, allowing me to process and understand information. I watched an edition of 60 Minutes, with a friend, and I got it. I read a page of Kierkegaard – because philosophy is obviously very conceptual, so had been impossible for me – and I understood it. I read pages from 10 books, and every single one I understood. I was like, hallelujah! It was like stepping from darkness into light.”

I would encourage readers to look at her example and the teaching methods that fell out of it in more detail. I haven’t looked closely at the evidence base, and it is worth asking how much of this is about the brain, and how much of it is about cognition(and how much does that question matter?!). Still, the narrative power of her example certainly made me think again about neuroplasticity. I had always felt people got a bit too excited about it (I mean of course we can change our brains- they change all the time!..) but the idea that specific cognitive interventions can made lasting neural impact on areas that require it, which in turn improves one’s quality of life is worth pondering.

According to the Guardian article, thousands of children diagnosed with ADD or ADHD, dyslexia or dysgraphia, dismissed as impossible to teach, have attended Arrowsmith schools for three or four years, returned to a mainstream school, and gone on academic and professional success.

As Arrowsmith Young herself puts it: “It’s because they’re not actually any of those things,” she says. “They don’t really have ADHD or dyslexia. They just have a couple of cognitive pieces that aren’t functioning as they should. It’s about going beneath the label.”

One question that follows is what ‘going beneath the label’ means in practice. Does it mean brain scans, or just cognitive testing, or both? Is this really a case where it is the neuroanatomy and neurochemistry of the brain as such that matters, or is it another example where we use brain-based language, particularly ‘neuroplasticity’ (which sounds rather like a desirable toy) to glamorise a case that does not rely on a deeper understanding of the brain at all.

On the other hand, if this glamorising is necessary to get the attention and funds needed to improve people’s lives, perhaps we should actively encourage it?

 

Wasting Time

I write this with a nice glass of Pinot Noir next to me in hopes this will aid the creation of moments of insights, as suggested by Jonah Lehrer in his RSA talk on creativity  last night. Indeed he speaks of the increase of alpha waves that lead to those ‘aha’ moments being induced by putting your mind at ease – hence the wine. Do I regard my glass of wine as leading to a wasting of time? Certainly hope so, but Lehrer spoke of how we have too narrow a view of what productive time looks like, critiquing our obsession with efficiency and lists. He quoted Einstein with ” Creativity is the residue of wasted time “ in making his point about wasted time leading to new discoveries.

Joe Hallgarten’s recent blog  speaks of the value of cross disciplinary reflection and it is the potential for new insights unlocked through imaginative interplay between incongruous influences that drives a project we are doing with Kings College.  In the Artist as Citizen and Cultural Intermediary , we are looking at the conditions that enable partnerships between artists and academics from very diverse areas of practice but also at what practical benefits might be realised from these differences.

The project was also inspired by Richard Sennet’s recent book Together which explores how we are losing the ‘cooperation skills needed to make a complex society work’ and of course these skills  exercised through working with people who think and practice differently to ourselves. But I wanted this project to go further and consciously create an environment where curiosity about the ‘other’ and accessing new lenses to re-see one’s work was the driving force with a valuing of difference as the underpinning principle. The invitation for difference worked – the project attracted interest from across the College, mostly from science and medicine and we have attracted artists and small arts organisations, who for the most part, have no history of working with academics. The ‘with’ word is critical. We tend to settle in transactional partnerships,that can suffer from being utilitarian and miss the possibilities generated from real exchange. There can be a failure to grasp what the ‘other’ has to offer.

I’ve long been a believer in epiphanies being more likely in such places as the shower where, as Lehrer suggests, one has the space from incessant external voices such as mobile phones. Putting your mind at ease releases our alpha waves  which in turn offers a chance for the inner quiet voice and those discoveries which can come out of the blue. As an actor, I always learned my lines while walking – the combination of activity, mild distraction of the senses and the rhythm of my steps worked for the most demanding of speeches. But how can you bring a metaphorical shower to a meeting of strangers that will lead to the formation of partnerships?   Interestingly I found many of Lehrer’s prompts for the generation of creativity worked for us in practice this last Tuesday.

We began our first day together with metaphor, each of us sharing an object that would illustrate what excited us most about our work, in the hopes that this would create connections between us. Of course, this also required all our participants to be willing to take a risk, enter a world quite  unfamiliar to their normal working lives and give time for partnerships characterised by difference. Dare I say it, the additional willingness to experiment was a crucial criteria and I think this involves an awareness of the wasting time principle that Lehrer speaks of – getting away from the focused rational and linear approach to problem solving and trying perhaps surprising and counter-intuitive approaches. Lehrer speaks of the brain being particularly good at metaphors helping us to bind things together. This technique of working through metaphor to describe what we are curious about can develop a collaborative  language that helps to transcend the challenges of the differences in our working languages and our usual referential shortcuts. If we agree that we need a different kind of conversation to generate transformation, then a language rooted in metaphor is a good beginning.

Another challenge for this first meeting was how to get beyond politeness and the inevitable desire to please,   natural to a meeting of strangers and move to a dynamic of critical friendship where each partner could assess the relevance of these particular strangers’ approaches  to their own working practices. And this is where we applied the ‘shower  principle’ with enforced moments of observation, reflection and prioritisation. Like many in the arts, I use a technique called the ‘silent gallery’ where participants can observe each others’ ideas in silence in order to conceive critical responses. Dissent and refinement of ideas is encouraged, but importantly within an environment of trust where each voice has an equal status,  silence can have a distinct role in exchange.

Lehrer was very critical of the use of brainstorming techniques and quite right too in the regard that used unwisely, this provides fresh but superficial and ill expressed ideas without critique. However, as a technique to get everyone’s voice heard and to loosen rigid thinking, they can be helpful if used in conjunction with refining and critiquing the ideas expressed.

But for all this commitment to new ways of working, new perspectives and trying experimental approaches, it does also get down to the people themselves and the relationships formed. That’s another thing Lehrer spoke about - that it is still important to be there ‘in the flesh’ so to speak. The extraordinary value of just showing up. He spoke of a very revealing statistic; that in spite of the huge increase in skype as a remote communication tool, attendance at conferences has doubled.  In spite of increasing demands on our time, people value being together. I’ll continue to blog about the development of this project and hope that some of our partners will be doing so as well, but for all of us it will be curiosity that sustains the exchange. And of course, a commitment to wasting time…

 

 

 

 

 

 

Networked facts are the new black

Facts are so last century. In the Internet-dominated world, networked facts have pretty much taken over. The old-fashioned view of the fact is that it is an irreducible atom of knowledge. The way information is organised on the Web means that everything is connected and it is only as a result of the links between elements of information that facts come into being.

This is one of the points that David Weinberger puts across in his new book, Too Big to Know, launched yesterday in the US (not out in the UK til 19th January). Weinberger calls these configurations of linked data, in which two ideas are connected by a relationship, ‘triples’. In an interview given to Thomas Rogers for Salon, Weinberger elaborates:

OK, so, if the triple is “Edmonton is in Canada,” ideally each of those should link to some other spot on the Web that explains exactly which Edmonton, because there’s probably more than one, along with which Canada (though there’s probably only one). And “is in” is a very ambiguous statement, so you would point to some vocabulary that defines it for geography. Each of these little facts is designed not only to be linked up by computers, but in itself consists of links. It’s a very different idea than that facts are bricks that lay a firm foundation. The old metaphor for knowledge was architectural and archaeological: foundations, bricks. Now we have clouds.

Now, I think I get this, and when we think about the ubiquity of the hyperlink, it’s pretty clear that Weinberger is absolutely right. But, even before the Internet, information was still linked, and it was still necessary to reference one idea in order to construct a basis for another. Aristotle, Darwin and Newton all did it. It was just a slower process. You had to have located and read the relevant source, be it a book, paper or article and access to these things was far more restricted than it is now. But, the basic principle was the same. I think it’s reasonable to say that Weinberger’s point about metaphors rings true not because of a fundamental shift in what facts are, but rather that the Internet age has speeded everything up and made access to data (almost) universally accessible.

Of course, I may be missing the point, particularly given that I’ve not read Weinberger’s book, but am instead responding to some bits and pieces I’ve read about it online.

The title of the book, Too Big To Know, implies that the volume of information we now have access to could be leading to a kind of overload, and there is a genuinely important (and unanswered) question about the impact of this on our brains. Are we getting cleverer or stupider as a result? Our burgeoning taste for punchy, sound-bitten data is obvious – if you can’t express an important idea in 140 characters, you’ll struggle to be listened to in some circles. Indeed, this review of Weinberger’s book on Inc.com is designed to give you the top line messages in about the time it takes to write a tweet. And, this very blog post indicates that I’m clearly as much as sucker for this as anyone.

Nevertheless, I’m pretty sure that Weinberger expresses some important ideas, not least that it isn’t individual cleverness that really matters, but the collective cleverness of the networks in which we operate. In his interview for Salon he says:

With the new medium of knowledge — the Internet — knowledge not only takes on properties of that medium but also lives at the level of the network. So rather than simply trying to cultivate smart people, we also need to be looking above the level of the individual to the network in which he or she is embedded to see where knowledge lives.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thinking, fast and slow

This evening, a lucky audience will have the privilege of listening to Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman in conversation with Richard Layard at an event hosted by LSE. They will be discussing Kahneman’s new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, which distils the author’s lifetime of work on the triumphs and pitfalls of conscious and unconscious thinking.

Kahneman is widely regarded as one of the world’s most influential psychologists, and his ideas have shaped the work of many other important thinkers, including experimental psychologist Steven Pinker and behavioural economist Dan Ariely.  In his new book, Kahneman explains the two systems that drive the way we think and make decisions – on the one hand what he calls System One, the fast, intuitive and emotional system, and on the other System Two, a slower, more deliberative and logical system. I’m looking forward to reading it, but until I have, I can’t offer my own appraisal.

There’s been a flurry of recent reviews, all of which suggest that I’m in for a treat. William Easterly’s review in the Financial Times pronounces the book a masterpiece. Easterly is ebullient about Kahneman’s choice to be upfront about the fact that ‘experts’ are as prone to making mistakes as anyone else, including him. Knowing that we are irrational in our decision making doesn’t in itself free us from falling into the same traps as everyone else. Easterly describes having to fight off the preying hands of friends and family members in order to get the book read, and says that it is ‘compulsively readable’.

Oliver Burkeman in the Guardian, is also clearly impressed. In his interview with Burkeman, Kahneman is keen to make clear that this is not a self-help book; reading it will not change the way you think. However, having a deeper awareness of how our minds work can only be a good thing, and with attention, it seems we may be able to learn when to trust our intuition and how to harness the benefits of slow thinking.

So, which system of thinking will drive my decision as to whether to buy it now, or wait for the paperback?

Highlights of the Week

1. The Iain McGilchrist RSAnimate is now live! If you are wondering whether it is worth twelve minutes of your time, take five minutes to read my blog: The Master and his Emissary-The Book of The Century?
2. As Emma noted yesterday we had a great event at the RSA yesterady: What is Madness? The best moment, for me, is when the speaker Darian Leader, a Psychoanalyst, spoke about ‘amygdala fetishism’ and the tendency, particularly among males, to try to explain everything with reference to one discrete thing, especially body parts. He added suggestive words to the effect: “As a Psychoanalyst, I have to wonder what is going on there.” He also asked rhetorically about neuroscience: “I mean, which other science do you know that feels the need to put ‘science’ in their name? It was very funny at the time, but on reflection there are quite a few: cognitive science, behavioural science, social science, political science…ah hang on…he means all the flaky stuff…
3. I attended an event at the House of Commons, hosted by Rachel Reeves MP, to celebrate the anniversary of the charity, Chess in Schools and Communities and encourage MPs to sign up to early day motion 2158 to get chess into primary schools across the country. There is a readable skit about the event in the Guardian.
4. There was a great article in the New Scientist about the Capitalist network that rules the world which gives a much deeper idea about how ‘the 1%’ sustains itself.
5. A curious study suggesting Brain imaging reveals why we remain optimistic in the face of reality but I remain mindful of Leader’s comments above.

Transforming Behaviour Change

An Astrologer once told me that I have an exalted sun in my house of enemies. This positive feature of my chart meant that bad feelings towards me are ‘burnt up’ by the heat of the sun, for which I am grateful. I have never really understood the basis on which astrology might conceivably make sense on even the most charitable interpretation, so I had to take his word for the rationale, but I appreciated the thought, which resonated with my experience.

The lack of enemies in my life means that I lack expertise in confrontation, and I am never quite sure what to do with hostility when it is directed towards me. Sometimes I feel disproportionately shocked and wounded, but mostly I am just bemused.

While chairing a recent RSA event in our Great Room, documented in the Guardian (where I was surprised to see my first name is ‘Donald’) by Carole Jahme, I had to endure some intemperate language from a distinguished guest after I tried unsuccessfully to involve the audience with just fifteen minutes of the lunch hour remaining. This exchange was regrettable, and while I could perhaps have timed and phrased my comments in ways less likely to provoke a hostile response, the sourness of the reaction was bizarre, and there wasn’t much to be learned from the experience.

A more significant case of hostility came a few months ago, when I wrote a Guardian CIF piece in response to The House of Lords report on Behaviour Change(which, alas, received very little coverage because it coincided with Rupert Murdoch giving evidence in Parliament). If you look at the final comment, by Cornelius Lysergic, you will see ‘the old familiar suggestion’:

“F*** off with your change our behaviour s***. Just f*** off.’

That was my favourite comment by far. As I have written before with respect to those who challenge the very basis for RSA’s work on Social Brain it is always interesting to read the ‘enemy’, because they sharpen your sense of purpose. In this case the challenge could not be clearer: Why bother with behaviour change at all?

The simple answer is that when you consider the planet’s most pressing challenges, on debt, on energy, on population, on ageing, on stress, on obesity, on terrorism, you find that most are either at root, or in part, behavioural. Governments have known this for a long time, but they have only recently realised that traditional policy levers relating to tax and regulation are not always enough to change behaviour in the requisite ways, and that some ‘behavioural insight’ – a pleasing phrase that probably has a limited shelf life – is required.

The Institute for Government addressed this challenge, and their Mindspace report appears to be very popular at every level of Government. For instance, I recently attended a meeting of the DCLG Behavioural Research Network where all major government departments gave a short presentation on how they are applying some of the principles in Mindspace, and more.

But the Government being interested will not allay the concerns of people like Cornelius Lysergic, indeed it will positively reinforce them. So given that it seems we need to change our behaviour, is there a way to make the idea of ‘behaviour change’ less top-down, less about elites manipulating the masses, less behaviourist and more human, less like something done to people(or pigeons) and more about doing things with them?

We think so, and in a few days we will be publishing a report called Transforming Behaviour Change: Beyond Nudge and Neuromania, which will explain how and why.  The challenge is to turn behaviour change into something people are encouraged to do themselves, based on knowledge of their own cognitive resources and frailties. A further challenge is to move away from what Aditya Chakrabortty called ‘cute technocratic solutions to mostly minor problems’ and focus on what we call ‘adaptive challenges‘. We need a richer conception of behaviour that is neither reductionist nor exclusively behaviourist, and recognises the need for individuals and groups to have more understanding of their own behaviour, including how it relates to values and attitudes.

Watch this space for details of that, and an ongoing account of the ideas emerging from our work.

Are we Neuromaniacs?

I am bored by reading people who are allies, people of roughly the same views.  What is interesting is to read the enemy; because the enemy penetrates the defences. – Isaiah Berlin

I don’t often feel nervous before an RSA event, especially one I am not taking part in, but the Neuromania debate between Ray Tallis and Matthew Taylor on July 5th is likely to pose important questions for the legitimacy of the Social Brain Project.

Tallis is the figurative ‘enemy’ that Berlin alludes to above. He is a trained doctor and neuroscientist, but also a respected philosopher and cultural critic. The message of his recently released book: Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity is that we have drastically overestimated the ability of science, particularly neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, to provide guidance on who we are, and how we should live. Tallis also directly attacks our Chief Executive Matthew Taylor, my predecessor Matt Grist, and the entire raison d’etre of the Social Brain Project(at least as he understands it) which I am currently responsible for.

Tallis’s book is nonetheless an extremely important contribution to the public understanding of science. I am definitely with him on the inadequacy of the cruder materialistic theories of consciousness, which I think is his real target and concern. I agree that we are not merely our brains, that humans do differ significantly from other animals, and that consciousness is (probably) more than an artefact of evolutionary biology. I also think he is right that neuroscience cannot and should not serve in a foundational or axoimatic role for social, ethical and political questions.

Like Tallis, I am deeply troubled by the legerdemain that leads froma mis-reading of an FMRI scan, to conceptual confusion on the relationship between mind and brain, to questionable insights into the causes of human behaviour, to a misdiagnosis of social challenges, to value-laden policy positions that existed independently of the brain science, but which find fresh justification through the preceding pseudoscientific process.

But the RSA Social Brain project wants no part of that. I really don’t think we are Tallis’s target at all. His bugbear is with the idea of science as authority, science as reductionism, and science as arbiter on issues beyond its provenance(talking of which, the book is rather funny- in one of his more withering attacks, Tallis refers to ‘colonic material of a taurine provenance’).

Tallis makes reference to Matthew Taylor wanting policy to be informed by findings from the “neuro-lab”, but this feels tendentious. What the RSA is interested in is learning more about ourselves and our capacties as agents of social change- in the language of 21st century enlightenment: our self aware autonomy.

Such awareness is not about deferring to men in white coats but about continually reflecting on the conditions of our action, including but by no means limited to our biological conditions.  To say that we need to be more aware of our biology is enlightened, to say that it fully determines who we are, or that we should stop being interested in everything else, is not.

In other words, Tallis is overreacting. This feeling was confirmed by his sideswipe at Iain McGilchrist (fellow neuroscientist/philosopher/culture critic) and his book, The Master and His Emissary, which he believes is the epitome of neuromania, becuase I suspect McGilchrist is very much on Tallis’s side with regard to the widespread mis-use of neuroscience, and its tendency to (literally) misrepresent human beings.

Tallis seems to be conflating our interest in the educative value of neuroscience with an uncritical reverence for its supposed imperial warrant. The former is healthy, and should not be lost due to fear of the latter. Neuroscience is a new card in the explanatory deck for human behaviour, and a powerful one, but it is not a trump card, and should not be played as such.

It is right to recognise that natural sciences enjoy greater epistemic warrant than social sciences and humanities, and that this represents an intellectual and cultural hazard, but the warrant can be curtailed with the right critical engagement. The prefix ‘neuro’, properly understood, need not be a signal of reductionism, but should instead be about recognising the periodic relevance and occasional salience of the distinct features of our extended and relational nervous systems.

There is a course between neuromania and neurophobia, and we are trying to chart it. The challenge is not to ignore or undervalue neuroscience, but to critically engage with it. The task for the RSA, I think, is to move away from the idea of ‘science as authority’- justifying moral/political positions, to ‘science as provocation’- stimulating reflexive behaviour change. That is what we are now working on building into a unique offer, as will become clear from publications over the next few weeks.

Older Posts »

• Twitter feed of #theRSA

  • RT @Liz_CarnegieUK: “@theRSAorg: #thersa blog: Big Idea: Cathedral Innovation Centre Unleashing religious spaces http://t.co/HFWrZE1tBN” sa… May 20, 2013 PortsmouthCath (Portsmouth Cathedral)
  • RT @michaelambjorn: #theRSA Big Idea: The Cathedral Innovation Centre http://t.co/Fv1mBLPSLy /via @imaliced #FRSA May 20, 2013 PortsmouthCath (Portsmouth Cathedral)
  • RT @Liz_CarnegieUK: “@theRSAorg: #thersa blog: Big Idea: Cathedral Innovation Centre Unleashing religious spaces http://t.co/HFWrZE1tBN” sa… May 20, 2013 FrancisTDavis (Francis Davis)
  • RT @michaelambjorn: #theRSA Big Idea: The Cathedral Innovation Centre http://t.co/Fv1mBLPSLy /via @imaliced #FRSA May 20, 2013 FrancisTDavis (Francis Davis)

• Archives

  Select Month May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007

• RSA Animate

  
  View more animations...

• RSA Shorts

  
  View more animations...

• RSA Links

  • The RSA website
  • Contact the RSA
  • About the RSA
  • RSA Events
  • RSA Fellowship
  • RSA House
  • RSA Projects
  • Matthew Taylor's blog
  • RSA Comment

• RSA Mobile

  
  

• Connect to the RSA

  • RSA Fellowship Ning
  • Linkedin
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Youtube

• The RSA

  The RSA: an enlightenment organisation committed to finding innovative practical solutions to today’s social challenges. Through its ideas, research and 27,000-strong Fellowship it seeks to understand and enhance human capability so we can close the gap between today’s reality and people’s hopes for a better world.

• Subscribe to RSA Blogs

  Enter your email address to get email updates:

  Or subscribe via RSS

• Tags

  arts behaviour Big Society Citizenship climate Climate_change community Design education energy Environment fellowship government happiness health inclusion inequality innovation internet mental health Mindfulness networks neuroscience Opening Minds persuasion Peterborough policy politics prison Prison Learning Network public services recovery resourcefulness RSA RSA Catalyst schools Social Brain social enterprise social networks social psychology social_brain spending cuts stigma technology wellbeing