The Brain Lights Up

Let’s talk about the brain. Not a day goes by when I don’t read about another study demonstrating a relationship between a particular area in the brain and an attitude, feeling, or behavior.

Imagine, for example, you are reading a really enjoyable novel. At the same time a neuroscientist is measuring the activity of various areas of your brain. A certain area lights up, other areas don’t. What exactly do we know when that happens?

Why is there so much talk about this kind of research, especially in the media with the research labs not far behind? In a recent article in the Times, “Your Brain on Fiction,” Anne Murphy Paul wrote,

“Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life.”

Change how we act in life? Really? That is a powerful claim. Is the activity in that area of the brain changing us? Or is the “detailed description” having that effect? Would our life be similarly changed if another area of the brain lit up when we read the text?

Are we not going well beyond the data in making inferences like this about the role of brain mechanisms and conscious processes, let alone changes in behavior?

I confess that I am not much enamored of the growing body of research in this area. I also admit I do not fully understand all of it. Still I know enough to realize no one has yet demonstrated a causal relationship between activity in a certain brain area and a particular idea, thought, or feeling.

Indeed, we know more than one area of the brain is activated by a specific experience. We also know the process whereby brain activity might generate a particular conscious experience or behavioral change is still a very great mystery.

It is reasonable to believe, as Kenneth Oatley and Raymond Mar have claimed, that those “who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective.” But is that because empathic individuals enjoy reading more than those who lack this very important characteristic or because reading fiction is the source of their empathy?

We also know that a great many individuals who do not read fiction have a very strong sense of empathy. Again, like any other behavior, attitude or sentiment, we are faced with the almost impossible task of untangling its roots.

In Psychology’s Ghosts, Jerome Kagan reminds us of this fundamental truth. If we discover an area of the brain that “light’s up” each time we read a book that arouses our sympathy for another person(s), the assumption is that this evidence demonstrates a relationship between the two. But what has been demonstrated? Kagan writes,

"An adolescent's feeling of shame because a parent is uneducated, unemployed, and alcoholic cannot be translated into words or phrases that name only the properties of genes, proteins, neurons, neurotransmitters, hormones, receptors, and circuits without losing a substantial amount of meaning.”

And by “meaning” Kagan is referring to the multiple effects of culture, class, prior experience, etc., factors that all too often are discounted by the prevailing belief in the primary importance of brain mechanisms in governing behavior.

The Rising Tide of Neuroscience

In the October 13th New York Times, the Op-Ed Columnist, David Brooks writes about the latest trend in what used to be known as psychology, now more properly called social cognitive neuroscience. This field emerged a few years ago from the previous cognitive psychology revolution that overthrew the field’s previously dominant behavioral approach.

As a former psychology teacher, I wonder what has happened to the study of behavior and the role of environmental and situational factors in shaping behavior. It appears that students care less now about these factors than they do about what goes on in the brain when individuals act, think, see or feel.

Brooks describes some of the papers he heard at a recent conference of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society. He comments that most of those who attended the meeting were “so damned young, hip and attractive.” I recall Thomas Kuhn’s claim that revolutions do not occur in science and by implication almost any discipline or institution until the members of the old school pass on and are replaced by the next generation of students.

At the meeting Brooks listened to a presentation in which subjects were shown images of menacing faces. People whose parents had low social status exhibited more activation in the amygdla (the busy little part of the brain involved in fear and emotion) than people from high-status families.

In another paper evidence was presented of the brain scans of Yankee and Red Sox fans as they watched highlights of one of their games. In a control condition neither group “reacted much to an Orioles-Blue Jays Game, but when they saw their own team doing well, brain regions called the central striatum and nucleus accumbens were activated. “ And so it went.

One wonders how investigators go about choosing what part of the brain to study in response the stimuli they present. Do they also measure other area of the brain to determine whether or not they are activated? In a letter to the Times, a person inquired if brain processes are the basis of the response that is measured or whether the response itself triggers the neurological event.

In his Op-Ed piece Brooks describes a study in which the anterior cingulate cortices in American and Chinese subjects were differentially activated when they saw members of their own group endure pain suggesting these effects may form the basis of prejudice. The writer of the Times letter asks,

Is the biochemical process the basis of prejudice or is prejudice the basis for a biochemical process taking place? To simply assume that a biochemical correlate of a social activity is its explanation is bad science…

Fortunately, there are still active groups of student/investigators who are equally committed to the situational analysis of behavior. One is from law and social psychology whose views are reflected on their blog known as The Situationist that is associated with the Project on Law and Mind Science at the Harvard Law School. In a description of this approach the authors of the Situationist write:

The situation” refers to causally significant features around us and within us that we do not notice or believe are relevant in explaining human behavior. “Situationism” is an approach that is deliberately attentive to the situation. It is informed by social science—particularly social psychology, social cognition, cognitive neuroscience and related fields—and the discoveries of market actors devoted to influencing consumer behavior—marketers, public relations experts, and the like.

If you read the blog and observe the breath of the topics that it treats on an almost daily basis, it will be clear that the study of the environment and the situation is far from moribund, nor is it confined to the young, hip, or necessarily attractive.