Category: neuroscience

A scan of my brain (it’s pretty normal!)

June 26, 2016 • 1:30 pm

When I was in Los Angeles a week ago, I found myself hanging around some neuroscientists and neuropsychologists, and they persuaded me to have my brain scanned and analyzed: a “QEEG”. I had no idea what it involved, but it was completely painless. I simply donned this funny-looking hat that had 19 recording electrodes. The electrodes picked up electrical impulses from different parts of the brain, and those impulses can be combined and crunched to triangulate the activity of deeper parts of the brain.

I had no idea what I was getting into, but the 60-minute procedure, combined with a computer program that analyzed my brain waves, produced a lot of information.  I should add that this procedure is often done by therapists as well as physicians, and can cost from $500 to several thousand dollars depending on they type of QEEG done. My procedure would have cost $1,000, so I was pleased to get a freebie. But I was also scared that I would find out my brain was abnormal!

The spike is not part of the apparatus, nor does it connote that I’m a pointy-headed intellectual:
My brain scan
Dr. Orli Peter, who is both a clinical and a neuropsychologist with a practice in Beverly Hills, explained the analysis to me:
There are several types of QEEG analyses and we use SKIL – an advanced analysis program developed by UCLA professor Barry Sterman, a pioneer in research for clinical applications for neurofeedback and his then graduate student, David Kaiser.
She and David Kaiser are colleagues in her practice and he did my actual brain scan and analyzed my brain activity using the program he helped develop.
I did the scan four ways. Two traditional ways: with my eyes closed and then with my eyes open, looking at a fixed image (a chair). And then two new ways, called the “Peter Test,” to pick up any unresolved alteration in brain functioning due to exposure to psychological trauma. “Trauma neuromarkers” have been identified via various neuroimaging techniques.

The analysis of David and Orli, summarized by the latter; I’ve put the take-home message in bold:

Just so you know, Brodmann area theta unity is analyzed in SKIL brainmapping. It is a measure of corticolimbic connectivity, an indirect measure of myelination and distribution of sub-cortically driven theta associated with cerebral maturation.

Nearly all regions in your brain show mature integration of limbic and cortical functioning. Your sensory sampling speed is at the slightly faster end of the speed shared with the majority of people, and consistent across regions, which is an indicator of healthy sensorimotor development . However, your frontal lobe shows excessive theta similarity, an indicator of primal (unmodulated) functioning in bilateral BA9 and BA47, and there is less theta similarity of the ACC and Broca’s areas, an indicator of inefficiency in functions served by these areas.

Here is a list of the the type of functioning these regions are involved with.

BA 9 —hyperlimbic connectivity may impact cognitive flexibility and planning, being able to infer the intention of others, and empathy. Children who show poor attachment have poorer activation here. Recent studies have also shown this region is involved in social fairness, and excessive limbic functioning will result in a different sense of social justice than the dominant group.

BA 47 –more primal functioning in this region may reduce decision making and (again) being able to infer the intention of others, and to properly understand emotion (this hub has been shown to specifically relate to understanding emotion when communicated through prosody.)

Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC) — the ACC is a major hub that has connections to both the “emotional” limbic system and the “cognitive” prefrontal cortex. Poorer integration of the ACC is associated with poorer decision making because of increased difficulty in holding two conflicting ideas simultaneously and because of poorer error detection. Poorer connectivity is also associated with poorer emotional awareness and recognition of emotional cues.

Broca’s area is associated with sequencing and hierarchical categorization, a subset that influences language.

In sum, the overall view is that most regions of your brain are functioning very well, better than most, but your ability to make decisions, infer intention of others, understand emotion and share in perceptions of social justice is driven by more limbic processes, making behaviors that rely on these abilities more challenging or unique.

I take this to mean that I have the moral sense and the empathy of an early mammal!

The type of corticolimbic integration are converted into colors, and, I was told, the more green your brain areas are, the more “normal.”. I was largely green, which greatly relieved me:

Brodmann Overview - BA Exec jchec50

Re The Peter Test: I did not show any alteration in the functioning of my default-mode-network due to psychological trauma. In other words, there is no sign that I’ve been traumatized (this could either mean “never traumatized” or “traumatized and recovered from it”) which jibes pretty well with my own self-assessment.  

And here’s my list of sampling rates from the 19 electrodes. The explanation, from Orli, is below. Of course most of it is beyond me, but I’m sure some readers will understand:

Dominant Frequency1-jerry

Re the chart above:
Sampling rates are shown two ways: dominant frequency table at 1/8 hz sensitivity and as spectral entropy plots which are 1 hz sensitivity. The “overall” is peak from 1 to 45 hz and can be ignored. This range will show artifact and delta and pink noise peaks. The sensory information gating peak is typically between 7-14 hz which is the second column and one to pay attention to. This information is also represented in spectral entropy plots. Here we can see the organization of frequency activity for each brain region (see first figure above).
 The peak frequency around 10.75 hz in much of your regions is calculated by tallying up frequency bins across recording. In the “eyes closed” condition typically we will see sinusoidal activity, and this is the primary speed of these sinusoidal waveforms. These waveform are generated by the thalamocortical loop and are the rate of inhibition by the reticular thalamic nuclei which sheaths most of the thalamus and is this inhibition is activated mostly by thalamus on the thalamic relay to cortex of sensory information  when there is little or no sensory stimulation the thalamus goes into an idling speed and this is the relaxed rate of sensory volleying to cortex; i.e., our relaxed or default sensory sampling rate of environment. This is not our max rate- just our default; We can sample and gate information to the cortex faster or slower than this, depending on the situation.
I was grateful to get this analysis for free, and relieved that I’m not some kind of brain freak! If you’re in LA or traveling there, you can contact this email to get an appointment for your own SKIL EEG. Dr. Peter gives discounts to those who can verify financial need; and insurance can cover some of the cost as well.

A gynandromorph moth comes to the light – and tells a story about science

September 2, 2015 • 11:00 am

by Matthew Cobb

This tw**t popped up in my feed the other night, from “wildlife illustrator and invertebrate enthusiast” Richard Lewington [Richard has a website showing his art here]. Richard was running a moth trap in the night when he found this beauty:

If you look carefully, you can just see the male’s feathery antenna on the left; the female side presumably had a straighter antenna (these different shapes relate to the different functions – males have to detect female pheromones from far away; females primarily need to be able to detect food plants on which to lay their eggs). You can see this clearly in another example Richard tw**ted:

Gynandromorphs are mixtures of male and female, often occurring because of a developmental problem – we highlighted the potentially gynandromorph cardinal bird here three years ago. There is a link between birds and moths, in that both groups have an unusual form of sex determination. In mammals, females have identical sex chromosomes (XX) while males have one X and one Y chromosome – they can produce two kinds of gametes (X and Y sperm) and so are called the heterogametic sex. For reasons that are unclear, in birds and lepidoptera (moths and butterflies),  females are the heterogametic sex (to avoid confusion, their sex chromosomes are called Z and W; males in both groups are ZZ).

It seems probable that these moths are gynandromorphs because, at a very early stage of development – probably when a fertilised female ZW egg divided into two cells – one of the daughter cells ‘lost’ the W chromosome because of some glitch. The tissues that were produced by that cell were therefore ‘ZO’ – you need the W chromosome to be female, so the tissues became male. The sharp dividing line down the middle of the moths, and the ‘mirroring’ of sexually dimorphic external structures on either side reinforces this intepretration.

There are many examples of gynandromorph lepidoptera on Google, which is probably a combination of people’s interest in these insects and the striking sexual dimorphism that exists in many species, making it easier to spot:

Image taken from here.

Here’s a photo of a gynandromorph gypsy moth, clearly showing the different shaped antennae (the male side is on the right):

Image taken from Jerry’s colleague Greg Dwyer.

As Jerry pointed out in his original cardinal post, those of us who work on the fly Drosophila (which, like us, has XX females and XY males) would occasionally see gynandromorphs in our stocks, although unless you are doing some funky genetics with sex-linked eye- or body-colour, male and female flies are not as different as the examples of the moths seen above. However, I do recall finding an apparently female fly with a male foreleg (male forelegs have ‘sex combs’ that are involved in sexual behaviour). Jerry’s explanation bears repeating:

In flies the sex is determined by the ratio of X chromosome to autosomes.  Flies, like all diploid species, have two copies of every autosome. If you also have two X chromosomes, you’re a female because the ratio of autosomes to Xs is 1:1. If you have one X chromosome and one Y chromosome, your ratio is 2:1 and you’re male.  The Y doesn’t matter here: if you lose a Y chromosome, and hence are XO, you still look like a male, although you’re sterile (the Y carries genes for making sperm).

So to get gynandromorphs in flies, all that has to happen is that one X chromosome gets lost in one cell when the initial cell in a female (XX) zygotes divides in two.  One half of the fly then becomes XX, the other XO, and the fly is split neatly down the middle, looking like the one below.  But gynandromorphs don’t have to be “half and halfs”.  X chromosomes can get lost at almost any stage at development, so flies can be a quarter male, have irregular patches of maleness, have just a few male cells, or even a male patch as small as a single bristle.

Way back in the day (i.e., 1970s), making mosaic flies in which different patches of tissue are either male or female was the only tool we had for identifying which tissues were involved in controlling various behaviours. This was fastidious work pioneered by one of the greats of post-war science, the physicist-turned-molecular-geneticist-turned-behaviour-geneticist, Seymour Benzer. [JAC: see my mini-post at bottom in which I used these methods for another purpose.]

Along with Yoshiki Hotta, Benzer was able not only to show tissue-level genetic control of behaviour, but also to show where in the embryo those tissues were determined, thereby constructing what he called a fate map of the action of a particular mutation. They adapted this technique from one of the founders of genetics, Arthur Sturtevant, who originally proposed it in 1929.

Here are some figures from Hotta and Benzer’s 1972 paper in Nature: ‘Mapping of behavior in Drosophila mosaics’. The first shows the range of mosaics that they produced – they were much more varied than the naturally occurring gynandromorphs because of the way they manipulated a special kind of X-chromosome in these flies, called a ring-X chromosome (known as X-R). This X-R chromosome could be lost at varying times in development, changing tissues from female (XX-R) to male (XO). The later the chromosome was lost, the more specific the tissues that would be male. By using a body-colour mutation on the X-chromosome, Hotta and Benzer could track from the outside of the fly which tissues were male and female, because they had different colours.

The top left fly in the figure apparently lost its X-R chromosome at the earliest stage of development, hence the straight line. As you can see, the effect doesn’t need to be symmetrical – if the chromosome is lost at a later stage, then a very specific part of the fly could be affected, such as the right wing in the top right fly (the left wing is still female).
240527a01

The second figure shows how they interpreted which parts of the fly embryo were involved in determining the behaviour of a mutation called hyperkinetic in which the fly shakes its legs when anaesthetised (this rather odd behaviour turned out to be of major importance, as it is produced by changes to the activity of ion channels in the fly’s neurons). Unsurprisingly, it appears that the hyperkinetic gene was exerting its influence in three separate regions (one for each of the fly’s pairs of legs), all of which are involved in producing the part of the fly’s nervous system that controls movement.

240527a0The arduous nature of the technique – it was not possible to predict which tissues would lose their X-R chromosome, and often no detectable change occurred – and the problems of identifying which tissues underneath the cuticle had changed sex, meant that it was not not widely adopted. By the late 1980s this method was  overtaken by direct manipulation of genes and the tissues they are expressed in, but for many years it was cutting edge science, available in only a few leading laboratories.

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Jerry’s addendum: I used gynandromorphs, and Benzer and Hotta’s ring-X stock, to determine where in the fly the females’s sex pheromone (a waxy substance on her cuticule that incites the males to court her and mate with her) resided.  As Matthew noted, that stock of flies, which still exists, is prone to losing X chromosomes when they’re contributed by a male parent. The male’s XX (female) zygotes often lose the X at different stages of development, producing patches of tissue that are XO and therefore male. You can tell which patches are male because the female’s X carries a recessive gene causing yellow body color, so male bits (XO) are yellow and female bits (XX, with one gene for normal coloration) are normally pigmented.

XX females have very different sex pheromones from XY and XO males, so by correlating which bits of a gynandromorph fly were male vs. female, and then extracting each fly’s sex phreromones with hexane and testing the chemicals’ identities on a gas chromatograph, Ryan Oyama (an undergraduate student) and I were able to determine where in the fly’s body the sex pheromones were produced and/or sequestered. It turned out that this was in the cuticle of the abdomen only: flies with female heads, legs, or thoraxes but male abdomens produced only male pheromones. The amount of female pheromone was proportional to the amount of female tissue in the abdomen, at least as seen in the visible cuticle.

This correlated with behavioral observations, too, for when gynandromorphs were tested with normal males (always horny), those males courted gynandromorphs most vigorously when their abdomens were female.  (This could, of course, have been associated with behavior or morphology of those gynandromorphs rather than pheromones, so we needed to do the pheromone tests as well.) Later workers actually localized the pheromone-producing cells to a layer right below the abdominal cuticle, confirming our results.

We published our results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (reference and free download below), and I thought it was a very clever way to use old genetic technology to study behavior and biochemistry. Sadly, the paper didn’t get much notice!

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Coyne, J. A. and R. Oyama. 1995. Localization of pheromonal sexual dimorphism in Drosophila melanogaster and its effect on sexual isolation. Proc Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 92:9505-9509.

The things rats dream about

June 30, 2015 • 10:15 am

by Grania Spingies

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

The Tempest (4.1.168-170)

I should preface this with my regular caveat: I-am-not-a-scientist, nor do I play one on TV. My level expertise only allows me to say the rough equivalent of “Oh hey, this looks interesting.”

As a child I often used to watch my dogs dreaming. Clearly they were running, sometimes barking and huffing, sometimes panting. It used to fascinate me, and I wondered where in their heads they were running. Was it a field they knew? Were they alone or with companions? Were they chasing prey? Running for the fun of it? What does prey even look like to Canis lupus familiaris who may never met anything particularly prey-like in their modern suburban existence?

Once one of them barked so loud in her dream that she startled herself and woke up with a jump. I’d never seen a Labrador look more sheep-like when her eyes met mine. Unfortunately there was no way to ask her what she had been seeing in her dreams.

But it seems that remarkably a team of scientists has had a glimpse at what rats dream about.

Sleeping-Rat-1
Not an actual lab rat

Kiona Smith-Strickland over at Discover Magazine writes about a new study where a team looked at rats and determined remarkably that they dreamed about going places they were aware of but had not yet explored. She explains the process:

First, researchers let rats explore a T-shaped track. The rats could run along the center of the T, but the arms were blocked by clear barriers. While the rats watched, researchers put food at the end of one arm. The rats could see the food and the route to it, but they couldn’t get there.

Then, when the rats were curled up in their cages afterwards, scientists measured their neuron firing. Their brain activity seemed to show them imagining a route through a place they hadn’t explored before. To confirm this, researchers then put the rats back into the maze, but this time without the barriers. As they explored the arm where they had previously seen the food, the rats’ place cells fired in the same pattern as they had during sleep.

Neuroscientist Hugo Spiers, who co-authored the study, notes:

People have talked in the past about these kind of replay and pre-play events as possibly being the substrates of dreams, but you can’t ask rats what they’re thinking or dreaming. There is that really interesting sense that we’re getting at the stuff of dreams, the stuff that goes on when you’re sleeping.

You can read the paper here:

Hippocampal place cells construct reward related sequences through unexplored space by H Freyja Ólafsdóttir, Caswell Barry, Aman B Saleem, Demis Hassabis, Hugo J Spiers

The Centrifuge Brain Project

March 10, 2015 • 3:40 pm

by Matthew Cobb

Have you ever wondered why children love going round and making themselves dizzy, and what might be the effect of all that centrifugal force on their brains? If you haven’t, never fear, because Dr Nick Laslowicz has been doing that for you, as outlined in this excellent brief film from 2011 called The Centrifuge Brain Project.

I think Dr Laslowicz is a close colleague of Dr Denzil Dexter, who has a rather similar research outlook:

 

h/t Simon Ings

First Nobel Prize of the year goes to three neuroscientists

October 6, 2014 • 5:24 am

Well, another year went by, and with sadness I must put my bottle of champagne back in the fridge (it’s well past its prime by now). According to CNN, the Karolinska Institut announced this morning that the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine went to three people: two Norwegians (a couple who works together) and an American working in England. Here they are:

141006110511-nobel-medicine-prize-winners-story-top

It’s a sad state of affairs that I have neither heard of any of them nor of their discoveries, described by CNN as follows:

John O’Keefe, along with May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser, discovered cells that form a positioning system in the brain — our hard-wired GPS.

Those cells mark our position, navigate where we’re going and help us remember it all, so that we can repeat our trips, the Nobel Assembly said in a statement.

Their research could also prove useful in Alzheimer’s research, because of the parts of the brain those cells lie in — the hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex.

Humans and other mammals have two hippocampi, which lie in the inner core of the bottom of the brain and are responsible for memory and orientation. The entorhinal cortices share these functions and connect the hippocampi with the huge neocortex, the bulk of our gray matter.

In Alzheimer’s patients, those two brain components break down early on, causing sufferers to get lost more easily. Understanding how the brain’s GPS works may help scientists in the future understand how this disorientation occurs.

The research is also important, because it pinpoints “a cellular basis for higher cognitive function,” the Nobel Assembly said.

The scientists conducted their research on rats, but other research on humans indicates that we have these same cells.

I’m not sure how overblown the Alzheimer’s implications are; perhaps a reader could tell us, or further describe the research. Remember that this prize, the only one explicitly designated for biology, is supposed to go for insights that improve human welfare. In practice that’s not always the case, as prizes have been given for fundamental breakthroughs in non-health-related work (viz. T. H. Morgan’s prize for genetic work in Drosophila or Axel and Buck’s 2004 prize for work on olfactory receptors), but one can always argue that such work has potential implications for humans, as Morgan’s indeed did.

The physics prize will be announced tomorrow, the chemistry prize Wednesday, the peace prize on Friday, and the economics “prize” (not really a Nobel Prize) will go to a University of Chicago Professor, as always, a week from today (Oct. 13). The prize for literature will be announced at an unspecified date.

Would anybody care to guess the recipients? If you get two out of the five, you’ll get an autographed copy of WEIT with a Nobel-winning cat (sporting the medal) drawn in it. You can guess all five if you wish. Deadline by today at 5 p.m., and one guess per customer. First correct answer wins.  (p.s.: our panel of expert judges is looking at the “cat vs. dog breed” answers.)

E. O. Wilson on free will

August 20, 2014 • 10:24 am

Ed Wilson has finally decided to wade into the murky hinterlands of Consciousness and Free Will, as seen in a new article in Harpers called “On free will: and how the brain is like a colony of ants.” (Sadly, you can’t read more than a paragraph without paying.)  I’ll quote from the pdf I have, but, in general, the article adds little to the debate about free will, which to me seems largely semantic. The real issue—the one that could substantially affect society—is that of determinism, which most philosophers and scientists agree on (i.e., we can’t make choices outside of those already determined by the laws of physics).

There are two problems with Wilson’s piece: it doesn’t say anything new, its main point being that consciousness and choice are physical phenomena determined by events in the brain, and it doesn’t define the subject of the piece, “free will.” How can you discuss that when you don’t tell people what it means? After all, for religious people (and most others, I suspect) it means one thing (libertarian free will), while for compatibilists like Dennett it means another (no libertarian free will, but something else we can call free will).

So here’s Wilson’s tacit admission of determinism, or at least of the physical basis of consciousness and “free will”:

If consciousness has a material basis, can the same be true for free will? Put another way: What, if anything, in the manifold activities of the brain could possibly pull away from the brain’s machinery to create scenarios and make decisions of its own? The answer is, of course, the self. And what would that be? Where is it? The self does not exist as a paranormal being living on its own within the brain. It is, instead, the central dramatic character of the confabulated scenarios. In these stories, it is always on center stage—if not as participant, then as observer and commentator— because that is where all of the sensory information arrives and is integrated. The stories that compose the conscious mind cannot be taken away from the mind’s physical neurobiological system, which serves as script writer, director, and cast combined. The self, despite the illusion of its independence created in the scenarios, is part of the anatomy and physiology of the body.

And here’s what I take to be Wilson’s tacit admission, though he’s never explicit about it, that “free will” is a mental illusion, since it reflects not conscious choice but unconscious brain processes. There’s a lot more to be said here, but Wilson doesn’t say anything beyond this one sentence:

 A choice is made in the unconscious centers of the brain, recent studies tell us, several seconds before the decision arrives in the conscious part.

But one novel part of his piece is reflected in the subtitle: an analogy between mental activity and colonies of social insects. Each insect is basically a little computer programmed to do a job, with its task sometimes changing with the environment (bee larvae destined to be workers, for instance, can become queens with some special feeding). But if you look at the whole colony, it appears as a well-oiled “superorganism” that works together to keep the colony functioning like a “designed” unit.  Wilson sees the brain in the same way: each “module” or neuron is entrained to behave in a certain way, but the disparate parts come together in a whole that is the “I,” the person who feels she’s the object and (as G.W. Bush might put it) “the decider.” But this analogy isn’t terribly enlightening, and doesn’t point the way forward to a scientific understanding of consciousness. That understanding will come through reductionist analysis, I think, but we already knew that.

Wilson is a physicalist, and says that progress in understanding consciousness and volition (I won’t call it “free will”) will come not from philosophers but from neuroscientists. In the main I agree, though I do think philosophers have a role to play, if only that of holding scientists to some kind of consistency and conceptual rigor. By and large, however, I see compatibilist philosophers as not only having contributed little to the issue, but having sometimes been obfuscatory by sweeping determinism (the truly important issue) under the rug in favor of displaying their own version of compatibilism.

At one point Wilson, though, appears to abandon determinism, but makes the mistake of conflating “chance,” which is simply determined phenomena that we can’t predict, with true unpredictability: that which we see in the realm of quantum physics. Perhaps in the statement below he’s saying that human volition isn’t repeatable or predictable because of such quantum phenomena, which could make decisions differ even if one replayed the tape of one’s life with every molecule starting in the same position. But Wilson could have been much clearer about this.

. . . Then there is the element of chance. The body and brain are made up of legions of communicating cells, which shift in discordant patterns that cannot even be imagined by the conscious minds they compose. The cells are bombarded every instant by outside stimuli unpredictable by human intelligence. Any one of these events can entrain a cascade of changes in local neural patterns, and scenarios of individual minds changed by them are all but infinite in detail. The content is dynamic, changing instant to instant in accordance with the unique history and physiology of the individual.

Well, does that give us “free will” or not? Does it give us truly unpredictable behavior, even in principle? Wilson doesn’t say.

In the end, Wilson bails, floating the common but unsatisfying conclusion that we have free will because we think we have free will, and that the illusion of (libertarian) free will is adaptive.

. . . Because the individual mind cannot be fully described by itself or by any separate researcher, the self—celebrated star player in the scenarios of consciousness—can go on passionately believing in its independence and free will. And that is a very fortunate Darwinian circumstance. Confidence in free will is biologically adaptive. Without it, the conscious mind, at best a fragile, dark window on the real world, would be cursed by fatalism. Like a prisoner serving a life sentence in solitary confinement, deprived of any freedom to explore and starving for surprise, it would deteriorate.

So, does free will exist? Yes, if not in ultimate reality, then at least in the operational sense necessary for sanity and thereby for the perpetuation of the human species.

Wilson is right in saying that we all act as if we have free will; nobody disputes that. And I’d like to think that he’s right in claiming that our illusion of libertarian free will is adaptive, though I know of no way to test that proposition. (We can, as always, concoct adaptive stories about this. One writer, whose name I can’t remember, argued that knowing whether a “choice” came from your brain versus someone else’s is an adaptive bit of information: it makes a difference if your arm is pumping up and down because you’re doing it yourself or if somebody else has hold of it and is doing it to you.)  I would have liked this conclusion better had Wilson been a bit more tentative in his adaptive storytelling.

But in the main, the piece adds little to the debates about consciousness and free will. In fact, I find that it muddles the debate. In my view, the best popular exposition of the problem of consciousness remains Steve Pinker’s article in Time Magazine in 2007. The reason the Harper’s piece got published was not because Wilson had something particularly new to say, but because the person who wanted to hold forth was E. O. Wilson. As for free will, I still like Anthony Cashmore’s piece in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

David Brooks: The brain is not the mind

June 19, 2013 • 5:25 am

David Brooks always seems to write above his pay grade when he weighs in about science. His pop evolutionary-psychology book The Social Animal, which was excerpted in The New Yorker, was pretty dreadful, and, I think, inimical to the public understanding of evolution in its pretense that we have a thorough understanding of the evolutionary roots of our behavior. 

But even that isn’t as bad as his op-ed piece in Monday’s New York Times, “Beyond the brain.”  Brooks’s thesis is that “the mind is not the brain”, which is simply a Deepity in the Dennettian sense. For while that mantra implies something deep (i.e., the mind is separate from the brain), what Brooks says is only that the brain and its workings are hard to study. Yet his article flirts heavily with dualism, leaving the reader with a sense that the mind is in some ways independent of the brain, and There Must be More.

I’ll have to quote in extenso to convey the full fatuity of Brooks’s views. He begins by asserting his xkcd-like superiority over both neuroscientists and philosophers:

[Neuroscience] is obviously incredibly important and exciting. From personal experience, I can tell you that you get captivated by it and sometimes go off to extremes, as if understanding the brain is the solution to understanding all thought and behavior.

This is happening at two levels. At the lowbrow level, there are the conference circuit neuro-mappers. These are people who take pretty brain-scan images and claim they can use them to predict what product somebody will buy, what party they will vote for, whether they are lying or not or whether a criminal should be held responsible for his crime.

At the highbrow end, there are scholars and theorists that some have called the “nothing buttists.” Human beings are nothing but neurons, they assert. Once we understand the brain well enough, we will be able to understand behavior. We will see the chain of physical causations that determine actions. We will see that many behaviors like addiction are nothing more than brain diseases. We will see that people don’t really possess free will; their actions are caused by material processes emerging directly out of nature. Neuroscience will replace psychology and other fields as the way to understand action.

These two forms of extremism are refuted by the same reality. The brain is not the mind. It is probably impossible to look at a map of brain activity and predict or even understand the emotions, reactions, hopes and desires of the mind.

By equating free will with the absence of determinism and materialism, Brooks implicitly labels himself a dualist. And yet the program of the “nothing buttists” sounds pretty good to me: in fact, it’s the only program that is likely to make progress in understanding how and why we think.

In the last paragraph Brooks makes his big mistake: he equates the difficulty of studying the brain with the conclusion that “the brain is not the mind.” This confusion plagues the rest of his piece.

Here’s why, according to Brooks, the brain isn’t the mind. There are five reasons, none of them having the slightest bearing on his thesis. His quotes are in bold in the bulleted points below:

  • “The first basic problem is that regions of the brain handle a wide variety of different tasks.”  Brooks notes that the amygdala can light up during fMRI scans during a variety of activities and thoughts, including sexual arousal, fear, novelty, and happiness.  To this I say, “so what”?  Brain imaging is crude, and yes, brain tasks are farmed out to a variety of regions of the organ. One “region” (which of course comprises millions of neurons) can do several things. But that is one thing we’ve learned from the materialist and reductionist program that Brooks so decries. Again, this is no proof that the brain is not the mind, but only a sign that the workings of the brain are complex.
  • Then there is the problem that one activity is usually distributed over many different places in the brain. In his book, “Brain Imaging,” the Yale biophysicist Robert Shulman notes that we have this useful concept, “working memory,” but the activity described by this concept is widely distributed across at least 30 regions of the brain. Furthermore, there appears to be no dispersed pattern of activation that we can look at and say, “That person is experiencing hatred.” Again, this is no evidence for Brooks’s thesis.  Perhaps we shouldn’t be looking at crude brain scans to understand hatred, but where else can hatred come from but the brain?
  • Then there is the problem that one action can arise out of many different brain states and the same event can trigger many different brain reactions. As the eminent psychologist Jerome Kagan has argued, you may order the same salad, but your brain activity will look different, depending on whether you are drunk or sober, alert or tired. This is just dumb, for who ever thought that brain activity, visualized broadly, will be the same in all mental and physiological states, even when you make an identical decision? Does this really suggest that the brain isn’t the mind?
  • Then, as Kagan also notes, there is the problem of meaning. A glass of water may be more meaningful to you when you are dying of thirst than when you are not. Your lover means more than your friend. It’s as hard to study neurons and understand the flavors of meaning as it is to study Shakespeare’s spelling and understand the passions aroused by Macbeth.  I think Brooks is using the wrong examples here, since the evolved desire for water when you’re thirsty is probably one of the easier mental states to study. Ditto for love.  But even the notion that The Sun Also Rises is more meaningful to me than, say, The Purpose Driven Life is a notion that in principle could be studied neurologically, for that judgment is a reflection of my genes and my experiences, both of which must be reflected in the way my brain is wired. For “meaning” is simply “emotional resonance,” and that, too, resides in the brain.
  • Finally, there is the problem of agency, the problem that bedevils all methods that mimic physics to predict human behavior. People are smokers one day but quit the next. People can change their brains in unique and unpredictable ways by shifting the patterns of their attention. Here Brooks is mistaking “predictability of behavior” with “source of behavior.” It’s unlikely that, at least in this century, we’ll understand enough about the brain to make good predictions about people’s behavior. For one thing, that behavior depends on the environment, and so you can’t predict one’s behavior from studying a single brain. You also have to predict the behavior of people with which that brain interacts, as well as other things like the weather, the availability of certain foods, and so on. Such predictability is an infinite regress, but says nothing about where the mind comes from.  Likewise, the fact that one’s behavior can change says nothing about where those changes come from.  You might be able to make a smoker relapse by putting a pack of Camels in front of him, but does that show that the mind isn’t the brain? Our feeling of agency, which we don’t yet understand, may well be an evolutionary adaptation—one also coded in the brain.

At the end, Brooks shows his true colors: he objects to the brain/mind program because it is materialistic and reductionist.  In fact, he raises the scientistic fallacy, but to no end.  He claims that “material determinism” isn’t the way to understand the brain, but, tellingly, suggests no alternative. Should we look for souls, or the hand of god tweaking our neurons?

What Satel and Lilienfeld call “neurocentrism” is an effort to take the indeterminacy of life and reduce it to measurable, scientific categories.

Right now we are compelled to rely on different disciplines to try to understand behavior on multiple levels, with inherent tensions between them. Some people want to reduce that ambiguity by making one discipline all-explaining. They want to eliminate the confusing ambiguity of human freedom by reducing everything to material determinism.

But that is the form of intellectual utopianism that always leads to error. An important task these days is to harvest the exciting gains made by science and data while understanding the limits of science and data. The next time somebody tells you what a brain scan says, be a little skeptical. The brain is not the mind.

Ah, there it is: “the limits of science and data”! Now where have we heard that from? Could it be. . . . . the theologians?

You know why Brooks would be a bad scientist? It’s because he wants this dualism to be true: he wants there to be something more to the mind than the neuronal secretions of the brain. And yet his objections to the materialist program are not objections at all. Nor does he suggest an alternative.  His decrying materialism suggests some kind of festering spirituality, which is odd coming from someone who wrote a book claiming that much of our modern behavior is coded in our genes. For Brooks’s brand of evolutionary psychology is nothing but materialist and reductionist.

In fact, the brain is the mind in the sense that the mind is a product of the brain, and without a brain there is no mind. The brain is in fact the meat computer that, taking in physiological and environmental inputs, produces the mind as its output. That may sound reductionistic and materialistic, but it happens to be true. Unless, that is, there’s a spiritual homunculus sitting in our heads.

Once again Brooks has done science no favors. This piece is simply the usual critique of scientism with the usual flaws. All it does is enable those who want to believe in woo.