Richard M. Restak, M.D.

THE NAKED BRAIN

Introduction:  Welcome to the Neurosociety

During the first half of the twenty-first century our understanding of the human brain will revolutionize how we think about ourselves and our interactions with other people.  This revolution is sufficiently powerful that I think it's fair to speak of the emergence of a neurosociety.

As citizens of that neurosociety, we will have to come to terms with brain based developments such as:

·         Tests aimed at revealing to others some of our thoughts and tendencies that, given our choice, we would choose to keep to ourselves

·         Brain scan images directed at gauging our suitability for certain jobs

·         Tests purporting to explain why we are romantically attracted to some people but repelled by others

·         Advertising campaigns that use brain scans to predict the products we are likely to purchase.

·         Chemical enhancers of the brain designed to turn us into insatiable consumers, even for products and services we don't actually need

·         Brain image profiles of us to ascertain which political candidates we are most likely to vote for

·         Brain response patterns that reveal the emotions aroused in us by movies and television shows

 Developments such as these will become part of everyday life during the first quarter of the twenty-first century, when we will increasingly employ terms and ideas referring to the brain to describe our inner experiences as well as our own and other people's behavior.  Indeed, references to the brain are already being used in law and medicine.

Trials of people accused of violent crimes, for example, regularly feature abnormal brain scans as proof of mitigating factors.

"There is something wrong with his brain that made him do it" replaces the traditional "There is something wrong with him.”  Brain scans are also offered to diagnose reading and learning disabilities, as well as to "explain" mental illnesses and suggest ways of treating them.

 Incidentally, if you have doubts that a highly technical topic as neuroscience will exert a powerful social effect ("It's too difficult for the untrained person to understand"), consider the social effects brought about during the twentieth century by three other equally demanding disciplines: computer science, physics, and psychoanalysis.  Terms such as "virtual reality," "fast-forwarding," "power down," "relativity," and "slip of the tongue" are now part of everyday discourse.  Brain imaging is currently exerting an equally powerful effect on our ideas about ourselves.

 "Nothing has so changed our ideas of the mind within our brains as the pictures of brain scans we now see everywhere-in  

newspapers and magazines, on television and at the movies," says Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles, Yale University historian and author of Naked to the Bone: Imaging in the Twentieth Century.

What's more, our evolving knowledge about the brain has led to the new discipline of social neuroscience: the application of brain science to social interactions.  This represents a dramatic break from our usual ways of looking at human behavior.

Traditionally, social and biological approaches to human behavior developed along separate and often antagonistic paths.  For instance, when you studied psychology or the social sciences in school you learned how to describe in abstract terms the mutual influences among individuals, groups, societies, and cultures.  Anthropologists, economists, linguists, and others provided alternative "explanations.”  Experts in these diverse fields operated like the fabled blind men palpating an elephant: each expert based her explanations on whatever part of the phenomenon she happened to encounter.  Rarely was any reference made to events happening in the brains of the people under study.

Until recently, neuroscientists (brain scientists) were equally restricted in their approach.  Over the past two hundred years they have studied the brain in isolation, almost as if they were deconstructing a watch.  In order to understand the workings of a watch you don't have to take into account the watch's surroundings (barring extreme conditions of heat or humidity).  You simply remove the case-and then tinker with its component parts.

Social neuroscience introduces a whole new dimension based on the recognition that the brain isn't anything like a watch but operates differently depending on social context.  Second, an understanding of mind and behavior can be achieved only by merging social and psychological viewpoints with neuroscience: the blind men must start talking to one another, sharing their experiences, questions, and theories.

The most fundamental insight provided by social neuroscience concerns the basically social nature of the brain.  First recognition of this occurred in the 1970s with the discovery in monkeys that physical contact was even more important than food in determining mother-infant attachment.  We have University of Wisconsin primate researcher Harry Harlow to thank for this insight.

Harlow isolated monkeys from their natural mothers within a few hours after birth and raised them without further contact with their mothers or human substitutes.  In the best-known of his experiments, baby monkeys interacted with one of two "mother" surrogates constructed of a wooden frame covered by either wire mesh or terry cloth.  The baby monkeys preferred the terry-cloth mother and clung to it even if the feeding bottle was attached to the wire mother-a neat demonstration that newborn monkeys have a built-in need for the softness and warmth of maternal care and if deprived of that care will select the next-best substitute.

Subsequent researchers later discovered what was happening in the monkey's brains during the Harlow experiments.  Early loss of physical contact with the mother reduced the number of receptors (binding sites) in parts of the brain to a class of steroid hormones involved in the stress response.  Monkeys with decreased receptor binding have a harder time managing stress.  And since these receptor-binding changes are permanent, the mother-deprived animal remains susceptible all of its life to stress-related illnesses.  In essence, Harlow 's discovery demonstrated that an absence of normal social interaction leads to alterations of the brain and, as a consequence, critical changes in behavior that endure over the life span.

Another insight into the social nature of the brain came a decade later when two experts on the effects of drugs on animal behavior discovered an important principle.  At the time they were conducting a routine experiment on the effects of the stimulant amphetamine on the behavior of male rhesus macaques.  Since the drug influenced identical areas in the brains of each monkey, one might expect that one monkey given a drug would respond more or less like another given the same drug.  And at first that is pretty much what the researchers observed.  But they discovered something quite different when they looked at their experimental results from a fresh perspective.

After taking into account each monkey's dominance position in the social hierarchy, the researchers observed that amphetamine increases dominant behavior in monkeys high in the social hierarchy but increases submissive behavior in monkeys closer to the bottom of that hierarchy. In other words, the researchers noted differences in the monkey's responses only when they performed both biological and social analyses. Subsequent research by other scientists confirmed that both biological and social factors must be taken into account in order to gain an accurate understanding about behavior and emotions. This holds not just for animals but for us as well.

For instance, you probably won't have to think very long to confirm from personal experience that threats to social identity produce physical consequences. Most of us get depressed and brood when other people ignore us, or our spouse talks about a divorce, or our boss suggests that perhaps we should look for other work. We become angry when a coworker ridicules us or when we're rejected from a club to which we applied for membership.

Indeed, our everyday language is rich with descriptions mixing the biological and the social: "hurt" feelings, "bruised" egos, and "broken" hearts are all metaphors for the painful experiences that can result from social interactions that have gone sour.

Thanks to social neuroscience we can expect to move beyond metaphors over the next several years as we achieve additional insights into the relationship of the brain to our most intimate and personal thoughts.

At the moment, social neuroscience is a fledging discipline similar to aeronautics at the time the Wright brothers made their first flight in Kitty Hawk , North Carolina . At that time who could have predicted the developments in commercial air travel that we now take for granted? A similar situation now exists when it comes to predicting the effects of social neuroscience on our individual and collective lives.

After several years of following research developments in this rapidly evolving field, I've become convinced that precise predictions aren't possible at this early stage of the development. So instead of predictions or a premature attempt at a synthesis of social neuroscience, I've chosen to provide a series of snapshots of how we are beginning to look in new and different ways at our most personal attributes such as trust, truth telling, love, sympathy, empathy, ethics, competition, dominance, and obedience. Neuroscientists are currently addressing these attributes armed with imaging devices and other research tools capable of measuring brain activity in intervals ranging from hours to milliseconds.

Moreover, their findings are influencing marketers, political scientists, and specialists in fields not traditionally associated with the study of the brain.

Some of the chapters that follow will include descriptions of their research; other chapters will suggest thought experiments that you can conduct on your own, testing and observing how your brain responds to social puzzles and conundrums; still others will point out how social neuroscience is influencing the ways we think about ourselves and why we act as we do. In the following ten chapters we will examine what social neuroscience has to tell us about topics such as marketing, economics, even ethics and morality.