E-mail updates
Follow on Twitter
Subscribe to RSS
Neuroscientist David Eagleman's latest book, "Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain," suggests that our brain's wiring dictates most of what we do, rather than any transcendent self. That goes for crime as well ... which leads him to suggest that the criminal mind is merely an outgrowth of a criminally structured brain.
Does that mean murderers or rapists can beat the rap by pleading that they had no choice but to do evil? Far from it. You are still responsible for your deeds, even if much of what you do happens on an unconscious level. But Eagleman argues that a better understanding of neuroscience should change our approach to crime and punishment, and perhaps even governance in general.
The founding fathers may have declared that all men are created equal, but science shows that all brains are not. And in Eagleman's view, we don't control the brain. The brain controls us ... whatever "us" means.
Eagleman is used to seeing things in a different light: His lab job at the Baylor College of Medicine focuses on how vision works, how our senses overlap each other to create the effect known as synesthesia, and how we perceive time. He's written works on a wide range of deep-think subjects, including "Sum," a series of fables about alternate afterlives.
You could also call Eagleman the prophet of possibilianism, a philosophy that advocates taking an open, inquisitive approach toward cosmic possibilities. "I think it's important, because it represents the scientific temperament: active exploration of different hypotheses without pretending we know what the right answer is in advance," he told me.
Neuroscientist David Eagleman talks about the message of "Incognito."
"Incognito" delves into the weird workings of our brain, including lighthearted explanations for visual and perceptual illusions (which are another of Eagleman's interests). But it's Eagleman's heavyweight discussion of neuroscience's social and philosophical implications that has attracted the most attention — and elevates "Incognito" above the usual gee-whiz fare.
That was the focus of my recent telephone interview with the author. Here's an edited transcript of the Q&A:
Cosmic Log: Do people really need to think of themselves and their brains in a different way? Or is this just a case of understanding what’s really going on all the time, and we shouldn’t change our lives because of what we read in "Incognito"?
David Eagleman: Well, I don’t know if people will change their lives, but I think that throughout history, there’s been a goal to know ourselves better, and I feel like in some sense, we are at a point in our history where we can understand ourselves at a much deeper level than we were able to previously, because now we’re looking inside the skull, at this alien totally foreign computational fabric that we call the brain, and it is … us. We can understand ourselves so much better by looking at the operations that are running under the hood, most of which have been inaccessible to us.
Q: Some people talk about the view that we have a "zombie brain," the unconscious part of the brain that takes care of everything that's done when you drive home along a familiar route, for example. A lot of the activity that we undertake day to day really is part of that zombie brain. Does that get us in trouble, to have so much going on in our brain that's below the level of consciousness?
A: I don't think it gets us in trouble so much as that it is the thing that "drives the boat." Almost everything that we think and do, act and believe is generated by these systems under the hood that we don’t have access to — whether it’s lifting a cup of coffee to your lips, or recognizing someone’s face, or falling in love.
Pantheon
"Incognito" delves into the frontiers of neuroscience and implications for society.
I wouldn’t say these systems get us in trouble. Your conscious mind, the part of you that switches on the light when you get up in the morning — that is the smallest bit of what’s happening in the brain. The analogy that I use is that the conscious mind is like a stowaway on a transatlantic steamship who is taking credit for the journey without acknowledging the massive engineering underfoot.
Q: One of the themes that comes out in the book is the idea about "who’s really to blame" for bad behavior. If there’s a criminal mind out there, it’s really more the brain’s fault, under the hood, than it is the conscious mind’s fault. What kind of reaction have you been getting to that idea?
A: The whole last half of the book is about what all this means for social policy. I argue that blameworthiness is the wrong question to ask. Brain development is the result of genes, and environment, and their very complicated interaction with one another. The important point is that you don’t choose your genes, and you don’t choose your childhood environment. And so for the kind of brain that you have in the end, it doesn’t really make sense to blame people or credit people, just as you wouldn’t take credit for having color vision or blame for having colorblindness.
The end result is that we have a big variety of brains in our culture. In the book, I say that brains are like fingerprints: They aren’t the same from person to person. So what we have in society is some numbers of people who are breaking laws. The issue really isn’t blameworthiness. It’s not a useful concept. That doesn’t forgive anybody. It doesn’t mean we’ll be putting criminals on the street. What it does mean is that with a biologically compatible system of jurisprudence, we could do customized sentencing, and customized rehabilitation, instead of turning to incarceration as a one-size-fits-all solution.
Q: So would someone with a brain that really isn’t suited to society get a break out of this?
A: Nobody "gets a break." A rabid dog doesn’t get a break. It’s not the rabid dog’s fault that it’s rabid, but we don’t give it a break as a result of that. It’s the same thing with crime. But as we get a better understanding of the brain and behavior, that allows us to predicate sentencing on rational factors — for example, the probability of recidivism. Some people are really dangerous, some people are rabid dogs, and some people aren't. Right now we treat all these things equally, but we need to understand what’s different about different brains.
The other thing we should do is understand better what happens in rehabilitation. Lots of people in prison undergo behavioral changes because they have something wrong with their brain. We’ve never even measured that stuff. The main issue that our prison system has become our de facto mental health care system. Thirty percent of our incarcerated population has mental illness. This is not only inhumane, but it’s not cost-effective. It’s criminogenic, which means it causes more crime. When you put people in prison, they end up going back to prison, because you’ve broken their social circle and limited their employment opportunities.
Q: Does neuroscience suggest that the solution is to warehouse people who are those "rabid dogs" of society? Are there particular therapies or strategies that are suggested for dealing with bad behavior?
A: Yeah, the idea is that wherever we can bring rehabilitative strategies to the table, we should be doing that. Sometimes you can't — for example, with people who are psychopaths. There is no rehabilitative strategy for psychopathy at the moment, so unfortunately, we just have to warehouse them if they’ve proven themselves to be violent criminals. Right now that’s our last resort. But in cases where we are able to help people, that’s what we should be doing.
Q: We should talk about the fun side of the book as well. You bring up some experiments that illustrate how weird our perceptive capabilities can be. In one experiment, a person started asking someone for directions, and while workers carried a door between the two people, a completely different person took the place of the questioner. And yet the direction-giver resumed giving directions without missing a beat, as if nothing had changed. Are there any mental exercises folks can do at home to discover the weirdness in themselves?
A: Well, all vision is an illusion, for example. It’s a construction in the brain. The brain is ensconced in darkness and silence in the vault of your skull. And yet you think you see light. Inside, internally, it’s all electrical and chemical signals. The book is full of visual illusions that demonstrate this sort of thing.
Q: Are there any other themes you want to emphasize from the book?
A: One of the frameworks that I synthesize in the book that’s really important is the fact that you are not one thing. The only way to understand the brain is as a neural parliament, where you have different political parties battling it out to control your behavior. This can now be measured in the brain with neural imaging. We can see that there are all these competing subpopulations in the brain that are always battling it out. You can call this a "team of rivals," and I think that’s a much more nuanced view of ourselves. You can get a real understanding how it is you can argue with yourself and cajole yourself. When you stop to think about it, you might ask yourself, which "you" is you? It’s all you.
I think this gives us a much more nuanced view of others' behavior as well. We don’t have to fall into this simplistic path of asking, "What are this person’s true colors? Is this person a racist or not a racist?" For better or worse, it’s perfectly possible that there are racist parts of your brain and non-racist parts. You get a much better understanding when you understand that, as Walt Whitman correctly surmised, "I am large, I contain multitudes."
He had the spirit of that exactly right. Freud had a similar idea with the concepts of id, ego and superego. What’s different now is that we can actually measure and understand the processes going on under the hood.
More about the brain:
- Interactive: Road map to the brain
- Neuroscientists refveal magicians' secrets
- 3-D images reveal how brain loses consciousness
- Identity crisis: You barely know yourself
- Decoding the secrets of your brain
- Gallery: Ten mysteries of the mind
- Still more about the brain from Cosmic Log
To learn more about Eagleman's life and work, check out this profile from The New Yorker and this video clip from "The Colbert Report."
Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also add me to your Google+ circle, and check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.
Leave a Comment:
"Thus when we cease to consider what the criminal deserves and consider only what will cure him or deter others, we have tacitly removed him from the sphere of justice altogether; instead of a person, a subject of rights, we now have a mere object, a patient, a ‘case’." --C.S. Lewis, The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment.
"Tabla Rasa" -the blank slate ... Put a baby in a violent environment and he will be violent, put him in a loving environment and he wil be a loving person.... The Brain seems to be a reaction machine, the mirror of his experience ... with no behaivor "inherent" in its structure ...
There is no such thing as a blank slate.
Dr. Eagleman's studies seem to point to the opposite of what you are saying... nature trumping nurture.
I think it's impossible to tell, though. Your brain may be wired from birth to act in certain ways, but certainly your surroundings can influence one way or the other or many ways.
Nothing is as simple as black and white... especially something as complicated as human behavior.
JimD, that's not true at all. There is abundant evidence that a great deal is hard-wired into the brain.
If people were blank slates with nothing hard-wired, then fraternal (non-identical) twins, raised in the same environment at the same time, should grow up to be adults with almost exactly the same personalities. Of course, almost any parent with 2 or more children can tell you that it doesn't work that way. You have two kids of the same gender, raised in the same house, that have *COMPLETELY* different personalities. This happens all the time, in fact.
When one member of a set of identical twins has a psychological disorder like autism or ADHD, the other one almost always does also (about 90% of the time). Yet, when the twins are NOT identical, it's fairly common for one to have the disorder and not the other. If environment were everything, then it shouldn't matter whether or not the twins have the same DNA. But DNA DOES matter -- a LOT.
The "environment is everything" mentality is not just wrong -- it's dangerous. This is exactly what leads many people to blame the parents for absolutely ANYTHING that seems to be wrong with a child, including psychological disorders that have a strong genetic component.
Got to love to product placement in the still shot of the video. :)
Dark Matter should also be discussed when dealing with the brain. Dark Matter permiates everything and comprises almost 90% of the Universe. Because of Dark Matter's energetic properties we can give a new meaning to what happens to us when we die. As our bodies decompose Dark Matter carries every single molecule into the stream of Dark Matter. The molecules then phase out of normal space as Dark Matter removes various particles from the molecule and are carried into space. Our molecules are then picked up by other molecules when Dark Matter passes through a cell where the cell then borrows the molecule from Dark Matter that when the molecules evolve into a sentinent being our thoughts would be present within the new species thus allowing each and everyone one of us to live forever.
Now I see why I have some really weird dreams at times of places and people I have never been too or seen. I have picked up the molecular pattern of their soul that has traveled through time and space through Dark Matter where my body has infused their memories into a dream that might only last second or two in my mind but after I have passed on the collected memories of all that I have seen and have felt through Dark Matter Dream Sequencing will then drift upon the eternity of the Universe itself through Dark matter.
So if you want to catch that alien's dream in your mind first learn how to record your dreams and then write them down. That way humanity can paint a picture of what other civilizations may be out there and what they may look like.
Troll. Dark matter is mostly only outside galaxies - scaffolding them. It has nothing to do with your brain, or the absence of one.
AB, go troll yerself, what dwighthuth states may well be much closer to the truth than scientists can accurately measure right now, and obviously closer than you want to believe. There are MANY things about consciousness that we plain have little understanding of. We are exactly as able to actually hold down and study a soul as we are able to hold down and study Dark Matter or Dark Energy and it EASILY could be that our souls are actually comprised of what we presently call 'Dark Energy'.
No, Dark Matter and Energy have NOT just been found outside of galaxies, it is just easier to detect them when, for some reasons that we do NOT understand yet, particular galaxies and their, apparently, attendant Dark Matter and/or Energy have become separated. The very reason that they are called 'Dark' is that they are undetectable by normal means, and so far we have only been able to detect them by way of the gravitational disturbances that they make by changing the focus of light from yet further sources and give no, presently, discernible electromagnetic signal in and of themselves. This does NOT, by any means prove that normal and dark matters/energies do not co-exist within the same space-time configurations simultaneously. We have MANY phenomena that have been proven, time and time again, such as ghosts, telepathy, clairvoyance, teleportation and apparent time travel (no matter WHAT some "Paid Debunkers" may state, they are, afterall, being paid to promote an agenda of disbelief, no matter WHAT the Facts actually are) that are completely unexplainable using standard physics. ALL of these things are completely possible and many of them can actually be proven as corollaries of Quantum Physics and yet are outside of the effects that one would normally assume to be products of 'Normal', Baryonic matter and energies as we presently understand them.
I myself have had dreams, repeatedly, that have come to be exactly true, I have witnessed ghosts myself, and have had a near death experience that has shown me that we DO live beyond these flesh and blood bodies. Do not go making broad statements that are based on your own little knowledge that state that these things cannot be when recorded history and observable facts show them to be as real as I am here posting on this board. Just because YOU have not encountered them does not mean that they do not exist.
First, there is no such thing as a soul. It simply doesn't exist. It's a fabrication of religion that you choose to continue to believe in. Second, I never said anything about dark energy. It is everywhere, with its effects most prominent in space.
Ghosts, telepathy, clairvoyance, teleportation and apparent time travel -- these have not been proven at all. Sure, they've been alleged by many, but until scientists can repeatedly verify them, the answer is no. As always, the burden of proof is upon the believer, not upon the debunker.
If you understand anything about the science of biology, about how evolution came to shape us as human beings, then you know we're made only of flesh and blood, and this leaves no room for phenomena of the kind you mention. If you can use your power to make a discernible prediction about the future, which you publicly publish, and if this comes true, then we can talk again, but until then, it's all in your head. Good luck.
It does my heart good whenever I read about another person who is on “the right track” to discovering how the human mind is actually nurtured (programmed) and how that nurturing (programming) actually functions to control the everyday lives of humans.
Right on, ……. “You are what your environment nurtured you to be”.
Right again, ……. and the “us” means our subconscious mind, ….. and our conscious mind is subservient to our subconscious mind.
And thus the extent of one’s “free will” is determined by the nurturing (programming) that is imbedded in the neurons and synapses of the brain that is only accessible to the subconscious mind.
Everything that you will learn today is highly dependent on what you learned yesterday, and every previous yesterday in succession, back until the day that you were born.
It will take decades before our culture is ready to give up on the "personal responsibility demanding revenge for crimes" ideas though. Americans in particular love to see a murderer get the death penalty and many would enjoy the thrill of executing such a person themselves.
Decades? I think it will take millenia before we can evolve to that point.
I find this article so fascinating.
It jells nicely with current thought on the cycle of poverty and why some people find themselves unable to break that cycle. It's not that they are lazy or under-educated (to over-simplify) but that they are conditioned to their status and at a certain level "comfortable" in that environment (again to over-simplify). To raise them to the next level, say from lower to middle class simply isn't possible because they are not "comfortable" living in a nicer house or a nicer neighborhood. They are more comfortable living in the poorer, rougher neighborhood they are accustomed to. (again, waaay over-simplified, but I think you get the idea)
Using this article as a theoretical jumping off point, possibly these people and their social position are the product of a combination of brain wiring AND conditioning and if we can identify that we can help them break the cycle of poverty.
Wow, just fascinating stuff. More. Give us more. I think we're heading in the right direction here and I wish we could do more research into this theory.
skip N, it is not a question of …. “possibly these people and their social position are the product of a combination of brain wiring AND conditioning”, ….. it is an evolutionary fact that they are a product of said.
And “yes”, it is fascinating stuff. And I can point you to more of my thoughts on the subject ….. and/or to this article titled …What Makes You Uniquely "You"?
Funny - in the old TV show "Herman's Head ('s_Head)," the neural parliament was shown as the "Greek Chorus". Too bad that show didn't last.
Funny - in the old TV show "Herman's Head ('s_Head)," the neural parliament was shown as the "Greek Chorus". Too bad that show didn't last.
There is no such thing as a Blank slate.
The problem with the "created equal" concept is that most people today have no clue what the founders intended by it. They never even would have implied that all people are qualitatively equal (i.e., having equal ability, capacity, skill, etc.). From my study, it is clear that their intention was to state that all persons' (admittedly, all those then recognized as persons) lives had equal intrinsic value, and that all had the same level of claim to the basic liberties afforded all mankind, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Intrinsic value should be based on intrinsic qualities, such as ability, skill, etc. You can't just arbitrarily declare that" object x has y value and that's that." If you do so, you make the concept of value itself worthless.
You don't have to have studied much of anything to come to that conclusion. It's stated clearly in the Declaration of Independence:
"We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Our founding fathers understood what you, apparently, do not. Individual rights and liberties must not be based on any such qualities. Who gets to decide which "intrinsic qualities" should endow a person with rights and which should not?
Most people, of course, are just going to say that the important qualities and skills are the ones they themselves just happen to possess.
The history of human civilization tells us rather clearly that the lucky group we bestow the greatest power upon will abuse the less powerful groups. The powerful nearly ALWAYS abuse the powerless. That's why everything about our government was set up with the obvious purpose of ensuring that no branch of government was entrusted with TOO much power.
Our founding fathers understood that certain rights must be bestowed upon EVERYONE, merely because of one's status as a human being. They knew that to do otherwise would be to encourage the very kind of tyranny that so many Americans had already fought to escape.
Just another crackpot looking to cash in on a controversial theory!
If it wasn't for "crack pots" and "controversial theories", we'd still be thinking the world was flat, the sun revolved around the earth, leeches cured disease, and hand-washing was a waste of time.
His assumption is flawed, what is considered "criminal" in one society may be common practice in another. For example I was reading an article today about China and the one child law causing an imbalance in the Female to Male ratio due to a son being the preferred gender to have. So, is this criminal? Here in the US I'm sure many do as some of the comments confirmed. While it is a rational decision in China due to the circumstances of that culture.
So to label something "criminal" just shows this mans ignorance. There's more likely a link to conformist (someone who just accepts the situation and goes along and adapts) vs non conformist (someone who questions what they are told to do and reasons whether or not to comply) than to innocent vs criminal. Hopefully no one takes this guy seriously because the implications of this are frightening. Imagine your first child is born and shortly after the doctors say "well looks like a criminally structured brain, were going to have to take this one. better luck next time.". Non-sense like this shouldn't even be given credence.
It should be noted that environment can also change physical attributes of the nervous system; it is not just genetics.
jpeyton76, no it is not a rational policy. Just because something is popular does not mean that it is rational. Hatred and cruelty are never rational. Only, the mind may use 'rationalization' to justify.
So someone finally admitted that the prison system is the 'default mental health system? What then is the purpose of graduating thousands of psychiatrists and psychologists every year, to the tune of millions of dollars?