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Jon Han

Letters

How Biology Influences Our Behavior

October 15, 2009
The New York Times

To the Editor:

David Brooks’s terrific Oct. 13 column, “The Young and the Neuro,” addresses the interdisciplinary nature of the research being done today in . Far from being merely the domain of medicine or sociology, it is a new discipline being forged through the fusion of biotechnology, psychology, physiology, and political and social science.

In the future, no single scholarly field will flourish without interrelationships with others. That this truth is being recognized is apparent in the Nobel committee’s decision to award the prize in economics to Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist at Indiana University.

University administrators should be aware that other areas that are usually relegated to “the arts” are also involved in cognitive science, including theater and performance studies, which has been examining how mirror neurons are engaged when audiences watch plays or view films.

Mr. Brooks is to be commended for recognizing the value of interdisciplinarity. Let us not forget, especially at a time when university budgets are being drastically cut, that those of us working in the humanities are contributing to “neurohumanism” as well.

Linda Charnes

Bloomington, Ind., Oct. 13, 2009

The writer is a professor of English and West European studies at Indiana University.

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To the Editor:

David Brooks heralds the new way that we will be analyzing our behavior, so that we will more fully understand how we react to events and to others. But there is one flaw in Mr. Brooks’s conclusion. He declares that the categories “emotion” and “reason” will no longer be relevant.

On the contrary, this new “social cognitive neuroscience” will highlight the way our reactions are determined by our emotions rather than our reason. We will finally begin to understand scientifically what psychologists have understood for decades: how most of our actions stem from our emotions rather than our rational thought.

Mark Ettinger

New York, Oct. 13, 2009

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To the Editor:

For decades, the psychoanalytic community has been helping patients to lead more productive, satisfying lives by searching for the conscious and unconscious motivations behind their actions, attitudes and behaviors. Our work has lately come under attack as being unscientific, but David Brooks describes just how our clinical theories intersect with empirical research and wider social concerns.

With the benefit of new technology, young scientists can scan brain processes and demonstrate how the unconscious brain affects behaviors and how human attachments are developed or altered. As psychoanalysts, we struggle to retain credibility in the health care debate, to get reimbursements from insurance companies and to get a seat at the table of political and cultural discourse.

We need to rethink the way we define what we do and challenge the perception of the analyst as insular and out of touch. An article like Mr. Brooks’s confirms that we are relevant. I hope that the young scientists can help us find a better way to engage. Mindy Utay

New York, Oct. 14, 2009


The writer is a social worker and psychoanalyst in private practice.

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To the Editor:

David Brooks writes: “The anterior cingulate cortices in American and Chinese brains activate when people see members of their own group endure pain, but they do so at much lower levels when they see members of another group enduring it. These effects may form the basis of prejudice.”

Aren’t these effects simply a result of prejudice? 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, even if chemical reactions look less “fuzzy” than the materials of social and cultural life. James Slotta

Portland, Ore., Oct. 13, 2009

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To the Editor:

David Brooks seems to consider it delightful that the social cognitive neuroscientists he saw at a recent academic conference were “young, hip and attractive.” But as an un-hip 62-year-old professor in a different field, I wonder whether the “geeks” and “graying professors” whose absence Mr. Brooks seems to celebrate were not there because they would be unwelcome.

Such discrimination would be not only immoral but also foolish, since even the old and un-hip just might have something to offer intellectually.

Felicia Nimue Ackerman

Providence, R.I., Oct. 13, 2009

The writer is a professor of philosophy at Brown University.

    How Biology Influences Our Behavior, NYT, 15.10.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/15/opinion/l15brooks.html

Op-Ed Columnist

The Young and the Neuro

October 13, 2009
The New York Times
By DAVID BROOKS

When you go to an academic conference you expect to see some geeks, gravitas and graying professors giving lectures. But the people who showed up at the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society’s conference in Lower Manhattan last weekend were so damned young, hip and attractive. The leading figures at this conference were in their 30s, and most of the work was done by people in their 20s. When you spoke with them, you felt yourself near the beginning of something long and important.

In 2001, an Internet search of the phrase “social cognitive neuroscience” yielded 53 hits. Now you get more than a million on Google. Young scholars have been drawn to this field from psychology, economics, political science and beyond in the hopes that by looking into the brain they can help settle some old arguments about how people interact.

These people study the way biology, in the form of genes, influences behavior. But they’re also trying to understand the complementary process of how social behavior changes biology. Matthew Lieberman of U.C.L.A. is doing research into what happens in the brain when people are persuaded by an argument.

Keely Muscatell, one of his doctoral students, and others presented a study in which they showed people from various social strata some images of menacing faces. People whose parents had low social status exhibited more activation in the amygdala (the busy little part of the brain involved in fear and emotion) than people from high-status families.

Reem Yahya and a team from the University of Haifa studied Arabs and Jews while showing them images of hands and feet in painful situations. The two cultures perceived pain differently. The Arabs perceived higher levels of pain over all while the Jews were more sensitive to pain suffered by members of a group other than their own.

Mina Cikara of Princeton and others scanned the brains of Yankee and Red Sox fans as they watched baseball highlights. Neither reacted much to an Orioles-Blue Jays game, but when they saw their own team doing well, brain regions called the ventral striatum and nucleus accumbens were activated. This is a look at how tribal dominance struggles get processed inside.

Jonathan B. Freeman of Tufts and others peered into the reward centers of the brain such as the caudate nucleus. They found that among Americans, that region was likely to be activated by dominant behavior, whereas among Japanese, it was more likely to be activated by subordinate behavior — the same region rewarding different patterns of behavior depending on culture.

All of these studies are baby steps in a long conversation, and young academics are properly circumspect about drawing broad conclusions. But eventually their work could give us a clearer picture of what we mean by fuzzy words like ‘culture.’ It could also fill a hole in our understanding of ourselves. Economists, political scientists and policy makers treat humans as ultrarational creatures because they can’t define and systematize the emotions. This work is getting us closer to that.

The work demonstrates that we are awash in social signals, and any social science that treats individuals as discrete decision-making creatures is nonsense. But it also suggests that even though most of our reactions are fast and automatic, we still have free will and control.

Many of the studies presented here concerned the way we divide people by in-group and out-group categories in as little as 170 milliseconds. The anterior cingulate cortices in American and Chinese brains activate when people see members of their own group endure pain, but they do so at much lower levels when they see members of another group enduring it. These effects may form the basis of prejudice.

But a study by Saaid A. Mendoza and David M. Amodio of New York University showed that if you give people a strategy, such as reminding them to be racially fair, it is possible to counteract those perceptions. People feel disgust toward dehumanized groups, but a study by Claire Hoogendoorn, Elizabeth Phelps and others at N.Y.U. suggests it is possible to lower disgust and the accompanying insula activity through cognitive behavioral therapy.

In other words, consciousness is too slow to see what happens inside, but it is possible to change the lenses through which we unconsciously construe the world.

Since I’m not an academic, I’m free to speculate that this work will someday give us new categories, which will replace misleading categories like ‘emotion’ and ‘reason.’ I suspect that the work will take us beyond the obsession with I.Q. and other conscious capacities and give us a firmer understanding of motivation, equilibrium, sensitivity and other unconscious capacities.

The hard sciences are interpenetrating the social sciences. This isn’t dehumanizing. It shines attention on the things poets have traditionally cared about: the power of human attachments. It may even help policy wonks someday see people as they really are.

    The Young and the Neuro, NYT, 15.10.2009,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/opinion/13brooks.html