← Brain Science with Ginger Campbell, MD: Neuroscience for Everyone
Brain Science with Ginger Campbell, MD: Neuroscience for Everyone
BS 146 Premium Ad-free Version (Alan Jasanoff)
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- [00:04]
A
Welcome to Brain Science, the podcast where we explore how recent discoveries in neuroscience are unraveling the mystery of how our brains make us human. I'm your host, Dr. Ginger Campbell, and this is episode 146. Before I tell you a little bit about today's episode, I want to give a shout out of congratulations to Dr. Pamela Gay for her upcoming induction into the Academy of Podcasting hall of fame. I think Dr. Gay is the first science podcaster to be inducted and her show Astronomy Cast launched way back in 2004. She has recorded over 300 episodes. I actually nominated her, but I'm sure that I wasn't the only one. So even though Brain Science is a podcast that focuses on neuroscience, we don't just talk about the brain, because you are not just your brain any more than you are just your body. Over the years, my guests have debated the meaning of the term mind, but one thing that is certain is that the human mind requires the interaction of our brain, body and the environment. For long term listeners, this might seem obvious, but today's guest, Dr. Alan Jasanoff, argues that there is a tendency to view the mind as identical to just the brain. In his new book, the Biological How Brain, Body and Environment Collaborate to Make Us Who We Are, Dr. Jasanoff from MIT explores the consequences of having such a narrow view. I really consider today's conversation to be a continuation of my previous discussion of this topic back in episode 109, which I called Avoiding Neuromania. Dr. Jasanoff's term for the problem is the cerebral mystique, and I hope you will find his ideas as stimulating as I did. For complete show notes and episode transcripts, please visit brainsciencepodcast.com youm can send feedback to brainsciencepodcastmail.com this episode will also be reviewed in the November Facebook Live event. So if you send your feedback before November 1st, I'll be able to include it. I'll be back after the interview to review the key ideas and to tell you more about next year's trip to Australia. Welcome to Brain Science, Alan. It's great to have you on the show.
- [02:39]
B
Thanks very much for having me, Ginger. And it's a great honor to be on the podcast.
- [02:45]
A
I was hoping that you would start out by just telling us a little bit about your background and how you became a neuroscientist.
- [02:53]
B
I actually came to neuroscience in a kind of circuitous way. I was trained as a molecular biologist and a biophysicist. My PhD is in biophysics and I even have A master's degree in chemistry. And I discovered neuroscience kind of late in the game. As a postdoc, I sort of was looking for something, I don't know, deeper or broader or something to do after I finished my PhD and I thought neuroscience was pretty alluring. And the kinds of problems that I got into at that point are actually problems that make use of my earlier molecular training. And I've spent much of my career trying to bridge molecular and organismic scales in neuroscience, chiefly by developing, experimenting with new molecular tools for brain imaging, for trying to understand the brain as an integrated organ, but at molecular level. So now I run a lab of about a dozen people at mit and I'm in the bioengineering and neuroscience departments. And my research program is pretty focused, but I have actually broader interest both in science and more generally. And a few things sort of took me from there to the topic of my book the Biological Mind. From within the field, I had a sense that there's quite a lot of kind of groupthink and sometimes narrowness about how we view the brain. For instance, thinking of it in terms of circuits and wiring rather than chemicals, or more organic ways to think of brain function. And then both inside and outside the field. I've felt that learning and thinking about the brain has had surprisingly little effect on how we view ourselves as people. And I'm actually particularly sensitive to this, I think, because like many people in neuroscience, I was sort of seduced by the feeling that this field is helping us learn about ourselves. But actually the way that people talk about the brain, often we learn about the mechanisms behind our minds in some ways, but it hasn't really fundamentally changed how we behave as people. And part of why I think that is, is because we still haven't fully come to terms with the differences between having a brain and having an old fashioned mind or a soul. The way that people 100, 200, or even 2,000 years ago thought of themselves. And so my book tries to take that apart. And that's what we're going to talk about.
- [05:05]
A
Well, that's a great introduction. And as I've been doing this show for over 10 years, I think I really understand where you're coming from because it's easy to get lost in the mechanisms. In fact, I've got listeners who sometimes get frustrated that I don't get into more mechanisms because I tend to try to take a bigger view of things, which is why I'm really excited to have you on the show today. Would you like to give us sort of A brief overview of the themes of your book.
- [05:37]
B
Yeah, sure. So the theme of my book, in a nutshell is how we're more than our brains and why that's important. And as I mentioned, I mean, part of why I wrote this book is because I think there's a good bit of popular wisdom, as well as kind of feelings in the academic community itself, that kind of prompts us to map the brain onto the soul or map the soul onto the brain. There's a catchphrase that people sometimes use. We are our brains. And actually, the day that my book was published, there was a company that caused a stir by advertising services of freezing people's brains for indefinite preservation so that they could be recalled to life at some future point where the contents of your mind and your being could be decoded from the brain. And that's a view that, you know, it's very extreme, of course, but I think that the more generic tendency is really alive in our society to map ourselves onto our brains. And I think that that has the negative consequence of reducing our problems, reducing the problems that we face in soc to problems of the brain. When we think about what makes people do the things that they do, what makes people mentally ill, how we're going to become smarter and better people, we're often thinking about how the brain is going to get us there, how, for instance, mental illnesses might be located in the brain, and so on. And so the book actually starts out by taking a look at what I think is a sort of a root problem behind this. You know, why is it that we're mapping ourselves onto the brain? The truth is that the brain is an organ. It's part of our body, and it is connected physiologically to our bodies and to the environments around it, to the environment around us, and it's also connected causally. So, you know, everything that happens around us, everything that happens in our body, is coupled in some way to our brain and vice versa. And many people will remember that in the olden days, as I'll call them, there was a philosophy that's called dualism. That was a philosophy that separated the mind from the body. The mind body distinction is a kind of a term that I think most people know about. And that philosophy viewed the mind as this ethereal thing that lives outside the body, that interacts with the body. It gets its information from the body, but it can kind of decide to do what it wants on its own. So it's causally distinct, and it's also different in substance. So it actually, you know, it's not made of body stuff, it's made of mind stuff. And the most famous philosopher who wrote about dualism was this guy Descartes, Rene Descartes, 17th century philosopher, who's credited with this view. And it seems to me that a lot of the trends in neurosciences, in particular, how it's relayed to the public, emphasize a form of brain body dualism that's very much like the mind body dualism we used to have, where the brain is different from the body in substance and in its causal relationships, instead of the mind being different. And I think that that kind of prompts people to kind of encapsulate themselves in their brains to think of their, you know, again, reduce their problems to problems of the brain as opposed to problems that are integrated more broadly, which is what happens when you break down the dualism. So the book takes a look at the source of this dualism, this brain body distinction. And it's something that I call the Cerebral mystique. The first part of my book is called the Cerebral Mystique, and it's about how we idealize the brain, how we have kind of a mystique about it. And I know about that mystique because it's what brought me into neuroscience. And again, it probably drives, you know, many people listening right now to, to listen to this podcast because the brain is truly an impressive and enigmatic organ, but it is part of our bodies and integrally intertwined into them and into the environment. So when we think of the brain as different, we lose that. So I spend a lot of the book actually talking about how the cerebral mystique comes about, how we think of the brain as different in substance from the body and different in its causal relations. And I talk about how there are views of the brain that make it seem inorganic, like a computer or machine. That's a really common way that I think people think of the brain. People also like to think of the brain as inscrutably complex. And that can be a great excuse for actually not trying to think in detail about what makes people do things. Because if you think that, well, the source of your actions is coming from this inscrutably complex thing, and we're never going to figure out how it works. Well, that tends to kind of let you off the hook for trying to explain what's really going on. So a lot of people think of the brain as compartmentalized, also with self contained functions. We have a part of the brain that does language, a part of the brain that makes decisions and so on. And this is sort of a burlesque view that comes about. It's actually bolstered by brain imaging studies, like, actually like what I do for a living, in part. But I think it, it also feeds into this notion that, okay, well, the brain is in this kind of dualistic relation to the world around it, because, you know, we can put our functions in different parts of the brain, like the phrenologists used to. And then lastly, in the book, when I'm talking about the cerebral mystique, I also talk about how, well, people also have these images of the brain as, as all powerful, that it's in control of the body. That's a cliche phrase that we, we learn mostly in elementary school also that the brain is autonomous of the environment and we get to decide what we do. And we can tame the environment, we can learn about the environment, but we're deciding we're in control. So these five things, the inorganic nature, complexity, compartmentalization, control and autonomy that the brain has, they're stereotypes that create this brain body distinction and that lead us to reduce ourselves in some sense to our brain. That make our brains seem more soul, like, more like the way that someone like Descartes, or earlier, maybe religiously motivated views might have described the essence of a person. So a lot of my book is about arguing against that, trying to argue that actually, well, the brain is super important for us, but it's not our essence. It's part of what makes us who we are.
- [11:39]
A
Great, that's a great overview. So I think the first theme had to do with seeing the brain as being abiotic. Could you discuss that in a little bit more detail?
- [11:50]
B
Absolutely, yeah. So one of the most dominant views of the brain, I think, actually both within the field and outside the field, is the view of the brain as a computer, as a mechanism more generally, but specifically as a computer. And this actually really dates back to the very earliest moments of the digital age. So there was a computer pioneer, John von Neumann, who wrote a book called the Computer and the Brain, based on a set of lectures just before he died in the 1950s. And he, with that book, kind of established this analogy whereby the mechanisms of the brain, the things that the brain does, get mapped onto what digital computers do. And there's a lot of truth to that. So one of the first things I think people learn about brain cells, neurons chiefly, is that they fire these little electrical impulses called action potentials. And those are electrical impulses that are generated by molecules and neurons. But they look a Lot like the electrical signals that travel down wires, or now fiber optic cables in a telephone network, or that zip in and out of computer chips to turn bits on. And. And that electrical nature of brain processing, I think is part of what underlies the computer analogy. Another pervasive and actually genuine similarity between brains and computers is that, well, they both have circuit elements in them. So computers obviously have digital circuitry, wires and so on. Brains have neurons that are often arranged in patterns of connectivity that look like circuits. They connect with each other, they're often in regular rays that kind of, if you look at them in the right way, they look like a computer chip. And that's true enough. But when we think of the brain as a computer, well, the language that we bring to that becomes frankly, really odd for something biotic. When something is a computer, well, we can think of it's inorganic. We can think of copying it, cloning it, we can think of sending it through space. It's sort of, in a sense, it brings with it a certain mysterious or otherworldly characteristic that we wouldn't really ascribe, let's say, to our livers or to our hearts. And while there is scientific truth to the analogy between the brain and the computer, there's also a complementary view of the brain, a different view that's much less machine like and I think much less conducive to this. Thinking of the brain as something that can be uploaded, downloaded and sent through space. And that relates a lot to the brain's chemical nature. So the most fundamental aspect of the brain's chemical nature actually relates to the electrical signaling itself. That, well, we wouldn't have electrical signals in the brain if it weren't for molecules whose concentrations are changing inside and outside cells. And those molecules don't just create little electrical impulses. They also kind of spread throughout the brain in ways that are a lot more like an oil droplet spreading on a puddle than like an electrical impulse traveling down a telephone wire. And there are many, many different chemicals around 100 different signaling molecules in the brain. And from their standpoint, all those electrical signals in the brain may just be complicated ways to turn one chemical into another, or rather to turn one type of chemical signal into another. So there's sort of a chemicals eye view of the brain, just as there is an electrical view of the brain. The other thing that I think people are becoming increasingly aware of, at least aware of the significance of, is the role of cells in the brain that don't use electrical signaling or that don't mainly Use electrical signaling. And the most famous of those cells are the so called that comes from the Greek word for glue. And the glia were once thought to be barely more than glue. Glue kind of holding the neurons together in the brain and basically letting the neurons do their thing without being dislodged. But it's turning out to be the case that actually, while functions performed by glia are actually really important for what the neurons are doing, and in a sense, there's a symmetry to that relationship. So as an example, when neurons signal each other, one neuron will often release a chemical, a neurochemical or neurotransmitter onto the other neuron. I talked about the importance of the chemicals already. Well, the glia are also interacting with that same chemical. They will often be involved in either taking up or potentially degrading the chemical. And that together with what the neurons are doing, influences how long the chemical is present for how far it can spread, and therefore how much of an effect it has. And so the glia are actually, in a sense, just as important for how that mechanism works as the neurons. It's like gears on a clock, and if you took one of them out, well, the clock would stop working. And in fact, people have done an experiment that's a little bit like that by replacing the glia in a mouse with foreign glia. You have to do it in very young mice. And in fact, the behavior of the mice that grow up with these odd glia is changed. It's different because the new glia aren't doing exactly what the endogenous glia, what the native glia would have been doing. Although that effect is subtle, in this case, it leads the mice to behave differently. They can do better on certain tasks. So I sometimes analogize the difference between the kind of electrical view of the brain, the view that emphasizes neurons and wiring, with this alternative view that emphasizes chemicals and glia. And I sometimes analogize it to this figure ground illusion, this famous optical illusion where you can see two faces in a vase. And in a sense they're both there at the same time and they're both just as real. And I think that the more that we think of the brain as this kind of mushy chemical thing with glue as well as wiring, the less we'll think of it it as a strange and foreign visitor to our bodies, Something that can be taken out and sent away.
- [17:25]
A
Right. And you have a lot of good examples, like the one you alluded to about the mice having the transplanted, shall we say, glia, what about the nervous system of C. Elegans, that has some relevance to this discussion, doesn't it?
- [17:41]
B
Sure, yeah. Well, one of the other forms of dualism that I talk about in the book, one of the other forms of this sort of brain body distinction, is the idea that, okay, well, we can look at the brain as almost like a self contained thing deciding what it's going to do and then executing its decisions in the body. And while C. Elegans don't have a normal brain, they have I guess, 309 neurons that make up its nervous system. But those neurons live in close apposition. They live right up close to all these other things that are going on in the worm's body. So the C. Elegans, I'm sorry, it's a little worm, only about 2 millimeters long, transparent. And if you pick up a soil sample, you can see and sort of pull it apart. You can see these things in there, they're very hard to see, they're clear. But their bodies are made up of different types of cells and they're all working together. So when the worm bends, there's a good chance that its neurons are being affected in some way. We don't actually completely know how different parts of the worms physiology are working together. But what we do know is that despite essentially comprehensive knowledge about at least the number and the connections of the neurons in the worm's brain, that we or in the worm's body, we know that we can't simply simulate what the worm is doing, that it's not enough just to know about the nervous system alone. And the same is true for us. So when you think about, well, what does the brain do? Well, I mean, of course our brains are much more complicated. We have somewhere approaching 100 billion neurons in our brain and a lot of glia as well. But we also have intimate interactions between the brain and the body. And those include exchanges of chemicals through the bloodstream that affect the rest of the body. They include also just the mechanics of the body, you know, what the body does and how that influences our cognitive possibilities and how we solve problems. And here I like to cite the case of this famous violinist, Niccolo Paganini, who was a famous 19th century virtuoso who could play unbelievable things on his instrument, in part because he had not the brain for it, but the body for it. He had a connective tissue disorder called Barfan syndrome, which gave his joints kind of abnormal flexibility so he could reach unbelievable intervals on the violin. So that's, that's a physical ability and obviously well, we know that playing the violin involves cognitive control, too, but it feeds back because when you have possibilities to generate music using your body, it also shapes your ideas about what music is possible. And Paganini is such a good example of this, because in addition to being a virtuosic performer, he was a composer. And a lot of the pieces that he played that he composed. I'm sorry, are pieces that he uniquely could compose because he could imagine them as kind of feasible pieces of music that the possibilities that his body gave him were there for his mind, in a sense, to make use of. So it's an interesting case of brain body interactions. They're underlying an interesting aspect of cognition. Worms can't do that, of course.
- [20:43]
A
Right. It is interesting that even though we know the wiring diagram for C. Elegans, we still can't unravel its behavior. And that's sort of sobering. And I was really surprised to read that they don't have documented action potentials.
- [20:59]
B
Yes. So that's right, too. And CL guns neurons, they cover relatively short distances because these worms themselves are actually quite small, and they don't fire electrical signals the way that our neurons do. Some people think that the reason for that is because one of the functions of the electrical signaling in the human brain or in the vertebrate brain is to send signals very rapidly over long distances. And so it's possible that worms don't have to do that just because they're not that big. Whether or not that's true, it does bring up the, you know, the possibility, in fact, the reality, that it's possible to have a nervous system that doesn't really use electricity in the normal way at all. And that's something that I think also emphasizes the alternative ways of looking at the nervous system that the chemical view and that the glial view also gave us.
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A
So the idea that the human brain is the most complex thing in the universe is almost a cliche. Will you explain why you see this view of the brain as a problem?
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B
There's no doubt that the human brain is super complex. And frankly, so is the rodent brain. That's the one that I do most of my work on. And actually, so is the insect brain, for better or for worse. But when you think about, well, what is it that we achieve when we say that it's super complex? Well, it does get people interested in it. There's certainly a lot of unanswered questions about the brain, but it also creates the sense of mystery about it that almost that it's A futile problem, futile endeavor, I should say, to try to figure out how it works or how it performs functions. And you'll see, if you look at books about the brain and so on, they're common references to the brain having more neurons or as many neurons as stars in the galaxy. And there are also a lot of people who use that or who frame that fact in the context of despair, the idea that, okay, well, we're never going to figure out how it works. I found a quote, actually, from something called the Institute for Creation Science that says the more complicated a system is, the stronger it argues for having been intelligently designed. And that also alludes to this idea that, okay, well, something like this, this is not just an ordinary part of the body or part of nature. This is something that came from elsewhere. That quote was about the brain, by the. And so I think that the significance of arguing about the brain's complexity is to distance it, again, from the body, from nature. And why is that a problem scientifically? Well, it's because chances are frankly low that the complexity of the brain, at least in these kind of galactic terms, is required to explain its basic functions. Now, human brains are pretty big, and they've got more cells than at least many other brains in the natural world, but not more cells than all of them. So, for instance, whales and elephants have bigger brains than ours in size and likely number of cells, and they are not generally thought to be more intelligent. Moreover, humans themselves can actually lose a lot of brain cells, a lot of their complexity, as it were, and still be cognitively almost as good. So one of the most remarkable examples of that that I've encountered, and some of your listeners might have heard of this also, is this rare congenital def. Sometimes have. And there was just a case that was written up a couple of years ago where someone actually was missing a part of the brain that has 80% of their neurons. And this is a woman in China who basically had lived a pretty normal life. I mean, she was married and had a kid and was apparently feeling nauseous and dizzy and checked herself into a hospital and got scanned. And it turned out that she was missing this part of the brain called the cerebellum, which is involved in motor coordination and making you good at moving, but she'd grown up without it. And the cerebellum has 80% of the neurons in the brain. It's a much smaller volume, you know, fraction of the volume of the brain, but it's still a lot of cells. And yet she basically had normal cognition and Another case that's sort of roughly along, along those lines is a case of these kids. Some kids are born with really pernicious forms of epilepsy that can't be localized well. And one of the treatments is to actually remove half of the cerebral cortex. So the cerebral cortex is that kind of convoluted stuff that's frankly most of the brain, most of what you think of as your brain in a person, and half of it got removed in these kids. And yet they grew up with basically pretty normal personalities, senses of humor, all this kind of stuff, paralyzed on the opposite side because of the hardwired nature of motor control from part of the brain, but nevertheless cognitively, again, pretty. And what these examples show is that, well, the brain is complex, but all of that complexity is not necessarily required to explain its function. And so dwelling on that, although it sounds nifty, may actually be counterproductive in the sense that it kind of creates this mysticism about the brain. Whereas we ought to be able to kind of look at it as a down to earth organ.
- [26:07]
A
Right. I want to take a few moments to thank everyone who supports Brain Science financially via premium subscription Patreon or direct donations. Your support is essential because although this show started as a hobby, since my husband died in 2015, the income from Brain Science has become an important part of my budget. Without your support, I will not be able to devote the necessary time and energy to continuing to create new content. If you'd like to learn more about how you can help, please go to brainsciencepodcast.com donations so, for the sake of time, I'm going to skip forward a little and say that to summarize where we've been so far. We've talked, you know, good overview, but we've really talked a lot about how the brain really is a biological organ in the body and that the brain is embodied, that it's deeply embedded in our bodies. I've talked about embodied cognition quite a bit on the show, so that's one reason why I'm going to sort of give it the short service today.
- [27:24]
B
Short end of the stick. Yeah.
- [27:26]
A
Just because we're getting a little bit behind on time.
- [27:29]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
- [27:30]
A
But what about the role of the environment? Because I think that's really important when we get to the implications of this whole cerebral mystique.
- [27:39]
B
Yeah, right. So the brain is obviously integrally entwined with the physiology of our bodies and it's also integrally entwined with sort of the physics of the world around us. And we're Used to sort of thinking of ourselves as perceiving the world around us, evaluating the stuff we perceive, and then acting on the basis of that. But the reality is often. Well, I won't say the reverse, but it often puts us in the passenger seat as opposed to the driver's seat, in the sense that the environment kind of penetrates into us. We don't get to decide that. And environmental stimuli actually influence what's going in our brains, whether we like it or not. And so I did actually a little bit of a little tally of all the input that comes in through our senses into the brain from the, let's say, the five canonical senses. And it's on the order of. I think it was 10 megabytes per second. It's something like that. It is a huge amount of data. I mean, you know, of course, computers are getting better and better all the time, but if you think about that amount of data flooding a normal household PC, well, it could actually disable it. It's actually one of the main tools that hackers use to disable computers is by flooding them with too much data. And here, okay, I'm slipping into the brain as computer analogy, but I'm ready to accept some of that. The data that comes into our brain, well, it's actually not just data. It's stimuli. They're telling us what to do. And in fact, if you, let's say, do brain imag. While a person watches a movie or gets a stimulus. But you'll find that there are parts of the brain that deep parts of the brain are modulated by all this information that's coming in, all this sensory stimulus that is coming in. So one study was actually kind of interesting. It looked at a bunch of different people watching the same movie, and then it correlated their brain activity from person to person. Same movie, different people. And what it found was that the brain activity patterns across the people were highly correlated just from seeing the same movie. And the correlations weren't just stuck in the visual cortex, you know, in the. The part that gets the visual information or the auditory cortex or whatever. The correlations extended all the way up to the prefrontal cortex, kind of the most advanced, cognitively important parts of the brain. And this is essentially coming from passively sitting there watching this movie. Different people, same stimulus. And it, I think, really illustrates the extent to which stuff coming in from the outside governs what's going on on the inside. And we can't really shut that off. I mean, the proof of the pudding, in a sense, comes when you start looking at how people behave when they get different stimuli. And the, I think, remarkable findings are that even very subtle stimuli from the environment change how people behave. They change, for instance, their emotions, their reactions to what's going on around them in ways that I think need to be considered as part of. A. Part of who we are. And here an example that I found came from a large meta analysis of the effect of climate on aggression. And so this was a paper that took a bunch of different studies of how climate variables, in particular temperature, correlated with how people were behaving on different timescales. And one of the things that these people found, as a group of researchers at Princeton, is that changes in temperature, when it got a pretty ordinary range, let's say, 70 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit, could actually make people more or less aggressive. And this is a subconscious thing. The temperature was changing up and down. The most remarkable study that they cited was an individual experiment where these police officers in training were shooting their guns. And it turned out that when the temperature went up a little bit, they shot their guns more often. They became kind of more aggressive. And this could fluctuate on a timescale of minutes as the experimenters regulated the temperature.
- [31:29]
A
Yeah, that was kind of surprising and disturbing.
- [31:31]
B
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, a certain amount of this, I think, sort of becomes not as surprising when you start introspecting about it. What is the difference between how you feel on a hot day versus a cold day? I mean, I certainly do feel different. I don't think of myself as more aggressive on hot day, that's for sure. And I need the scientists to do the study to point out that that is true, at least on average. On the other hand, I mean, I think we recognize that these stimuli do influence us, but I think when we think about, for instance, causes of crime, even causes of cultural differences in different parts of the world, I mean, well, people are living, and they're behaving against pretty different backdrops in different contexts, and those backdrops actually help influence them. So one of the case studies that I point to is the case of this, the famous Texas tower shooter, Charles Whitman, who's been actually the subject of great discussion in neuroscience circles, because this guy committed one of the worst mass shootings, or one of the first and also worst mass shootings in American history. In 1966, he climbed up to the top of a tower at the University of Texas in Austin, and he shot 14 people to death. And after he died, he was killed as part of the incident. His Brain was autopsied, and a tumor was found near his amygdala, which is part of the brain that's linked to stress and various other kind of emotion related functions. And that was compounded by the fact that apparently he'd left notes saying that he felt weird in the days running up to the event. And so a lot of people have sort of taken this as an excuse or motivation to redefine criminality as something that comes from the brain. But I think that. I think there's, of course, some truth to that. So in the sense that if you had a different brain, you could be a more aggressive person, or you could be a less inhibited person. You might do things that you wouldn't do otherwise. But it's important to take the broader view. And actually, I transitioned from temperature to Whitman in part because it happened that the day that he committed this crime was particularly hot. I don't remember the temperature, but it was really hot that day in Austin. He had a lot more going on in his environment that probably contributed to his crime in some way as well. And there's actually a picture that's sort of haunting of him with his wife and his mother all smiling, with him in a military uniform, because he had been in the army, and it was actually the day of his court martial, so he was actually kicked out. And he was there with his female relatives, in part because his father was a difficult character and who apparently beat the mother. And, you know, so this sort of difficult kind of social environment around him. And of course, also he was a big, militarily trained person with access to firearms. I mean, he had other environmentally predisposing factors. And so what I argue is not that we shouldn't think about the brain in analyzing what's making someone do something, but that their environment is super important. And it's not right to, let's say, to migrate from blaming somebody's bad character or bad soul to blaming their brain. We've got to cast a broader net. And I think that's what that story tells us.
- [34:32]
A
Right. And that's a good lead in to the second half of your book, which is really about the consequences of the cerebral mystique.
- [34:42]
B
Exactly. Yeah. So when we divide the brain from the body, when we have this kind of dualistic view of how the brain is separated from the body and from the environment around it, it makes it easier to kind of encapsulate what makes people do what they do in the brain. To kind of think of people as their brains and think of them Doing what they do because of the brains. I just gave, obviously, the example of Whitman. And one of the things I talk about in the book, and it's, I guess, a slightly geeky kind of historical subject, but it's still interesting, is the idea that actually, while there, if you look at psychology, the history of psychology in the United States, there have actually been two schools about what makes people do what they do. And one school, one group of academics has argued that, well, what makes you do what you do comes from inside. And before the early 20th century, that view, of course, was dominant. And people viewed the source of action as the mind, the soul, though something that's intrinsic to a person. It may not be physical. And of course, people didn't yet know that much about the brain back then, but they viewed people as guided by kind of internal lights, as it were. And kind of a remarkable thing happened in the early 20th century, around the time of World War I, where people led by this person, John Watson, and then later somebody named B.F. skinner, introduced this alternative view called behaviorism. And probably a lot of listeners know a little bit about behaviorism. It's the view that, well, what makes you do what you do comes from the environment. That actually the environment conditions people. That people are essentially blank slates that are written on by the environment. And there's this famous quote from John Watson, the founder of behaviorism, who said that he could take any infant at birth and condition them to become a doctor, a lawyer, an artist, or even a beggar or a thief. And he believed that, at least tongue in cheek, because he thought that the most important factors in making people what they do and making behavior happen come from outside. And in the later part of the 20th century, there was kind of a reaction against that, the view that, okay, well, behaviorism went too far. Behaviorism doesn't explain thought. Thought doesn't come from the outside. Thought is something we each experience personally inside. And that movement to kind of strike back at behaviorism was called the cognitive revolution. And with that came this intense focus on the inner workings of the mind and brain. And I think that's essentially what's brought us to where we are now. And of course, a lot of that is absolutely right. You know, that we do have brains that do complicated things, and they do computations, and they do perform mental functions, but they don't do them alone. And that's where I think we may have sort of come in a sense, too far from the behavioristic view that actually we need to kind of bring these two sides together. That there's the inside and the outside, and they're working together to make us do what we do. And again, that case of Charles Whitman, it's a case in point because, you know, we shouldn't be looking at a case like that and saying, okay, well, that tumor made him commit crime. Actually, the tumor and the environment together may have contributed. You know, we don't really know. But there's no reason to discount all of the environmental input that he was getting.
- [38:04]
A
Right. What about. I know you, you have a whimsical chapter that sort of is your take on this. But I think that the whole idea of the brain in the vat, the famous thought experiment. How would you look at that experiment based on what we have talked about today?
- [38:22]
B
So you're alluding to this famous philosophical problem which asks the question, how do we know that we're not all brains and vats? And the problem I think of is most closely associated with Hilary Putnam, a philosopher who. 20th century philosopher, died a few years ago. And it's actually, I kind of hijack that scenario because the reason why the philosophers got interested in it was actually to ask questions about, well, what's real? What's the meaning of what we say when we experience something, do we know it's connected to the real world? And so on. And actually, that's not how I use this problem, because I'm interested in part in something that, in a sense it's even more futuristic because I'm surrounded by people here at MIT who want to take their brains out of their heads and freeze them or preserve them or upload them, one of those things, so that they can live again or live forever in some way or another. And behind that view is the notion that, well, okay, everything important about you is in there, that you are your brain. That's how we started this conversation. And the brain in the vat, well, one of the ways you could be brought back to. Brought back to life if your brain was taken out and preserved, would be in a vat. So I do talk a little bit about, well, what I think would be missing if that were done. Now, the idea I think would be, okay, well, you take the brain, you put it in the vat, you don't just do nothing to it, because that would be too boring. It would need to get input of some sort. And what I point out, or at least imagine, is what it would be like just to get very basic input about sensory experiences and so on without a full simulation of the body. And part of what I think would be missing is a lot of our experiences of emotions. So one of the really key ways in which our bodies and brains are connected is during the experience of emotions, both through chemical exchange. That's part of how we have emotional experiences. And also because when we have emotions or when we have emotional reactions, things change in our body and we're, you know, we generally perceive those things. So if you were just a brain in a vat, and your. Whoever was programming your vat didn't do a pretty good job programming all that stuff in, well, your experiences would be quite different. If you think about what makes our lives rich. Well, a lot of that is kind of the emotional color on our experiences. You know, we're not just watching a movie that we don't care about about. We're living a life that has all kinds of stimulating experiences that are actually deeply emotionally meaningful to us. And in fact, the things that we remember, the things that make the most impression on us, that change us, are often the things that have the emotional valence. In fact, they're almost always. And that would be missing at an even broader level. And of course, this is sort of general enough that it leaves neuroscience in some sense, is the question about, well, why would we be there? What's the point of being a brain in a vat? And the point may be no point. The goals that we have for ourselves in the real world often relate to things we got to do with our bodies, you know, like eating and reproducing and that kind of stuff. And when you're a brain in a vat, you don't have to do that stuff. And you could ask, well, what would be the point? Playing video games forever may not be enough to keep us going to eternity.
- [41:30]
A
Yeah, I personally have no interest in having my brain frozen for any purposes, but we've certainly only scratched the surface of your very interesting book. Is there anything else that you really want to share Today we close?
- [41:44]
B
Well, I think one thing that we didn't talk about, which I think is actually one of the most practically significant points or implications of the cerebral mystique and how we react to it, is the implications for mental illness. And there's a view that's actually out there increasingly. I would say that mental illness is due to brain disorder, that mental illness is brain disorder. And like many other things that are ascribed to the brain, there's, of course, a lot of truth in that. I mean, there are many. For instance, genes that are associated with mental illness that are expressed particularly in the brain. There are genetic determinants that are associated with many brain diseases. So we know that biology is important, and some of it is brain biology. But I think that to the extent that we attribute our behavior to the brain, we are lured too much into this view that the brain causes mental illness, that dysfunctions of the brain cause dysfunctions in behavior. And I think that that's problematic for a few reasons. The first is practical, that sometimes it's actually more stigmatizing to view someone as having kind of a broken brain than having a mental illness that's due to, let's say, a moral fault or, you know, kind of the old fashioned ways of viewing mental illness. And in fact, studies have shown that actually people, at least in a number of surveys, don't seem to be more accepting of mental illness when it's attributed to, to brain disorders. And so from a practical standpoint, it doesn't clearly help. In fact, some people also point out that, well, the Nazis actually, before the Holocaust, killed people with mental illness and learning disabilities. It was something called Action T4 Oxyon T4, that kind of was a trial run for the Holocaust. And that's exactly because they reduced these problems to biological disorders, brain disorders that were incurable and that they wanted to take out of the biological reservoirs. So the second reason not to reduce mental illness to brain disorders is because there are actually multiple other contributors. And I talk about that a bit in the book. But I mean, one of the things that I think really stands out is the fact that actually there are very few mental illnesses that are even close to 100% explained by well established genetic factors. So even schizophrenia that has 80% heritability is only about, let's put it this way, you can't predict who is going to be a schizophrenic based on genes alone. And there are very interesting correlations between who experiences these disorders and even very broad environmental aspects. So for instance, one of the things that I think is really amazing is that supposedly incidences of schizophrenia correlate with being born in winter, being born in a city, with being an immigrant or an ethnic minority. And nobody really knows exactly why these correlations exist, but it shows that even for something that's really quite closely linked to behavior, you know, abnormal behavior factors in the broader environment are contributing in some very general ways to what's experienced. And so I think the lesson here is if we want to solve the problems of mental illness, we also have to look beyond the brain as well as in the brain, for our solutions.
- [44:58]
A
Right, and you talk about that also with regards to addiction. And. And I mean, to me, as a physician, one of the things that strikes me is that it's now very difficult to get funding for treatment approaches that don't fall into this cerebral mystique. I mean, with mental illness, all the money's in the drugs for addiction. It's all in the brain disease model. And behavioral approaches that work can't get funded just because they don't fit that model. To me, it's a very sobering example. So I usually ask my guests for advice for students, and I do mean students interested in neuroscience. But in your case, it can be any of the areas that you're an expert on. Just advice for students.
- [45:50]
B
Yeah. So the advice to students comes in different forms, depending on what stage they're at. But to graduate students, probably the top piece of advice that I would give is to kind of urge them to look or think outside the box. And the book attempts to do that a little bit by sort of, let's say, looking outside the brain for things that interact with the brain and help make us who we are. But when you're a student and you're trying to make an impact, well, often the concerns you have are a little bit more personal and super important, and they include having an impact that's unique to you. And I think looking outside the box is pretty important to that. And it's also going to help you see more of the picture. You could see aspects of a problem that other people haven't seen or aspects of the explanation that other people haven't seen.
- [46:35]
A
And since your book is also aimed at non scientists, I think. Do you have any advice for laypeople who are fascinated by neuroscience? How do they escape the cerebral mystique?
- [46:50]
B
That is, of course, the mission of the book. So read my book. But there are other books that are very good too, that you should also read. So I don't want to plug it at the expense of other things. But I think one of the things that my book tries to do, very generally speaking, is to bring the brain down to earth. That by all means, we should be fascinated with the brain, what it does, how it works. And that's what I spend my life doing, you know, so I'm a complete slave to the cerebral mystique myself. But I think it's important that we not mystify it, that we realize that it is an organ like the other organs in our body, that it's not accounting for everything we read about. You know, when we read a book about the brain and criminal behavior, or how the brain functions in teenagers, or how the brain makes people intelligent. We need to remember that there are all these other things that go into each of these kind of social contexts, whether it's criminality or creativity. There are so many factors that come together and the brain is a nexus of that convergence. But it is a nexus, it's not not itself the thing. And I think that that is a really socially important message, actually. I do really hope that people keep that in mind that it's our world is actually stitched together, that. That our brains may be kind of nodes in the world, but they're part of a fabric.
- [48:06]
A
Yeah. The way I kind of like to think of it is using an automobile analogy. The brain is the engine, but it's not the whole car.
- [48:16]
B
Yeah, I think that's great. And I think. I mean, I'm tempted to think of the car as the body in that analogy. And to that I would add that, well, the roads, the traffic lights, the community that sets traffic laws, all that stuff is part of it too.
- [48:30]
A
Exactly. Well, I have really enjoyed talking with you.
- [48:34]
B
Thank you so much, Ginger.
- [48:39]
A
It was a pleasure to interview Dr. Alex Jasanoff about his new book, the Biological Mind, because I share his concerns about the consequences of what he calls the cerebral mystique. The cerebral mystique has several key features, including the tendency to view the brain as if it was abiotic rather than as an organ. Part of this is due to the over emphasis on its electrical properties as opposed to its overwhelmingly chemical nature. There's also the feature of complexification, which is a tendency to see the brain as so complex as to make it mysterious. There's also a tendency to see the brain in isolation as if it could pilot the body on its own, which leads to an idea of autonomy which forgets that the brain is both embodied and dependent on its environment, and leads to the idea that the brain in a vat could actually happen. We did consider some of the consequences of the cerebral mystique on page three of his book. He says it obscures the consequences of the most fundamental discovery of neuroscience, that our minds are biologically based. Another consequence is that we forget our interdependence in terms of our brain's dependence on the body and the environment and the fact that it is the interaction of the brain, body and the environment that makes us who we are. The cerebral mystique recapitulates the old mind body dualism, creating a sort of scientific dualism that makes the brain a stand in for the soul. Why does this matter? Well, well, it affects our approach to many of our most critical problems, including addiction and mental health. We see them as only brain problems, and this gives us a narrow, very narrow view to the solutions and gives us an excuse to ignore the importance of things like environmental factors that we might therefore have to take responsibility for. In discussing a little bit of the history of how this happened in psychology, how they went from an internally motivated approach to the behavioralism and then the rejection of behaviorism, it's to me almost like a version of the nature versus nurture question, with nature taking the place of just focusing on the brain and then nurture, of course, taking the environment into consideration. As happens in almost every nature versus nurture question, the answer is both. The brain cannot operate separate from the body or separate from the environment. So how do you avoid falling prey to this cerebral mystique? Well, the simple principle is to remember that the brain is a biological organ and that the mind is the result of the interdependence of the brain, body and environment. You are not only your brain, just as you are not only your body. You are the result of the interaction of your brain, body and its environment. And so am I. The Biological Mind How Brain, Body, and Environment Collaborate to Make Us who We Are is a book that I highly recommend to everyone because it makes an important contribution to our ongoing discussion of why neuroscience matters. Before I talk about next year's trip to Australia, I want to thank those of you who submitted nominations in my behalf for the Academy of Podcasting hall of Fame. Naturally, I was disappointed that I was not chosen this year, But I consider Dr. Gay's choice to be a good sign. They only pick eight people each year, so it would be unlikely for two science podcasters to be chosen in the same year. Maybe next year will be my turn. Meanwhile, I have finalized the details for next year's trip to Australia. It will be from May 20th through 30th, not counting travel days to and from Australia. There is room for 16 people on a first come first serve basis, but I also plan to have meetups in both Melbourne and Sydney which will be open to everyone. I sent out more details in a recent newsletter, but if you are interested in being part of this adventure, just email me@brainsciencepodcastmail.com and I will send you the details. Before I close, I want to remind everyone that I plan to resume my monthly Facebook live sessions on July 5, 2018 at 8pm we will be discussing episode 142, which was about peripersonal neurons. That was the discussion that was aborted in April. In August we'll do episode 143. In September we'll do episode 144. In October we'll do episode 145. And today's episode 146 will be discussed in November. This means that if you're listening to this episode before November 1, 2016, you still have time to submit questions or comments for inclusion in the Facebook Live. Of course, you can also submit live comments and questions. But remember, if you are a premium subscriber or a Patreon supporter, you will be able to download the audio from this session so you'll be able to enjoy it as if it was a bonus episode. If you'd like to learn more about how to support Brain Science, just go to brainsciencepodcast.com donations. Thanks so much for listening. I look forward to talking with you again very soon. Brain Science with Dr. Jones Ginger Campbell is copyright 2018 to Virginia Campbell, MD. You can copy this show to share it with others, but for any other uses or derivatives, please contact me@brainsciencepodcastmail.com.