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Brain Culture Part 3
00:28:32
In a change to our usual format, we are podcasting Matthew Taylor's "Brain Culture"...
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- [00:00]
Matthew Taylor
Thanks for downloading the More Or Less podcast from the BBC. The program's off air at the moment, but Brain Culture continues here. In the third and final episode of his series examining neuroscience and Society, the former number 10 strategy head Matthew Taylor looks at politics and mind control, asking if new knowledge about the human brain will allow us to make better choices or leave us open to ever more manipulation.
- [00:31]
Narrator / Interviewer
Welcome to Brain Culture, where we ask how new insights into how our brains work may change the world around us and even the way we think about ourselves. Now, this is not futurology. If you've ever eaten in a fast food restaurant, your choices may well have been influenced by neuroscience. Across the world, corporations and governments are applying brain science to help sell products and make us more compliant citizens. Should we be enthusiastic or maybe frightened? In the 19th century, phrenologists said they could judge character by feeling the bumps on people's skulls. Will future generations look back on our attempts to apply neuroscience and say it too was just a fad, or that it was the dawn of a new era, the era of brain culture.
- [01:21]
Professor Reid Montague
I think the knowledge of how our brain generates our mind and our behavior is itself a fundamentally liberating body of knowledge. To look past someone else's skull directly and just eavesdrop on their amygdala or their prefrontal cortex and kind of see
- [01:37]
Ray Tallis
deeper into them, I think it would lead to a picture of human beings as essentially the playthings of their evolved brains, not as complex conscious agents. And that can lead to extreme pessimism about the hope of changing things for the better.
- [01:55]
Duncan Smith
So what we're going to do is we're going to put this cap on your head. What this cap does, it looks a bit like a shower cap. Got small little recesses, and in each of these recesses are tiny little electrodes.
- [02:05]
Narrator / Interviewer
To understand how neuroscience is being used to sell anything from burgers to politicians, I've been strapped up to an electroencephalogram, or eeg. It's a quite rudimentary brain scanner. I'm at the Brighton headquarters of Mind Lab, a neuromarketing agency with its director, Duncan Smith. Duncan plays me clips of South American political adverts, though he won't let us name or play the add on air of their politician. They they use brain techniques like the one they're doing on me to design a winning election campaign for this major politician. One machine is measuring where my eyes are focusing while the EEG is tracking my brain activity.
- [02:52]
Duncan Smith
We're going to be able to pick up the electrical activity that Your cortex gives off.
- [02:56]
Narrator / Interviewer
Fascinating. But how on earth is seeing electrical charges in my brain telling you anything of any value?
- [03:03]
Duncan Smith
Because a lot of our decision making, in fact the majority of our decision making, goes on beyond consciousness, conscious awareness.
- [03:11]
Narrator / Interviewer
Unlike traditional market research, Mind Lab don't ask me what I think. Instead, they try and read the automatic reactions of my unconscious brain as a more useful guide to my future decisions than my conscious thoughts. It's an infant area of neuroscience, but neuromarketing is premised on the idea that we are unaware of the basis of even important decisions that we make. You see, our brain makes them automatically.
- [03:37]
Duncan Smith
There is a thought that at least 95% of our brain's activity is subconscious activity beyond our conscious awareness.
- [03:46]
Narrator / Interviewer
So you were putting people in the kind of shower cap thing that I'm wearing as I speak to you now, Duncan, you were putting people in these shower caps, you were showing them different political broadcasts, you were mapping their response, and then you were feeding that information directly to the politician and his campaign.
- [04:00]
Duncan Smith
Exactly. We were doing that every week for seven or eight weeks.
- [04:03]
Narrator / Interviewer
As a former insider, I know only too well that political parties spend a load of money on communication and they never really know whether it works. But by delving into the unconscious reactions of voters, mindlab were able to develop a strategy to boost a politician's emotional appeal. At the subsequent election, this politician's majority went up by a whopping 20%. Now, it's not certain that neuromarketing was the only secret of his success, but. But I can't help wondering how those voters would have felt at knowing the campaign was appealing not to their reasoned thoughts, but their automatic reactions. Perhaps it's not that surprising that mindlab didn't want us to identify the politician. We keep talking rather coyly about the candidate, and that's because this politician, even though he's on the other side of the world, doesn't want anyone to know that he used this technology. Why is it you think he's shy about people knowing that he used neuromarketing?
- [04:57]
Duncan Smith
Well, I think to start with, he was the first candidate that we're aware of in all of South America that had ever used neuromarketing. And people don't understand neuromarketing. And like you mentioned earlier about subliminal advertising, if people think they're being told what to think, they're going to change their minds. People don't like being told what to think and like to be able to at least believe that they're being given the choice.
- [05:21]
Narrator / Interviewer
Ah, choice. We're promised it everywhere from the supermarket aisle to the GP surgery. The assumption is that we weigh things up careful, make a rational decision. But the more we know about the way the brain works, the more doubt is cast on this model. Neuromarketing offers another way of thinking about our choices. Imagine someone riding an elephant through a town. The rider is our conscious brain, the elephant our automatic brain, and the town the social context in which we operate. The traditional model of choice is that the decisions are made by the rider. But neuromarketers know how powerful our automatic brain is. They are whispering in the ear of the elephant.
- [06:01]
Professor Reid Montague
While society is built around the conscious you, it's influenced under the covers by the unconscious you in many, many ways. And we just don't understand that very well.
- [06:11]
Narrator / Interviewer
It's a profound idea, but how sound is the research? Professor Reid Montague is a high profile brain scientist at University College London. And his study of the world's favorite fizzy drinks provided tentative evidence that our choices aren't always what we think they are. By scanning the brains of his subjects, he was able to show that people who actually preferred the taste of Pepsi still chose to buy Coke and vice versa. In other words, it was the marketing of colas, not the taste, which operated on their automatic brains, and it's that that drove people's preferences.
- [06:45]
Professor Reid Montague
So the first insight, I think, is that what you taste has never just been a function of the chemicals in the fluid, it's always been a compilation of a whole bunch of other information. And a large part of what generates preferences in your nervous system are unconscious processes, processes that aren't available to your awareness.
- [07:06]
Narrator / Interviewer
So presumably this can help you guide all sorts of people trying to sell us things.
- [07:11]
Professor Reid Montague
I know this claim. This is by understanding the physical nature of how our preferences are generated. I'm going to enable the dark side of marketing to come in and make me buy a bunch of really bad stuff. I see it the other way around. It depends what you do with it. It's like any powerful weapon. I think it'll force a question on us as a society to decide whether or not do we allow this kind of stuff. Is this how we want our political leaders to be elected? And what are we going to allow and disallow?
- [07:37]
Professor Gemma Calvert
We've always been selling to the brain. What's changed? The only difference is that instead of asking you, I'm asking your brain.
- [07:43]
Narrator / Interviewer
Professor Gemma Calvert, the managing director of Neurosense, is a pioneer of neuromarketing. And Gemma knows how to make you eat more fast food.
- [07:54]
Professor Gemma Calvert
We did some work with a large global food chain who were very interested in being able to place some non food smells into the restaurant to cover the smell of fat and to probably encourage healthier food choices. Smells are something which we find very difficult to verbalize about, to put labels on, but yet with brain imaging, we can actually detect certain implicit biases and we're able to find out what was the best fit between a particular fragrance and this brand.
- [08:27]
Narrator / Interviewer
That's terrifying, isn't it? I mean, the idea that you're using brain science to overcome my perfectly rational and commendable concerns about fast food.
- [08:37]
Professor Gemma Calvert
Well, that's possibly true, but then your same criticism could be made to anybody who's been selling their house and has baked some bread in order to, you know, facilitate the sale.
- [08:48]
Narrator / Interviewer
As we'll hear, government advisors are now trying to catch up with the marketers. They've got their own experiments in fast food restaurants, but they've a long way to go. Because it's not just in influencing our choices of food and drink that the neuromarketers have been appealing to our automatic brain. Get your number. You're listening to one of the most successful advertising campaigns of recent times. Watching two mustachioed men dressed like 70s athletes running around somehow managed to ensure that the 118118 telephone inquiry service came to dominate the market. And behind what seemed like inspired wackiness, there lay some hard science. The man behind the campaign, advertising guru Robin White, says neuroscience has reminded trendy creative people, the kind of people who work for him, are some very old, basic techniques.
- [09:49]
Robin White
First of all, faces, your brain is wired up to recognise faces, not names. You can look at about 20,000 faces in a row before you make a mistake and think, have I seen that face before? So when our ad was actually put through a brain scanner, the facial recognition system in the brain almost went, you know, blue seeing our two faces with the moustaches on them. So it was a deeply branded. So you got the branding. But does it make people like you? It doesn't make people like you, it's just recall. So the next thing we needed to do was. It's well known that music is the fastest way to get to the amygdala. The amygdala is the part of the brain in between our ears. It runs our emotions. And music is like an express train straight to the amygdala.
- [10:35]
Ray Tallis
The trouble is those kinds of observations are made in highly artificial situations. I mean, even when I make a snap decision, it has a non snap hinterland. As you know, I don't find myself going into a shopping mall in order to buy a can of beans and come out with a four poster bed.
- [10:49]
Narrator / Interviewer
Given the growing influence of the neuromarketers, it seems the question is not whether brain science will change the world, but how. Yet, standing out against the enthusiasm of people like Gemma Calvert and Robin White, there are dissenting voices, and none louder or more cogent than former clinician Ray Tallis. He's coined a new word for what he sees as a combination of hype, bad science and dangerous philosophy. Neuromania.
- [11:19]
Ray Tallis
Over the top is the word neuroscience itself. Fine. And what we're learning about the workings of the brain, about brain damage and how the brain recovers, but the implication that this tells us a lot about persons and about society and about how we alter our affairs in society, that's where I draw the line.
- [11:37]
Narrator / Interviewer
Ray Tallis isn't alone in his skepticism. Writing about a tendency among some brain scientists to jump to conclusions about behaviour based on a few brain scans. A recent high profile paper in Nature magazine coined the phrase voodoo correlations. The truth is that neuroscience is still in its infancy. Some of the most revolutionary ideas, like the power of the automatic brain, are still controversial. Take as an example the science of mirror neurons, an idea related to the automatic brain. Here's Chris Frith, doyen of British neuroscience.
- [12:11]
Chris Frith
Mirror neurons were originally discovered in monkeys. They respond when the monkey performs a particular action, like picking up a peanut. And then what they discovered. A certain percentage of these neurons also respond when the monkey sees the experimenter making the same movement. There will be a neuron which responds when the monkey picks up a peanut and also responds when the experimenter picks up a peanut in front of the monkey, but wouldn't respond to other kinds of movements.
- [12:40]
Narrator / Interviewer
You can see why the world gets excited or sometimes over excited about ideas like this, because if mirror neurons do exist in human brains, it proves that our brains automatically imitate others and that could fundamentally challenge our view of human society.
- [12:55]
Chris Frith
My take on this, which is purely mine, is that one of the things that mirror neurons do is they make us more pro social. That is to say, if someone imitates you covertly, you think they're a nice person. And therefore it seems to me, it puts you in a state of mind where you're not going to be looking for deception.
- [13:18]
Narrator / Interviewer
In a sense, our brains are not separate one from the other. They are. They're almost like a network working together.
- [13:25]
Chris Frith
The brain sort of creates for us, if you like, a delusion that we're independent entities. To me at least, what the imaging has shown is how much more embedded we are in the social world than we realize.
- [13:39]
Narrator / Interviewer
Exciting new ideas like this seem to keep emerging from neuroscience, while many haven't yet been fully proven already. Professor Reid Montague, who studied Coke and Pepsi, thinks it's not just companies who can take advantage of them. Social goals like reducing obesity can be pursued by developing techniques that engage not just our conscious, but our automatic brain. The idea that understanding our cognitive process gives us new tools to meet our own and society's goals, well, that's what lies behind one of the most influential ideas in modern policymaking, the idea of nudge.
- [14:15]
Professor Reid Montague
Nudge? Your nervous system doesn't require giant ameliorating conditions to make it change its behavior. You can have small changes.
- [14:23]
Narrator / Interviewer
Small changes to the environment we live in can nudge us towards making better choices. Take eating more healthily, for example. Campaigns based on persuading our conscious brains have at best a mixed record. But Montague told me about a famous nudge team in the US who found a much cleverer way to get people to eat less by redesigning a cafeteria.
- [14:45]
Professor Reid Montague
They changed several things. What foods are shown first versus what foods are shown last. And they changed in a small way, the size of the plates used and showed that they could reduce the caloric intake by something like 30%. That is unbelievably cheap change to affect a gigantic behavioral change in that cafeteria. So what if you did that all through an entire city?
- [15:06]
Narrator / Interviewer
I was working for Tony Blair when the first ever government paper on what was called behaviour change was commissioned. Whereas in the past policymakers relied exclusively on taxes, laws or exhortation, this new approach drew heavily on brain and behaviour science to try to develop a new policy toolkit. Since that first paper, there's been a constant stream of experts offering government new insights into how we make decisions and how we can be influenced. Indeed, behaviour change was about the only strand of Number 10's work that David Cameron decided to keep on with when he was elected. And now those ideas have been turned into practice, as you might find out the next time you book into the gps. Can I help you?
- [15:50]
Marie (Patient)
Yes, I'd like to book an appointment, please. Which doctor? Dr. Long, please. My name is Marie. I've come here with my son Max because I found some lumps on his arm. Just need to get them checked. And because he's only two months old. I'm here most weeks, to be honest.
- [16:08]
Narrator / Interviewer
Regularly Marie is visiting the Toddington Medical Center, a quiet village surgery in Bedfordshire. But what Marie doesn't know is that the procedure she's about to go through was designed by one of the world's leading behavioral scientists, Robert Cialdini, author of the best selling book influence. The number 10 behaviour change unit is receptive to Cialdini's new intervention on an old but very expensive problem. In fact, 700 million pounds a year of expense across the UK. The question is how to reduce the number of NO shows for appointments in GP surgeries and hospitals.
- [16:45]
Robert Cialdini
Two sets of principles of influence were in play in that doctor's waiting room in Bedfordshire. One has to do with a tendency in people to want to be consistent with what they have already said or done, especially in public, by saying aloud the date and time of their appointment.
- [17:08]
Marie (Patient)
Could I make that earlier in the day, please?
- [17:12]
Narrator / Interviewer
Half past three?
- [17:13]
Marie (Patient)
Yeah, that will be fine. Okay. And can you confirm your appointment time?
- [17:18]
Robert Cialdini
Simply saying it allowed made a public active commitment to that. And that reduced NO shows. That reduced failures to attend by about 7%. Simply doing that. Another thing that happened, we had the patient write down the date and the time rather than the receptionist.
- [17:42]
Narrator / Interviewer
Would you like to write it down?
- [17:43]
Marie (Patient)
Oh, where do I write it on? This is new. So that's 3:30 on Monday the 26th.
- [17:59]
Robert Cialdini
That reduced no shows by 18%. In a final implementation of these principles, there's research to show that if people find themselves out of keeping with the group on brain scans, the area of the brain that lights up is the area associated with pain. So this is why people want to be in keeping. This is why people want to be aligned, because it hurts to be out of keeping with one's peers.
- [18:34]
Narrator / Interviewer
Based in part on ideas drawn from neuroscience, Professor Cialdini asked the surgery to display a sign. It was telling the truth. And it said 98.5% of people turn up on time for their appointment. Like the other nudging techniques, the idea that everybody else turned up on time made more people do so themselves. Altogether, NO shows were down by almost a third during the trial period. And they went back up when the period stopped. With the NHS in England being told to make £20 billion in efficiency savings. Who on earth could argue with a way of saving millions of pounds without anyone losing a service? But how did Marie feel about being
- [19:16]
Marie (Patient)
nudged reading that statistic? 98.5% of people do show up for their appointments. I suppose it makes you feel pressure to not be among the. What is the rest of the statistics? 1.5. That don't show you want to be in the higher percentage don't you something like that I have absolutely no problem with. If it works, it's fine. It's not invasive, it's not looking into any privacy. It's just commonsensical, really. I think everybody would know. If they write something down themselves, they're more likely to remember than if someone wrote it down for them. So it's fine.
- [19:52]
Narrator / Interviewer
The ranks of the nudge sceptics, and that now includes a recent House of Lords committee, veer between saying the techniques don't work and worrying that they're an infringement of our liberties.
- [20:01]
Robert Cialdini
I think people do have a right to feel uncomfortable. If it's the case that the study of the mind, the study of fundamental human behavior, is being used to move them in particular directions, even if they're directions that are in their best interest, provided that that information is not accurate, then they have a right to be concerned. But if the information is true, if it's merely something that they are being pointed to that they didn't recognize before, it's a form of education, it's not a form of coercion.
- [20:40]
Ray Tallis
This is, as it were, neuropaternalism. It's the dream of developing policies that go with the grain of the people. The people don't really know what they want, but the brains know what they want. So you really need to bypass the people and talk directly to their brains. And by offering their brains policies that go with the grain of the brain, the individuals who fall in with those policies will help them to do the right things that they wouldn't otherwise do.
- [21:04]
Narrator / Interviewer
Ray Tallis, the eternal neuroskeptic. But the final stop in my journey is one that I believe provides an answer to his skepticism about the utility of neuroscience. It's an example of how I think future generations can be the first in human history to develop strategies for living which are informed by an accurate understanding of what makes us behave and feel as we do. What we're going to start with to begin this class is a little mindfulness of breathing. And just beginning by noticing the weight
- [21:33]
Professor Reid Montague
of your body on the chair.
- [21:36]
Narrator / Interviewer
In a quiet classroom in South London, there's evidence that brain culture is not just about manipulation. A number of neuroscientists are studying what happens to the brains of people who practice mindfulness. This class, being led by Shamash Alidina, has no religious element. In effect, it's a kind of secular form of meditation, becoming aware of the fact that you're breathing.
- [21:58]
Dr. Tamara Russell
My name is Dr. Tamara Russell. I'm a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist. You know, really what we're talking about here is the holy grail of neuroscience. What is the nature of consciousness? What is the nature of the mind? And it seems like the mindfulness technique has opened up a door that had yet to be explored. In this quest to understand what is
- [22:21]
Narrator / Interviewer
consciousness, bringing your attention back a thousand times back to the natural sensation of your breathing, these studies are yielding a new and big idea. It's still under explored scientifically, but it's exciting everyone, from doctors trying to reduce pain, to American defence chiefs wanting to cut down stress among soldiers, to ordinary folks just looking for more everyday contentment in their lives. By understanding the nature and power of automatic feelings like fear, pain and anxiety, we can learn to regulate those impulses. For example, some studies suggest that when people can see pain impulses in their brains during scans, they can learn to handle those impulses and even make the pain more bearable.
- [23:09]
Dr. Tamara Russell
And we discover that people who have practiced mindfulness meditation are better able to focus their attention, they're less easily distracted, they're better able to inhibit certain responses which can be very useful. And we also find out that with mindfulness meditation, we're better able to regulate the emotional centers of the brain.
- [23:32]
Narrator / Interviewer
It's a beautiful irony. Through appreciating the limits of the conscious brain, we could actually give that conscious brain more control.
- [23:42]
Dr. Tamara Russell
We are constantly being bombarded with information from all different sources and the nature of the brain is such that the majority of that information is processed automatically. And we might find, for example, that we're quite mindlessly reaching for a product on the supermarket shelf that we never bought before and then be curious about that and say, well, hang on a minute, why did I choose that? So the idea is that with the mindfulness training, we just adding an extra element of awareness to the unconscious processes. Given that everybody's trying to get hold of our unconscious processes, mindfulness training is a way that we can take ownership back.
- [24:30]
Narrator / Interviewer
It almost sounds like an arms race. While the marketers and governments try to use brain science to influence our behavior, there's potentially an opportunity for us to use the same science to get more control. It's mindfulness as an antidote to mind control. The resemblance of mindfulness to meditation can sometimes give it an otherworldly, even cranky image. But Professor Reid Montague of Coke and Pepsi fame has been researching which people are most able to deflect the so called sponsorship effect, the natural bias we have towards brands which we associate with good causes. And he found there was one group that was particularly able to resist the sponsorship effect. It was the people who'd done mindfulness
- [25:11]
Professor Reid Montague
training, the people who had mindfulness training. They may be a type, in other words, it may be that mindfulness training just selected for a certain type of people. The training itself may not have been able to do anything. We're still uncertain about that. But they are more. More rational and they don't experience the biasing that comes from the social favors. In the context of the experiment, that might be an internal neural measure of the capacity to exert what you'd call willful control.
- [25:39]
Narrator / Interviewer
As my journey into brain culture comes to an end, I return to Ray Tallis. In lecture theatres, magazine articles and on the net, the two of us have been having a running debate, me arguing not only that brain science will be a major influence on society, but that it can be a source of good. Him combining scientific scepticism with fears that neuromania will be an excuse for a new and dangerous paternalism.
- [26:05]
Ray Tallis
I think it's very dangerous. I think it would lead to a picture of human beings as essentially the playthings of their evolved brains, not as conscious agents, not as embodied subjects who are independent points of departure in the world, but as entities that are somehow coupled into the material world. And that can lead to extreme pessimism about the hope of changing things for the better.
- [26:31]
Narrator / Interviewer
And do you think you're going to win this argument, Ray? You know, I've had this. We've been having this argument for some time. It's great fun. Or do you think, despite your reservations, actually we are going to become more and more interested in this stuff?
- [26:41]
Ray Tallis
Well, we certainly come more and more interested in brain science as brain science gets clever and clever. But I have to say, at the moment we're in the position of such feverish enthusiasm about the meager data we can get from our current methods of investigation, meager in terms of their relationship to psychosocial phenomena, that I would be very surprised if the enthusiasm continues long enough for people to see the whole thing through so that it really perhaps delivers some minor advances in our self understanding.
- [27:13]
Narrator / Interviewer
I may not agree with him, but I think it's important that skeptics like Thales are given a hearing. Over the last three weeks, we've looked at neuroscience in the courts, in the classroom, in the marketplace and in government. But in the end, it's the possibility that we ourselves can use a better understanding of our brains that most excites me. And I want to end with a bit of advice drawn from the research, reflecting the importance of the automatic social nature of our brains. And it's this. If you'd like to be a nicer person, don't read all those self help books which appeal unsuccessfully to your conscious mind. Just surround yourself with nicer friends and then, without any effort, your automatic brain will lead you on a better path. If the brain culture is one where people find it just a little bit easier to do the right thing, well, surely that can't be bad.
- [28:09]
Matthew Taylor
Brain Culture was presented by Matthew Taylor. The producer was me, Mukul Devachand. For our Terms of use, please go to the BBC website. And that's the end of Brain Culture. But of course, not the end of brainy podcasts. Because if you download this podcast, next week Tim Harford and the team will be back with their uniquely numerate take on the world in more or less.