Bookraft

Brain Science or Neuro-thinking is becoming more and more prevalent in the popular discourse. Take for example the book The Assault on Reason by Al Gore in which he explores some of the causes for Reason taking a second seat to Fear in much of US political decision making. Gore argues "There are mental structures that govern feelings and emotions [in the brain], and these structures have greater impact on decision making than logic and reason. Moreover, emotions have much more poower to affect reason than reason does to affect emotions - particularly the emotion of fear.....Our capacity for fear is 'hardwired' in the brain as an ancient strategy that gives us the ability to respond instantly when survival may be at stake....By contrast, reason is centered in parts of the brain that have more recently evolved and [reason] depends upon more subtle processes that give us the ability to discern the emergence of threats before they become immediate and to distinguish between legitimate threats and illusory ones. Neurologists and brain researchers describe how disturbing images go straight to a part of the brain that is not mediated by language or reasoned analysis."

This is not the only part of the book that Gore uses neuroscience to bolster his arguments. And the analysis triangulates into the arguments made by Sharon Begley at Newsweek on the politics of fear. Sharon follows more closely the ideas of Dr Drew Westen of Emory University whose book the Political Brain tracks the phenomenon of fear politics from the social psychology point of view.

David Brooks of the New York Times has an editorial on the Neural Buddhists which argues that much of the controversy over religion emanating from the clashing worlds of Science (think Dennet, Dawkins, Hitchens and others demeaning rote religious beliefs) and Religion (think Creationism, Terry Schiavo and popular evangelical attacks on secularism )is misplaced. In contrast, Brooks notes that many transcendant and religious experiences can be artificially induced and/or monitored in the brain. From this base, Brooks argues that debate will not be about the belief in God, but rather in the belief of the Bible and other religion's testaments as the source of true and reliable guides to the nature of God.

In this regard, scientific work on basic belief and trust mechanisms is fascinating. For example, Scientific American in its June 2008 issue has a feature story on the Neurobiology of Trust. The story details that how experimental tasks called the trust game, have allowed researchers to determine how a hormone, oxytocin, enhances an individuals propensity to trust a stranger when that person exhibits non-threatening signals. It is felt that greater understanding of oxytocin's functions and interactions with other brain chemicals may lead to insights on autism and other anti-social pre-dispositions.

What This Means

Forty years ago conversations about the Ghost in the Machine - the nature of will and free spirit competed with a nascent brain psychology that was finding ever more significant determiners of behaviour locked right into various brain regions. Much of the impetus for these conclusions was derived from Luria's work on brain damaged Russian WWII veterans and the homunculus studies during brain surgery done by D.O. Hebb in Montreal. What has happened in the meantime is that Neuroscience has been able to marshal technology like PET and FMRI sensors that can trace what is activated and happening in the brain on patients and test subjects without invasive surgery or catastrophic loss through injurty, tumors or strokes.

Finally, a recent article again in the NYTimes, The Science of Sarcasm (Not That You Care), again picks up the theme that a particular, tiny brain structure, the parahippalcampus gyrus, is instrumentl in detecting sarcasm. Again people who have had damage to the body are unable to pickup either tonal (pitch of the voice like using baby talk with an adult) or verbal cues that maybe what the person is saying is derisively the opposite of what they mean. In essence this is symptomatic of the growing fascination of how we can discover how the bran makes us tick the way we do.

Yet even as the Brain Science progresses three facts stand out. First, the functioning brain is outstanding miracle of evolutionary development. Second the complexity of the brain is on the order of magnitude of the number of possible immediate neuron connections in the brain(10 to the 15th). This is already an intimidating number. But if you consider neural circuits or cell assemblies of 6 or less neurons, then the number of possible neural pathways raches 1o to the 90th or more than a billion times all of the atoms in the universe. Third and In sum, the more we know about the brain - the more we know that we don't know, and are still just scratching the surface including 40 years and counting on how to explain how the brain remembers.

David Brooks in his article catches this sense of mystery to be solved and its import:

"In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.

In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. I’m not qualified to take sides, believe me. I’m just trying to anticipate which way the debate is headed. We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects." I think the mind body problem or the Ghost in the Human Machine will not be resolved within the Kurzweil timeline, but rather a flowering in the discovery of the nature of transcendence as predicted by Brooks is much more realistic.