The Neuroscience Revolution
Neuroscience will set the terms of the debate about ourselves and society
I think we’re at the beginning of a revolution that will fundamentally change how we understand ourselves and society. This revolution will be driven by neuroscience.
The first step in this revolution is something you’re already familiar with. The way science can dictate the terms of a discussion. For example, diseases used to be considered the result of evil spirits or moral failings, whereas now we understand they're the consequence of biology we have little if any control over. The key insight is that the terms of the debate about disease is limited. The biology of disease isn’t considered one of many options that also includes evil spirits. The scientific explanation is considered the objective truth and the only acceptable source of information. This is how I see insights from neuroscience will influence the debate we have about society and ourselves.
So what are these insights? I’ll give some examples but this post is just an intro to many others. These examples represent what I already know about (I’m a neuroscientist), what I would like to learn more about, and novel ideas of my own:
The frontal lobe – this area of the brain plays an essential role in making us human. It allows us to plan ahead and put various options into a broader context, particularly socially. Without it we would live in the moment and be indifferent to how our behaviour is impacting others. I’ll discuss how society-wide improvements in the frontal lobe function of individual members may underlie differences between societies.
Generalisations – one of the ways we resolve the problem of living in a complex world that contains large amounts of information is by forming generalisations. Apples and oranges become fruit, for example, or people become grouped into ethnicities based on superficial physical characteristics. The successes and failures of our framing of ourselves and the world are often directly related to the truth of the generalisations we make.
Intelligence – in some respects, this blog is really about trying to understand intelligence and how it affects our behaviour. As I'll expand in multiple posts, I think intelligence really is everything and all we are. I’ll use the intuitive, everyday use of the word ‘intelligence’, rather than the academic version that defines intelligence in terms of specific cognitive skills (as measured by IQ tests, for example). The spread of this academic definition of intelligence has had a negative influence on our discussions about human behaviour, I’d say, especially as it relates to debates about social issues.
Time and Energy – both of these are a call to recognise the brain has ‘engineering’ limits that have to be appreciated. It takes time to learn, and we don’t have an unlimited amount of energy to do it. To illustrate how I might discuss this feature of our brains take this example. The ratio between jobs that require academic skills vs physical abilities has shifted to the former in modern economies, but how has that affected people’s ability to think about social issues? That is, if people expend more of their mental time and energy on work, might they have less resources available for understanding and thinking about social issues? I’ll discuss this.
Scale – this requires multiple posts to explain, but the basic idea is that large scale society-wide events are just the aggregation of smaller scale individual behaviour, which is itself determined by features of the brain which are shared. As neuroscience has more influence on our discussions about society we will focus on this smaller scale, how the shared features of our brains might be generating society-wide events, and what action we can take at the level of individuals if we want to change some outcome. How we currently understand human behaviour at the level of whole societies – that it is due to belief systems, or explained by sociological and political theories – will be replaced by this more neuroscience driven analysis.
I imagine the neuroscience inspired ideas above would be known and understood at a basic level, just enough to limit the terms of a debate. And they would become a routine part of everyday life. For example, we would enter discussions conscious we’re making generalisations and expect them to be examined. We already do this to some degree but one of the points of this blog post is that this process will become routine and an expectation will emerge that people need to show humility about an often error prone way of perceiving the world.
One last point before completely this post. I can imagine some people would think that the ideas above a better classified as part of psychology or some other discipline. But in fact, I think ideas about the brain and mind won’t really take a hold in our discussions until they have a more solid grounding in the biology of the brain, as determined by neuroscience.