The Naked Brain: How the Emerging Neurosociety is Changing How We Live, Work, and Love - Hardcover

Restak M.D., Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400098084 ISBN 13: 9781400098088

Publisher: Crown, 2006

Synopsis

Consider a world in which

· Marketers use brain scans to determine consumer interest in a product

· Politicians use brain-image-based profiles to target voters

· A test could determine your suitability for a job or to whom you will be romantically attracted

Far from science fiction, this “neurosociety”—a society in which brain science influences every aspect of daily life—is already here.

Innovative researchers and cutting-edge technology, like brain imaging and brain scanning devices, have revolutionized our understanding of how we process information, communicate, trust, sympathize, and love. However, scientists and doctors are not the only ones interested in the naked brain; advertisers, politicians, economists, and others are using the latest findings on the human brain to reshape our lives, from the bedroom to the boardroom.

Despite the potential benefits, there’s obvious peril in the promise. Richard Restak explores the troubling moral and legal dilemmas that arise from corporate and political applications of this new brain research. Someday we may live in a world where our choices, our professional and personal prospects, even our morals and ethics will be controlled by those armed with an elite understanding of the principles of neuroscience.

Eye-opening and provocative, The Naked Brain is a startling look at the impact such unprecedented access to our most secret thoughts and tendencies will have on all of us.

In The Naked Brain, bestselling author Richard Restak explores how the latest technology and research have exposed the brain and how we think, feel, remember, and socialize in unprecedented and often surprising ways. Now that knowledge is being used by doctors, advertisers, politicians, and others to influence and revolutionize nearly every aspect of our daily lives.

Restak is our guide to this neurosociety, a brave new world in which brain science influences our present and will even more tangibly shape our future. Citing social trends, shifts in popular culture, the rise and fall of products in the public favor, even changes in the American vernacular, The Naked Brain is an illuminating and often troubling investigation of the impending opportunities and dangers being created by the neuroscience revolution, and a revelation for anyone who ever wondered why they prefer Coke over Pepsi or Kerry over Bush.

About this title

About the Author:

Richard Restak, M.D., is a neurologist, neuropsychiatrist, and clinical professor of neurology at George Washington University’s Medical Center. He is the bestselling author of fifteen acclaimed books about the brain, including Mozart’s Brain and the Fighter Pilot and Poe’s Heart and the Mountain Climber. He has also written the companion book to several PBS specials.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

1

The Emergence of the Neurosociety

Brain Imaging: Peering into Bertino’s Brain

As a first step in appreciating the impact of social neuroscience, it helps to understand the power of imaging techniques to provide a window into events happening within the brain.

The earliest techniques capable of revealing the brain’s inner processing carried a definite risk of injury and sometimes even death. Consequently, they were restricted to patients suffering from various brain diseases. As a result of this emphasis on disease, we presently know more about the functioning of abnormal brains than we know about normal ones. As a neurologist, I’m especially aware of this paradox. Ask me about the brain dysfunctions associated with strokes or autism or even some forms of learning disability and I can explain the difficulties in more detail than you probably want to hear. But ask me how the brain of a genius differs from that of his or her less intellectually gifted counterparts and the explanation isn’t going to take long at all.

Not that we can’t learn a lot about the normal brain on the basis of studying abnormal brains. Even a study of the diseased brain often provides some helpful insights toward furthering our understanding of the normal brain. My favorite example of this comes from the observations of the late-nineteenth-century Italian experimenter Angelo Mosso.

In the course of his research Mosso encountered a peasant, Bertino (no last name is recorded), who several years earlier had suffered a head injury severe enough to destroy the bones of the skull covering his frontal lobes (located immediately behind the forehead). The resulting opening, covered only by skin and fibrous tissue, provided Mosso with a window through which he could directly observe the pulsations of Bertino’s brain. Similar pulsations can be observed in a newborn baby during the first few weeks of life prior to the growth and fusion of the skull bones. When the baby cries or strains, the pulsations increase; when the baby sleeps, the pulsations subside.

One day when Mosso was observing the pulsations he noticed a distinct increase in their magnitude coincident with the ringing at noon of the local church bells. At this point Mosso, in an act of inspiration, asked the peasant if the ringing of the Angelus reminded him of his obligation to silently recite the Ave Maria. When Bertino responded yes, the pulsations increased again. Intrigued at this sequence, Mosso asked his subject to multiply eight by ten. At the moment Mosso asked the question, the pulsations increased and then quickly decreased. A second increase occurred when Bertino responded with the answer. From this simple but elegant experiment Mosso correctly concluded that blood flow in the brain could provide an indirect measurement of brain function during mental activity.

Inspired by Mosso’s findings with Bertino, students of the brain during the early and middle parts of the twentieth century developed more accurate techniques for measuring blood flow and metabolism in the human brain. For instance, dyes and radioactive substances injected into the arteries leading to the brain help pinpoint the relevant structures responsible for vision, movement, and sensation. But one important limitation lessened the usefulness of these probes into the brain’s functioning: All of them were intrusive, dangerous, and on occasion fatal. While undergoing one of the tests the subject could suffer a stroke, blindness, even death. Fortunately, that problem is now a thing of the past thanks to the safety of newer techniques, which carry little risk.

Current imaging techniques are often described using a kind of alphabet soup terminology: “The patent’s CAT was normal but a contrast-enhanced MRI showed a small SOL in the frontal lobes later confirmed by PET.” Such a sentence isn’t very helpful to anyone other than a doctor or someone else trained in the use of this off-putting terminology. In place of acronyms and obfuscation, here’s a simplified way of thinking about brain imaging.

Basically, imaging techniques are either structural or functional. If you’ve ever undergone a CAT (shorthand for computerized axial tomography) scan or an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scan, the doctor ordering that scan was interested in capturing an image of your brain’s structure. Perhaps your doctor thought that you might have suffered a stroke or developed a brain tumor. Tumors and strokes can be recognized by the alterations that they bring about in normal brain anatomy. CAT scans and MRI scans provide a picture of those alterations.

Functional imaging, in contrast, depicts what the brain is doing over a certain period of time ranging from seconds to minutes. All of the functional imaging techniques (functional MRI, or fMRI, PET scans, and SPECT scans are the most common) are based on a simple principle: Brain activity leads to changes in blood flow (as with Bertino), electrical discharges, and magnetic fields.

As I’m writing this sentence an fMRI would show increased activity in those areas of my brain associated with thought (especially the frontal areas), vision, and the movement of my fingers across the keyboard of my word processor. An fMRI of your brain would show activation of the visual areas, which process the words on this page, along with the frontal areas, which grasp the meaning of the sentences, and the motor areas, which control the movement of your hand as it reaches up and turns the page.

Ideally, an imaging technique should accurately pinpoint both the structure and the function, the “where” and the “when” of brain activity. On the “where” scale currently available techniques are accurate within millimeters. But the “when” determinations leave a lot to be desired. The temporal resolution of PET (positron-emission tomography) scans is tens of seconds or even minutes. The most technologically advanced fMRI does a bit better, with a resolution on the order of a tenth of a second. But even that is woefully insufficient as a measurement of how rapidly things are happening in the brain. To give you some perspective, consider that an activation originating in the motor neurons of your brain takes only about 150 milliseconds (thousandths of a second) to reach the muscles of your forefinger when you press a doorbell. Or consider that you can accurately identify an object that suddenly enters your field of vision within a few hundred milliseconds.

In short, in order to establish meaningful relationships between our mental lives and events occurring in our brain, it is important to achieve a temporal resolution of milliseconds. But here’s the sticky point. The most accurate technique for doing that involves inserting a tiny needle into the brain and then threading it into a single brain cell. While Dr. Strangelove might consider this invasive, potentially risky procedure acceptable in healthy brains, most others would consider it totally unacceptable.

To further appreciate the challenges in depicting brain activity, think back for a moment to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in quantum physics: You cannot simultaneously determine the position and the velocity of a particle because of the effect created by the act of measurement (“The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa,” Heisenberg wrote in 1927). Neuroscientists also encounter a kind of uncertainty principle when studying the brain: They have to choose between achieving either an accurate positional fix (within millimeters) or an accurate temporal fix (within fractions of a second). So far no single technique exists that can provide both; only the use of multiple techniques can make possible the desired integration of spatial and temporal information. To further complicate matters, the brain’s operation can’t be understood by measuring one neuron at a time; instead, we must focus on thousands of neurons firing together to form “circuits.”

Everything You’ll Need to Know About the Brain

Although a lot will be said about the brain in this book, a detailed knowledge of that incredibly complex structure won’t be required. Indeed, all that you’ll need is to remain mindful of two useful distinctions.

The first is between controlled and automatic processes. As an example of a controlled process, recall the last time you worked on your income tax or balanced a budget. Your thoughts followed each other in a sequential manner; you remained consciously aware of what you were doing; if requested, you could explain your thought processes to somebody else. In addition, if you continued your efforts long enough you were likely to experience fatigue or boredom.

As an example of an automatic process, think back to the last time you took an immediate dislike to someone you had just met. Or an occasion when you discerned a hint of condescension in a coworker’s voice as she explained a new procedure to you. Or an afternoon when you paused while walking down a street and looked appreciatively as an attractive person passed by. If asked at the time about such occurrences, you would have come up with various explanations to justify your impressions, but these would only have been guesstimates. That’s because with automatic processes things just happen. You can’t really explain why you disliked the new acquaintance while everybody else liked him. Nor why you were the only person who perceived condescension in the coworker. Nor why other people weren’t stopping to gawk at that man or woman you found so attractive. Automatic processes, in contrast to controlled processes, involve more than one avenue of thought occurring at a time, don’t involve consciousness, aren’t accompanied by a sense of effort, and can’t easily be explained to anyone else. And since we’re not consciously aware of them, automatic processes don’t make it onto our mental radar screens.

Most of the things we do involve a necessary balance between controlled and automatic processing. Too much automatic processing and we behave impulsively; too much controlled processing and we become paralyzed by indecision, such as when we mentally rehearse “perfect” responses to every conceivable question we might be asked during the next morning’s job interview.

The second distinction is between cognitive and emotional (affective) processes. While cognition is usually defined as “thinking,” that doesn’t quite capture the elements of what’s meant by cognition. Cognition refers to your perceptions of everything that is going on around you, to all of your thoughts and all of the actions that you might take in response to your outer and inner experiences. Here’s a definition from a current textbook: “The ability of the central nervous system to attend, identify, and act on complex stimuli.” But let’s keep it simple: think of cognition as a shorthand term for all of the ways we come to know the world. Cognition isn’t a thing but a process; nobody can hold it in her hand and show it to you, nor can scientific instruments reveal a picture of it. It includes thinking, remembering, daydreaming, mentally calculating—indeed, any mental activity you select can be included under the umbrella term cognition.

When you explain to your accountant all of the income tax deductions that you’re claiming, you’re involved in a cognitive process, essentially repeating aloud the thoughts you previously entertained while working out for yourself the amount of money that you think you owe. Everything is very intellectualized and rational: You talk and he listens. Emotions play little role here. But suppose later that evening you get a call from your accountant informing you that you actually owe additional money to the IRS. At this point, emotional processes—anger and resentment—are likely to displace cognitive processing (at least momentarily). Indeed, you can define an argument as essentially a dialogue in which affect displaces cognition, emotion overpowers reasoning.

While distinguishing between emotions and cognition and between controlled and automatic processes helps in understanding our own and other people’s behavior, it still doesn’t help us to answer fundamental questions such as: What happens in my brain when I make an impulsive purchase? Or decide that a certain person is trustworthy? Or invest money in a stock after listening to a broker? In order to address such questions from the perspective of the new social neuroscience, look at the diagram of the human brain on page 16. It is the only brain diagram that you will need to understand the topics that we will take up in this book.

The key structures are the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the temporal lobes, the su- perior temporal sulcus (STS), the anterior cingulate, the in- sula, the parietal lobes, the amygdala, the basal ganglia, and the cerebellum.

In order to understand the diagram, keep one organizational principle in mind: automatic and controlled processes occur at different locations in the brain. Those regions that are involved

with automatic activity are concentrated toward the back (occipital), top (parietal), and side (temporal) lobes. Controlled processes, in contrast, occur mainly in the front (orbital and prefrontal) areas, with the prefrontal cortex especially important since it integrates information from all other parts of the brain, fashions long- and short-term goals, and directs our overall behavior. Think of the frontal lobes as the CEO of the most complex organization in the world, the human brain. And thanks to the exponential growth of the prefrontal lobes over the past several million years, we are capable of mentally outperforming any other creature on earth.

Since the frontal lobes will be playing a starring role in this book, it’s worth spending a few moments to give you a more complete picture of what the frontal lobes do. So let’s look first at the kinds of problems that can arise when frontal lobe functioning is compromised.

The Frontal Lobes of Jonathan Meaden

Meet Jonathan Meaden, a sixty-three-year-old man brought by his wife to my office for neurological consultation. After retiring five years ago from a successful career in business, Jonathan devoted himself full time to his lifelong passion: chess. Following a year of concentrated chess study—including tutoring by a local chess master—Jonathan improved his game to the point he could hold his own against highly rated amateur players.

Suddenly things started to go terribly wrong. On several occasions Jonathan became lost while driving to a tournament. In addition, his level of play deteriorated to the point that he placed last in several competitions, losing to players he had consistently defeated in the past. Most of these losses resulted from careless mistakes due to failures of concentration. But his problems involved more than just chess and finding his way on the highway.

Always a meticulous and careful investor, Jonathan started buying questionable oil and gas investments that, according to his wife, “he would never have had anything to do with before.” Books that formerly interested him now sat unread on the shelves; if sent to him by relatives or friends, the books sometimes weren’t even taken from their packaging. Even more distressing to his wife were Jonathan’s “memory problems.” In addition to forgetting the names of several of their close friends, Jonathan’s memories were “mixed up,” according to his wife; he recalled things out of sequence. But if she raised any questions about accuracy, Jonathan flew into a rage and began shouting.

On a recent vacation trip to Los Angeles Jonathan left his wife in the baggage area and rushed ahead to ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Crown
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1400098084
• ISBN 13: 9781400098088
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272