Can Your Brain Force You to Do Something You Don't Want to Do?

I have been reading Jerome Kagan's compelling recent book on emotion. I stumbled on one particular line:

An article in the June 20, 1988, issue of Time magazine, reporting on a woman who murdered her infant, told readers that the hormonal changes that accompany the birth process create emotional states, especially in women unprepared for the care of children, that can provoke serious aggression that women are unable to control. It is thus not fair, the journalist argued, to hold such mothers responsible for their horrendous actions. This conclusion is a serious distortion of the truth. There is no known hormonal change that can force a woman to kill her infant if she does not want to do so!

This raises one of most difficult problems facing 21st Century ethics. We want to treat criminals differently if they are in control of their actions. For instance, a soldier who is ordered to commit an atrocity is, if still guilty, a bit less guilty than one who does the same thing, but just for kicks.

When the outside influence constraining your free will actually arises within your own body, it's a bit more difficult. Suppose Alfred goes on a drug-induced killing spree. Again, it's different from the just-for-kicks murderer, but then one might wonder if Alfred should have thought of the consequences before injecting himself with psychotics. Or what about somebody who had a psychotic break? Where do we draw the line between that and a bad mood?

Many people used to be comfortable drawing the line between psychosis and a bad mood using medical information. Anyone who acts under the influence of a medical condition is less culpable (or, at least, differently culpable) than somebody who is not. However, neuroscientists find the brain correlates of conditions like a bad mood and geneticists find that nearly every personality trait is heritable (including being just plain mean), this line is breaking down.

To be fair, this is in essence not a new problem. Certain strains of Christian religious thinkers have spent centuries tying themselves into knots trying to explain how, given that everything is according to God's plan, including sin, it was not sacrilege to punish sinners, who, by definition, were just carrying out God's plan.

Nonethess, Christian civilizations did not collapse under the weight of this paradox, and I suspect we'll get along for some time without a coherent answer to the Great Question of Free Will. But it would still be nice to have...

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Kagan (2007) What Is Emotion, p. 80

Fractured Consciousness

The modern scientific consensus is that the 'mind' is just a word we use to describe our experience of our own brains in action. That is, mind and brain are more or less the same thing, just described at different levels (this gets stuck in the semantics because the brain monitors some nonconscious things such as heart rate, activities not normally thought of as in the domain of the mind).

That said, some in the scientific community and many in the general community have difficulty buying this 'astonishing hypothesis' (check out the comments to my last post on the subject).

Different people arrive at the hypothesis by their own paths. To me, the most compelling evidence is the range of bizarre consequences of brain damage. For instance, check out this late-December New York Times profile of a recent case of blind-sight, a phenomenon in which a person, due to brain damage, believes herself to be blind, but is clearly able to see. Oliver Sacks books are full of such cases, such as hemispheric neglect, in which people lose their awareness of half the world, to the extent that they eat from only one side of their plate, shave only one side of their face, and may even only be able to turn in one direction. A recent obituary of a famous amnesic noted how work with amnesics has shown that losing one's ability to form memories is in essence losing part of oneself.

Data like these make it hard to save dualism. If there is a non-material soul, it is not responsible for memory, for having a sense of left or right, or probably even for consciousness itself. That doesn't seem to leave much for the non-material soul to do. This conclusion may be disheartening, but it seems inescapable.

Mind and Brain

In periodic posts, I've been trying to lay out the modern scientific consensus on the mind/brain problem, with mixed success. If I had come across the following passage, from Ray Jackendoff's Language, Consciousness, Culture, a bit earlier, I might have saved some trouble, since I feel it is one of the clearest, most concise statements on the topic I have seen:

The predominant view is a strict materialism, in which consciousness is taken to be an emergent property of brains that are undergoing certain sorts of activity.

Although the distinction is not usually made explicit, one could assert the materialist position in either of two ways. The first would be 'methodological materialism': let's see how far we can get toward explaining consciousness under materialist assumptions, while potentially leaving open the possibility of an inexplicable residue. The second would be 'dogmatic materialism,' which would leave no room for anything but materialist explanation. Since we have no scientific tools for any sort of nonmaterialist explanation, the two positions are in practice indistinguishable, and they lead to the same research...

Of course, materialism goes strongly against folk intuition about the mind, which concurs with Descartes in thinking of the conscious mind as associated with a nonmaterial 'soul' or the like... The soul is taken to be capable of existence independently of the body. It potentially survives the death of the body and makes its way in the world as a ghost or a spirit or ensconced in another body through reincarnation... Needless to say, most people cherish the idea of being able to survive the death of their bodies, so materialism is more than an 'astonishing hypothesis,' to use Crick's (1994) term: it is a truly distressing and alienating one. Nevertheless, by now it does seem the only reasonable way to approach consciousness scientifically.

New York Times falls for mind/brain duality...again

Jack Shafer at Slate runs a periodic column where he calls newspapers to task for over-using anonymous sources. An example passage culled from a New York Times article:

Republicans close to the White House said Mr. Bush was the driver of the changes made so far, including the decision to ask Mr. Rove to focus primarily on the midterm elections.

Why, Shafer asks, do those "Republicans" need to be kept anonymous down to their number (are there 2? 3?). Shafer feels this over-use of anonymous sources is at best getting in the way of informing the public, and at worse hiding people with ulterior motives.

As of this entry, I'm starting my own watch-dog column: newspapers which write inane articles espousing mind/brain duality. The latest offender is, coincidentally, The New York Times, which ran a disappointing article a few days ago called "My Cortex Made Me Buy It." It describes a recent study in which people sampled "cheap" and "expensive" wines (actually the exact same wines, just marked with different prices).

When they sampled the wines with lower prices, however, the subjects not only liked them less, their brains registered less pleasure from the experience.

It's important to consider what the alternative was: that subjects reported liking the cheaper wines less, but their brains reported the same amount of pleasure. What would that mean? One possibility is that the participants were lying: they liked both wines the same, but said they liked the more expensive ones more in order to look cultured.

There's another possibility. Dan Gilbert, who studies happiness, usually does so by simply asking people if they are happy. He doesn't worry much about people lying. He could use a physiological measure (like a brain scan, as was done in the above study), but he points out that the reason we think a particular part of the brain is related to happiness is because it correlates with people's self-reports of being happy. Using the brain scan is completely circular. Under this logic, if the brain scans fail to show more pleasure when drinking the expensive wine, it could be because the relevant areas of the brain have been misidentified.

A final alternative possibility is that the participants' immaterial souls liked the expensive wine better, but their brains didn't register a difference.

The Times piece discussed none of this.

Wait -- are you suggesting your brain affects your behavior?

One of my office-mates burst out laughing on Monday after receiving an email. The email was a forward, but it wasn't intended to be funny. It was a brief news blurb about a recent study looking at teenage impulsiveness, entitled "Teens' brains hold key to their impulsiveness."

What's funny about that? Well, where did the journalist think the key to impulsiveness was hidden -- in teens' kidneys? Many scientists puzzle over the fact that 150 years of biology have not driven out Creationism, but 150 years of psychology and neuroscience have been even less successful. Many people -- probably most -- still believe in mind/brain duality.

Philosophers began suggesting that all human behavior is caused by the physical body at least as early as Thomas Hobbes in the 1600s. A century and a half of psychology and neuroscience has found no evidence of an immaterial mind, and now the assumption that all behavior and thought is caused by the physical body underlies essentially all modern research. It's true that nobody has proved that immaterial minds do not exist, but similarly nobody has ever proved the nonexistence of anything. It just seems very unlikely.

This leads to an interesting dichotomy between cognitive scientists and the general public. While journalists get very excited about studies that prove some particular behavior is related to some particular part of the brain, many cognitive scientists find such studies to be colossal wastes of time and money. It would be like a physicist publishing a study entitled "Silicon falls when dropped." Maybe nobody ever tested to see whether silicon falls when dropped, but the outcome was never really in doubt. 

This isn't to say that the study I mentioned above wasn't a useful study. I have no doubt that it is a very useful study. Determining mechanistically what changes in what parts of the brain during development affect impulsiveness is very informative. The mere fact that the brain changes during development, and that this affects our behavior, is not.