Hype
Daniel Margulies
DM - Hype Segment 1:
DG: The rise of the neurosciences and its popularity in recent years has led to a lot of humanities and social sciences scholars wanting to explore fMRI work and/or use cognitive neuroscience in their research. Or at least findings, apply findings to their research. So I guess the first question out of that is: in your view, why is neuroscience so popular across the university? Why has it become so popular?
DM: You can do anything in a brain scanner, I think. Neuroscience to me, the way that we do it here in this institute is a much more humanistic endeavor than one sees from the outside. We’re categorized within the Max Planck - and this is just a quirky thing that I like to make sense of - but in the Max Planck society there’s three sections. There’s biomedical; there’s the physics and material sciences section; and then there’s humanities. And we’re actually within the humanities. We’re not in biomedical, which you would think for psychology, brain institute, we’d be medical or humanities. And if you take a step back and look at the kind of questions that are being asked in this building, they’re absolutely humanistic questions. They’re about language, they’re about plasticity in the brain when it comes to being a fully functioning person. There used to be a department that was dedicated to psychology of movement, and there’s the compassion group, social neuroscience experiment. These are questions about what makes us human, more than they are questions about what is the actual function of the brain. Have you had a chance to interview Jan Slaby yet? I hope you get a chance to meet him. He’s got a wonderful example of this. He said, what if God were to walk in – no, I’m sorry, what if God were to call a meeting at the auditorium here at the institute. Bring everyone together at the auditorium and say, ‘okay I’m sorry to bother you all, you’re all very busy, but it’s time that I explain, you guys have been doing a great job, but it turns out that the mind is not located in the brain. It’s located in the knee. And I’m sorry for misleading you and not bringing this up until now, but I tell you what, I’m going to make it up to you. I’m going to build an institute across the street (DG [interjecting]: Shaped like a knee - / - exactly) for Max Planck Institute for Mind and Knee. And if anybody wants to come over there and continue your line of research in understanding the mind and its anatomical substrates, you’re all welcome to do so. So who comes with me?’
At this point when he tells the story is that, probably 90% of the folks would go, because they’re not particularly interested in the brain; they’re interested in understanding how the mind - what are the materials and mechanisms underlying the mind? And here are a set of tools that can allow you to ask these questions and pin it down to some sort of materiality. The fact that we do it in the brain. Yeah. There’s nice work by Russ Poldrack on the history of neuroscience, where he says if these imaging tools were invented 150 years ago, we’d be talking about localizing phrenological concepts in the brain, and it’s just this matter of historical accident that neuroimaging became big around the time when cognitive psychology was big and so we use those concepts. But what we see within these fields is you can bring anything and map it onto the brain if you do figure out a way to operationalize it in the scanner. So it’s attractive for that reason.
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DG: But the hesitancy that you feel to correlate directly to human behavior is exactly what, I mean that impetus is exactly what a lot of people in the humanities and the social sciences want to do. They’re interested in discovering something about human behavior that they did not know that can rewrite theory. They can rewrite philosophy.
DM: My honest take on it is: how many examples can you really give where the science has changed the theory? I see it much more as the theory providing the framework for understanding what we - the data. But I can’t think of very many. I mean, I’d be hard pressed right now to come up with one example where the neuroscience has somehow adjudicated between positions within the humanities and said here, this is now right and that is now wrong. It’s much more people using as much evidence as they can scrap together to support a certain view.
DG: What about mirror neurons? How does that both fit in? So I mean, mirror neurons were interpreted, from my perspective, largely through Merleau-Ponty. And then were disseminated popularly, became, instead of a philosophical way of thinking or a theoretical framework, mirror neurons themselves became the explanatory framework for human behavior. So in other words, do you see it the same way? That sort of philosophy allowed for the interpretation of the neuroscientific data and now the neuroscientific data allows for the interpretation of human behavior? So there’s sort of a replacement going on there?
DM: Okay, from that line I see what you’re saying. I guess my problem would be, what happens then when somebody says ‘okay we’ve got the mirror neuron theory of social behavior for instance, and we have this other theory of social behavior. Which one is right?’ And then you try to mediate between those two perspectives, by conducting some experiment. I really would be hard pressed to find examples where that’s been anywhere conclusive or been able to properly decide on a mechanism that is more appropriate for describing behavior in that way. But it certainly has replaced it in the social realm or outside of academia.
DG: Do you think then that, are you suggesting that the…
DM: I guess what’s important about that though is that it replaces it in the way that it’s supporting the theories, it’s not adding something new necessarily. It’s giving it a material basis; it’s not theoretically shifting things. So for Merleau: it is still Merleau-Ponty just being passed through mirror neurons in this case. Then mirror neurons get freighted with all sorts of other materials as well. I suppose that’s what makes them neat as an object, but it’s other ideas that are being carried through this thing, rather than the thing itself telling us something about the function behavior.
DM - Hype Segment 2:
DM: I think there’s more and more push back now against the neurosciences. I don’t think that’s going to turn into a general insecurity within the field, for the human neuroscience folks. But I do think the value of discussion and incorporating criticism and being open to dialogue about the criticism is going to grow, because people won’t be able to get away without it. So that’s the shift that I imagine will happen. But that’s still playing out very much on the terrain of neuroscience; that’s still really about doing better neuroscience.
DG: Do you think some of the push back against the neurosciences is caused by what?
DM: The frustration is the way it has become generalized or popular. It’s the way it’s taken over everything. As soon as it encroaches too much on people’s territory, it’s starting to get push back.
Jack Gallant
JG - Hype Segment 1:
JG: Right. Well again, that’s what I was talking about before: science works at two levels. There’s the actual physical level of what you did, and then there’s the bullshit level of what you’re telling other people. And certainly if you’re the one doing the science, then everything is to keep these two levels separate. And what you’ll find oftentimes is very senior scientists who haven’t been collecting their data for a long time, they actually, these two things kind of start to melt together. This is a problem. It’s hard to keep these two levels clearly separate in your mind. Also, of course, if you’re running a lab, you gotta raise money. Running a lab, even in humanities, you know, the amount of money you need is basically just for you. And that’s a small amount of money; you [humanities] don’t need much. But if you’re running a lab with 10 people, where you’re using a machine that costs 500,000 - 500 dollars an hour to run - you gotta bring in a lot of money. And so in that case, it’s more like you’re - I think if you’re in the humanities, it’s more like you’re an artist producing artwork. And if you’re in science, it’s more like you’re a guy running a small business. Where it’s start up company. He’s gotta raise his venture capital and then once he gets it, then he’s gotta produce a paper. And so you have to tell stories to your venture capital guys who are NIH so that they’ll give you money to tell a story. And you know, NIH is now funding at like 10 percentile. So you send in a grant, and there’s less than a 10% chance you'll get your money. So it really is like venture capital.
So that means to people, making this top level, this, you know, this bullshit level - starts making them paint a lot of really heavy varnish on this.
JG - Hype Segment 2:
JG: I’m on your side then. I think there’s a lot of - right now there’s this big neuroscience backlash in the popular press. I think the reason this backlash has occurred: it’s the neuroscientists’ fault. The neuroscientists oversold their findings to the press. And the press is perfectly willing to take what the neuroscientists are selling because it makes a good story, and it doesn’t cost them. They put out a story today, and if it turns out to be bullshit, then it doesn’t affect the press. What it affects is the neuroscience. The neuroscience has kind of shot themselves in the foot, not realizing that the press would take whatever the neuroscientists told them and multiply it times ten. Neuroscientists should have been conservative. Instead, a lot of them were kind of, you know, going out and saying way too much about the game. It’s not - the same issue comes with the humanities. It’s not gonna do neuroscientists any good making all these promises to the humanities people only to have the promises dashed because then the humanities people just hate them. And then they think that it’s all bullshit.
Marco Iacoboni
MI - Hype Segment 1:
MI: Yeah well, it’s tough question to answer because I mean, I read some really bad papers about mirror neurons, but they are all actually neural imagining papers so. And of course there are some, you know, probably sweeping statements about how mirror neurons are involved in this and that and even though some, most of the statements aren’t entirely crazy, they’re perceived as again, kind of sweeping statements. They also create a lot of animosity. I know that some people even in the humanities hate mirror neurons and for the life of me I can’t understand how you can actually get to that point in which actually hate the discovery of. I guess it’s mostly because it’s been so popular and maybe popularized a little too much or exploited too much maybe for you know, in support of theories that were against the theories of these guys, I don’t know. It’s possible. It’s likely I would say. I can’t really give you any specific example of research that or even just scholarly articles that has been inspired by mirror neurons that it’s so good or so bad. I mean a lot of things I read, they either make sense or they tend to be a little too stretched. Sometimes when they tend to be too stretched are actually more in my business than outside of my business. Specially because outside my business like social sciences or humanities, people talk about mirror neurons, they make, they really say that these are what they’re saying are theory and speculations, they’re not proven facts from the lab. They know about the stuff from the lab. It’s the evidence from the lab. But not evidence from your own theory necessarily. So but yeah, no can’t come up with any specific example.
Gregory Hickok
GH - Hype Segment 1:
GH: The thing that I’m most familiar with is mirror neurons so that’s not my work directly but I’ve kind of looked at it. That’s the obvious application, something that’s come out of hardcore neuroscience and then applied extremely broadly in social neuroscience, in art appreciation. I just got a call this week from, last week from someone at the Getty Museum wanting to know about mirror neurons and how to light things so that mirror neurons will respond properly when you’re looking at a painting. Apparently, there’s some company that is trying to apply this and has some technology, but this guy at the Getty was not so sure. And he wanted my input, so.
DG: I mean, how do you respond to that situation?
GH: The way I respond to everything that’s mirror neuron related. The whole mirror neuron idea stemmed from an assumption about what these cells are doing and once you make that assumption, you can build grand theories so that assumption is that these cells are involved in understanding people, social interaction, and understand what you’re doing by simulating it in my own head. Mirror neurons are the basis of that. Once you’ve got that, you can apply that to lots of things. 'I can empathize with you because I can simulate feelings and then I understand your feelings and that’s empathy.' I can appreciate sports because I can put myself in their position and understand what’s happening. And autism, people, you know, people have difficulty, these people have difficulty, apparently, you know, empathizing and reading other people’s minds. Not exactly true but assuming it’s true, then oh you can say, that’s a mirror neuron thing. So once you’ve got that assumption, you can run with it, and it makes logical sense from that point forward. The problem is getting to that initial assumption was speculation, and it turns out not to be true. And so that just sits like a house of cards. It just completely falls apart once you, once that assumption doesn’t pan out.
Larry Cahill
LC - Hype Segment 1:
LC: Well in that sense, I certainly have worked with people in the social sciences. It gets grey regarding psychology quickly because cognitive science, which historically didn’t have much to do with the brain until about 20 years ago when fMRI invaded everything, 20 years ago if you looked at the graduate school promo flyer that’s posted on the walls for cognitive science departments, 20 years ago none of them had anything brain related on them.
DG: Behavioral studies..?
LC: Yeah. Behavioral. Cognitive science, psychology, behavioral studies of the mind. Maybe a rat mind, maybe a human mind, but you know, brain as green cheese model. Don’t know, don’t care. That all changed in the last 20 years, and now every cognitive science school program, even though it’s in the social sciences, you know, look at their advertisement for their webpage or their advertisement for the graduate students: they’ll have a picture of a PET scan or an FMRI on it. Ooh we do brain stuff. So it’s been a merge and then in fact, I think this project right here we’re discussing, neurohumanities, fundamentally grows out of that. The great change that happened in 1990 or 91. The very first FMRI study. Brain imaging had been there. Right? PET scan, in it’s earliest sort of stages, coalescing in the 70s and 80s. But PET scanning was never super widespread. It required injections of radioactivity. It was expensive, and there was at the peak, something like 50 PET scanners in the whole country. Something like that. So PET scanning stayed stuck in a corner. It all, I’m actually kinda thinking out loud as I’m answering this question.
1990/91 I think it was 91, it was the first ever FMRI study. MRIs were there, I think the guys name was Ogawa or whatever it was, who figured out how to modify what you’re measuring to measure oxygenated or deoxygenated hemogloblin. Right? From the same MRI machine. Now all of a sudden functional MRI is a position to explode. Because the MRI scanners are everywhere. Every hospital. Right? They were what replaced CAT scanners as a structural MRI. This guy comes along. I don’t know why he’s hadn’t gone ahead and got a Nobel prize yet, but he teaches everybody. He goes, “Hey look at this, I can modify and measure in various parts of the brain or the liver or whatever, how much oxygenated hemoglobin is there.” Cuz it reacts differently in a magnetic field than deoxygenated hemoglobin. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this. Right? So that means, oooh I can say how much oxygenated hemoglobin is in your amygdala. Not just the structure of your amygdala but how much oxygenated hemoglobin is in it. Cool. I can see how that changes as you blink your left eye. Or recite the presidents. Or see pictures of bloody hands. Right? So functional MRI suddenly exploded. Suddenly anybody can start talking about the neurocorrelates of anything. And the people started to run with the power. And they’ve done a lot of good with it, but at the same time, now you get the neurocorrelates of being democratic or republican. Right? The neurocorrelates of being in love. I have a slide that I like to show which I took from Vogue or Cosmopolitan or Glamor, one of those magazines, and it was your brain on love. The neurocorrelates of love. I have this design it’s the splotch and the colored splotch that’s lighting up when the people looked at pictures of their beloved. I love it because the colored splotch is in the ventricles. The ventricles are the fluid filled holes in the middle of your brain which we do not believe participate at all in neurocommunication. But there’s the neurobasis of love in your ventricles. That’s my textbook example of people running wild with the thing that started in 1991. MRI, the power to look at the human brain functionally, suddenly going widespread, going viral, if you will.
LC - Hype Segment 2:
LC: Let’s, let’s talk about mirror neurons for a minute because I, it does bring to mind an example, I think, of the harmless, at best, harmful at worst, but not necessarily helpful, use of something like mirror neurons. I was once at a airport, very uncrowded airport. Northern California. I forget where. I think Sacramento. At any event, it’s late at night. I’m catching a plane. I’m like the only guy in Security. And I start chatting with these people, and they start to tell me about how the TSA in their training of screeners is teaching them about mirror neurons.
DG: Really?
LC: That’s exactly my reaction. Really? I think it started with, I know why it started. It was cause they saw this colored brain in my bag. See that colored brain? They saw that, oh you’re a neuroscientist? Yeah I’m a neuroscientist. And it started this little conversation. And they said you know, they actually teaching us about mirror neurons. The Transportation Safety Administration according to these people that night at the check in, the Security at I think Sacramento Airport were telling me that they were taught about mirror neurons. Why helping them, because the person you’re dealing with, if you smile, it will mirror in their head or something like that. How to, some crap about how to deal with people. And you see it’s all valid because there’s mirror neurons in the person, and so if you smile, it’s gonna make their mirror neurons smile or something like that. Now, okay. Is that true? I don’t know. I don’t know enough about mirror neurons. Do you need mirror neurons to validate the idea that if you try to smile to the people going through security, it tends to work better and put them in a better frame of mind and they tend to smile? Do you need mirror neurons to validate that idea? No. Why do it? Because, I think, it just seems to validate the idea in people’s mind. Oh, there’s mirror neurons. If I smile, I’m gonna activate the mirror neurons in their brain, right? So it’s maybe a perfect example for you. And you might be able to Google this and go beyond my anecdote and find that, by god the TSA is actually teaching mirror neurons to their airport security people in this country. I can tell you I was told that unequivocally.
DG: That’s the communication issue where I get really interested. Why are we persuaded in this way? Blah blah blah.
LC: You should look this one up. It’s probably gonna be tailor-made for you because I can promise you that I didn’t bring up the concept of mirror neurons. They did. How do you guys know about mirror neurons? Oh because they teach it to us in TSA training. And I had the exact reaction as you. Really? Why? Right? And the why is your question. So I try and approach these things again, as open minded as possible. I’m looking for, like you, bits of exciting, fruitful, true exploration while at the same time trying to avoid BS.
LC - Hype Segment 3:
LC: The way science works on complicated issues like brain and memory, you gotta get at it from multiple different angles. Each has its own strength and its own weaknesses and out of all that, you’re trying to assemble a picture. And you do that slowly and painfully, and you don’t have one finding and then run to, 'oh this is why men go to sleep in board meetings.' Right? I think that’s the fundamental problem, is that you have to go about this slowly, painfully, haltingly, falling through the ice, making your mistakes, getting back up, and carefully. And it’s damn easy to run wild and sell tickets but you’re not helping the real search for the truth. You’re harming it with the possible exception of what you alluded to before. Even though you’re selling tickets and saying a lot of things that aren’t true, you’re still drawing people into the broader issue. I hardly, I have trouble believe that’s enough of a rationalization and I’m still not convinced. Because you know why? I’ve done enough talking to teachers that I know you can do it in a more honest, straightforward, knowledgeable way and still get them really interested. So why do we need the snake oil stuff? So actually this has been interesting. It’s been helping me to think through. You’ve asked me connections with humanities people, social sciences people, answer not much except psychologists with specific questions about memory and hormones. And whatnot. But why couldn’t you use, you know, why couldn’t you use the methods of neuroscience to ask interesting questions about how rhetorical devices work?