Neuropolis: A Brain Science Survival Guide

COPYRIGHT

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017

Text © Robert Newman 2017

Cover design by Jonathan Pelham

The author asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008228651

Ebook Edition © April 2017 ISBN: 9780008228699

Version: 2017-04-11

For Yana and Billy

LIST OF CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

1 Voxel & I

2 On Rafts Across the Sea of Okhotsk

3 Humouring the Chameleon

4 When You’re Snarling

5 Phineas Gage and the Myth of the Supermax Brain

6 Robot New Man

7 I’m Looking Through You

8 Pavlov’s Disobedient Dogs

9 ‘Scientists Discover the Love Spot’

10 The Neurobiology of Guilt

11 Why the Long Face?

12 Like Yesterday

13 The Myth of the Stone Age Brain

14 ‘Found: The Brain’s Centre of Wisdom’

15 The Death of Allegory

16 The Body’s in Trouble

17 The Fabergé Brain

18 A Strange Kind of Realism

19 Too Much Monkey Business

20 How Mind Makes Brain

21 The Origin of Mind

22 Attack of the Killer Sci-Fi

23 The Neurobabble and the Damage Done

Bibliography

Thanks and Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

To read the current crop of brain science books and articles is to discover that we live in ‘a colourless, odourless, tasteless, silent world’,* where ‘smiling evolved from an aborted snarl,’† where ‘Japanese people struggle to tell the difference between fear and surprise,’‡ and where ‘there is nothing special about human brains that a sufficiently complex computer couldn’t do just as well’.§ So much so, in fact, that some suggest we will soon be able to ‘upload consciousness, escaping the biological wetware from which we have arisen’.¶

* David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You, 2015.

† V. S. Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain, 1998.

‡ Dick Swaab, We Are Our Brains, 2014.

§ Brian Cox, interview by Hannah Devlin,The Times, 6 September 2014.

¶ David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You, 2015.

This sort of talk slanders and libels us but it is also very funny with its runaway extrapolations that leave science far behind. In fact this book grew out of a stand-up comedy show called The Brain Show, which toured for a hundred gigs, and then developed into a BBC Radio 4 comedy series.

My argument in this book is that brainless interpretations of brain science are doing our heads in more than we know by giving us a dehumanising and pessimistic picture of ourselves. This picture, I argue, derives not from science at all but from philosophical stowaways. Indeed if we look at what the latest neuroscience actually tells us, then a very different picture emerges.

‘But who are you to talk about any of this?’ was one interviewer’s opening question to me on live national radio. I opened and closed my mouth like a roach on a riverbank. Minutes passed. I just didn’t know what to say. I never did come up with a reply. Who am I indeed to trespass on the brain scientist’s bailiwick?

In his 1940 lecture series Dynamics of Psychology, however, German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler praised ‘trespassing as a scientific technique’, on the grounds that what is merely special data in one field may turn out to have much broader significance in another. Now this doesn’t mean the trespasser sees the big picture in a way that eludes everyone else. Trespassing can be helpful by accidentally treading spores from one field into another, where they unexpectedly start fizzing and wriggling into life. Or the trespasser might find fertilizer sacks full of rubble and rusty cogs blocking the entrances to badger setts. Certainly one of the great joys of researching this book has been to disinter fascinating brain science buried under all the reductive bluster.

And then there’s the fact that brain science appears to have arrogated to itself all understanding of human behaviour anyway, which makes it kind of hard to move a muscle without trespassing. In fact, since the brain science fiefdom now includes life, the universe and everything, the question is who is the real trespasser here? In the words of the great comedian Michael Redmond:

People are always saying to me, ‘What are you doing in my back garden?’ To which I reply: ‘What are you doing in my house?’

Let’s go and climb the back steps and see what they are doing in our house.

1. VOXEL & I

From the get-go, it is important to remind ourselves that brain-imaging does not actually film your brain in action. There is no live action footage of thoughts or feelings. No one will ever be able to read your mind – except your mum. Brains do not light up during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG). Strictly speaking fMRI and EEG are not techniques of brain imaging but of blood imaging, since they track blood flows to different brain regions on the working hypothesis that active neurons devour more oxygen, and blood is the brain’s oxygen delivery service.

On 17 May 2016 the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA published the first comprehensive review of 25 years of fMRI data*. The conclusions were damning:

* Anders Eklund, Thomas E. Nichols & Hans Knutsson, ‘Cluster failure: Why fMRI inferences for spatial extent have inflated false-positive rates’, PNAS, 2016.

In theory, we should find 5 per cent false positives … but instead we found that the most common software packages for fMRI analysis … can result in false-positive rates of up to 70 per cent. These results question the validity of some 40,000 fMRI studies and may have a large impact on the interpretation of neuroimaging results.

In 2009, the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science published ‘Puzzlingly High Correlations in fMRI Studies of Emotion, Personality and Social Cognition’. (Original title: ‘Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience’).* Two of the paper’s authors, Ed Vul and Harold Pashler first became suspicious when they heard a conference speaker claim he could predict from brain-images how quickly someone would walk out of a room two hours later. This had to be voodoo.

* Ed Vul et al., Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2009.

Imagine a scenario in which roaring floodwaters smash the office windows. Your colleagues flee, but then turn back to see you stranded in the rising water.

‘Save yourself!’ they cry. ‘Run for you life!’

‘You go on ahead’, you holler back. ‘I’m not gonna make it. I decided a couple of hours back on an airy saunter through the doorway.’

‘Well, sashay for your life! Mince like you’ve never minced before!’

Vul et al. set about re-examining the data. They surveyed the authors of 55 published fMRI papers and found that half acknowledged using a strategy that cherry-picked only those voxels exceeding chosen thresholds. These cherry-picked voxels were then averaged out as if they were the average of all voxels, not just the ones that fit the hypothesis they were supposed to prove. This strategy, says Ed Vul, ‘inflates correlations while yielding reassuring-looking scattergrams.’

Voxels are the organisation of statistical correlations into cuboid 3D pixels. Each cube represents a selective sample of billions of brain cells. They provide a computer-generated image of what brain activity would look like if cherry-picked statistics matched raw data. Together the cubes build a Minecraft map of the mind.

To form each cuboid voxel, you collate all the neuronal clusters that have a blood oxygen level of x at split second 0.0000001 with all the ones that have a value x at split-second 0.0000007. Junk all the non-x brain cell activity going on between 0.0000002 and 0.0000006. (Call it ‘noise’). Now amalgamate your cherry-picked voxel with other voxels, (themselves boxes of cherry-picked data), and there you have your fMRI picture showing which region of the brain spontaneously ‘lights up’ when we are thinking about love or loss or buying a house. There you have the murky world of the technicolour voxel.

Ed Vul et al. call this strategy ‘non-independent analysis’. To illustrate how this strategy inflates correlations they used it to show how daily share values on the New York Stock Exchange could be accurately ‘predicted’ by the recorded fluctuations in temperature at a weather station on Adak Island in Alaska. Here’s how it works. Non-independent analysis simply skims the strongest correlations between each of the 3,315 stocks being offered on Wall Street, and finds a handful whose value appears to strongly correlate with the previous day’s temperature drops on the windswept Alaskan tundra.

‘For $50, we will provide the list of stocks to any interested reader,’ wrote Ed Vul. ‘That way, you can buy the stock every morning when the weather station posts a drop in temperature, and sell when the temperature goes up.’

Not long after came the banking crash. It turned out that Wall Street had been using some ‘non-independent analysis’ of its own. In the same way that fMRI false positives are boxed up into cuboid voxels, Wall Street was boxing bad debt into mortgage bonds and ‘collateralised debt obligations’, or CDOs – better known as the wobbly stack of Jenga blocks Ryan Gosling eloquently demolishes in The Big Short.

And yet ponzi voxels were to rescue ponzi bonds. Newsrooms used brain-imaging data to explain the banking crash. Neuroscience helped shift the blame from banks to brains, and from rich to poor. It turned out that the system of short-term greed that caused the banking crash was the limbic system. Neuroeconomists

popped up on the nightly news to explain that sub-prime mortgages were entered into by people who let their limbic system’s urge for instant gratification triumph over the prudence of their prefrontal lobes. Those who lack the mental strength to resist the limbic system’s short-term greed, it turned out, would always make bad property investments. Grotesquely, ponzi voxels rescued ponzi bonds by shifting the blame onto the feckless poor.

A huge jar of sweets in a sweetshop window

To want to understand human behaviour is a human need, but frustratingly the answers are always complex and incomplete. There is no royal road to the truth, just a multiplicity of weakly-acting causal pathways. And so when we are shown a new technology that appears to answer our deepest questions, it is only human for us to want to fill our boots. EEG and fMRI are what we have been looking for all along: shiny machines that produce simple answers to complex questions. Better yet, these answers come in the form of vivid arrangements of 3D voxels, like a huge jar of sweets in a sweet shop window.

In the rush for a quick-fix answer to a complex problem did any neuroeconomist or Newsnight presenter ever think to blame their own limbic system for overpowering the prefrontal cortex? Why wasn’t the way they themselves snatched at simplistic answers symptomatic of short-term neural reward circuitry?

One of several experiments to which neuroeconomists alluded to in the wake of the banking crash was an investigation into ‘neural reward circuitry, which measured blood oxygen levels in different brain areas when people were offered five dollars now, and when they were offered forty dollars six weeks from now. The instant five-dollar cash offer represents the sub-prime mortgage. But this is the economics of the Wendy house. ‘Only a behavioural economist,’ says philosopher and neuroscientist Raymond Tallis,

would regard responses to a simple imaginary choice [$5 now or $40 later] as an adequate model for the complex business of securing a mortgage. Even the most foolish and ‘impulsive’ mortgage decision requires an enormous amount of future planning, persistence, clerical activity, to-ing and fro-ing, and a clear determination to sustain you through the million little steps it involves. I would love to meet the limbic system that could drive all that.*

* Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind, 2014.

* * *

I am keen to draw a sharp distinction between MRI’s medical applications and its use in waffle about the neural basis of poor investment decisions and the like.

Brain-imaging helps oncologists track the success of different treatments in halting the spread of brain tumours. MRI can show the rate at which dementia is progressing. It can be used to assess the extent of damage caused by a stroke and to predict the likely recovery of brain and body function. I would probably not be able to walk but for MRI. Thanks to the magnetic resonance imaging machine at London’s Royal Free Hospital, surgeons could tell at a glance that they needed to perform an emergency discectomy and laminectomy on my spine. The Registrar told me there was a two per cent chance that I would emerge from surgery doubly incontinent, in a wheelchair and in unbearable agony for the rest of my life. Sign here. But thanks to the skill and expertise of the surgeons, and thanks to magnetic resonance imaging showing them exactly where to go and what to do when they got there, I am back on my feet.

None of the medical applications just mentioned involve voxels, those 3D pixels made from crunched numbers. The voxel is a monument to the confusion of mythology with science. The wonderful medical uses of MRI lend credibility to all the mythologising.

It’s only twenty-five years since brain-imaging got going. You might think the novelty of brain-imaging would make us less prone to mythologise the brain, but in fact it makes us more so. We have been mythologising the heart long enough to know when we are doing it. We don’t confuse love hearts for real ones. With brains it is different.

We mythologise the brain by stashing philosophical stowaways in the uncomplaining hideouts of the nucleus accumbens and ventromedial striatum. These philosophical stowaways include for example, the revival of out and out predestinarianism that you find in We Are Our Brains, the 2015 international bestseller by renowned Dutch neuroscience researcher Dick Swaab:

our levels of aggression and stress are set before birth for the rest of our lives.

I don’t know about you but I was feeling pretty laid-back until I read that. Let us examine some of the other way out claims made in We Are Our Brains.

2. ON RAFTS ACROSS THE SEA OF OKHOTSK

We Are Our Brains is written by a man with a grudge against humanity on account of being called Dick Swaab. Dick Swaab argues that people from Japan and Papua New Guinea struggle to tell the difference between fear and surprise:

Japanese and New Guineans find it difficult to distinguish between a face expressing fear and a face expressing surprise.

A thought experiment seems in order.

Let’s say, Yoko Ono is having her annual business meeting with Paul McCartney to settle the Beatles estate. If, during the course of that meeting, she finds herself struggling to decipher what exactly Paul McCartney’s facial expression might possibly mean, then she is no different from the rest of us, who have shared her perplexity ever since that day about a dozen years ago, when McCartney went into his plastic surgeon’s and said: ‘I’m tired of expressing lots of different emotions, can you give me just a rictus of mild surprise and vague curiosity?’

‘Sure,’ replied the surgeon. ‘Do you want a hint of disingenuousness with that?’

‘I don’t think that’ll be necessary do you?’

Paul McCartney seems to get by pretty well with just the one emotion on his face. In live performance, however, he concedes that the rictus of mild surprise and vague curiosity has changed the emotional register of the songs. As he told one interviewer:

If you take a song like ‘Eleanor Rigby’, when we did it with Beatles it was always very much a song about pity and compassion. Now, when I perform ‘Eleanor Rigby’ live, it’s much more a song about mild surprise and vague curiosity. Sort of, ‘Ooh, I wonder where all those lonely people came from all of a sudden?’

The argument that the Japanese cannot tell fear from surprise contradicts one of the central tenets of human evolutionary biology. ‘I have endeavoured to show in considerable detail,’ wrote Darwin in The Expression of the Emotions In Man and Animals:

that all the chief expressions exhibited by man are the same throughout the world. This fact is interesting, as it affords a new argument in favour of the several races being descended from a single parent-stock, which must have been almost completely human in structure, and to a large extent in mind, before the period at which the races diverged from each other.

Everything significant about our species was already well in place 35,000 years ago when Paleolithic sailors rafted across the Sea of Okhotsk to become the first humans to make landfall on the Japanese archipelago. If Dick Swaab is going to take a sledgehammer to the Darwinian principle that all people everywhere express emotions in pretty much the same way, then we might reasonably expect him to provide some evidence. I mean, that’s a mainstay of human biology. But Dick Swaab produces no evidence to support his claim. None. In fact, the atrocious allegation that the entire Japanese nation suffers from a sort of autism is made in a book which offers no sources or footnotes at all.

The New Guineans are also supposed to be unable to do what is child’s play for Africans, Europeans and continental Asians, and tell fear from surprise. And Dick Swaab has worked out why. It’s because: ‘linguistic and cultural environments … determine … how facial expressions are interpreted’.

Over 800 different languages are spoken in Papua New Guinea and West Papua, and they not even from the same language families. The Ternate spoken in West Papua is from a different language family to the Austronesian and Papuan languages spoken in Port Moresby. Nowhere else on earth exhibits such linguistic diversity. Nowhere else on earth, therefore, is it less likely that a common language could create a shared inability to read facial expressions. Dick Swaab literally could not have chosen a worse example from the face of the earth than ‘New Guineans’ to support his argument. But Dick Swaab is on a roll. Don’t stop him now:

When surveying a scene, Chinese individuals, unlike Americans, don’t focus on a single object at a time but look at it in relation to its surroundings.

Last time I looked, the United States of America was a new-ish political state created from every race and nation on earth. According to the US Census Bureau, more than a fifth of the population, over sixty million people, speak a language other than English in the home. Americans are not a biological entity. They are not a linguistic one either. There is no specifically American way of seeing, just as there is no Chinese way of seeing. The Chinese people are not a Terracotta Army all facing one way, all seeing everything holistically the whole time. When NASA astronaut Mae Jemison, of mixed East-Asian and African-American descent, looked out of the Space Shuttle Endeavour’s window did she see the big picture or the small?

In her memoir Find Where The Wind Goes, Mae Jemison wrote that ‘science provides an understanding of a universal experience’.* What is so terribly damaging about Dick Swaab’s parascience is precisely its denial of the universality of human experience.

* Mae Jemison, Find Where The Wind Goes: Moments From My Life, 2001.