Brain Power

How do we cope with the complexity of the modern world and foster local and global solidarity in the face of diversity and individualism? Solutions to these challenges will come from our growing desire to shape our neurological processes, says Jonathan Carr-West

Anxiety and progress often go hand in hand. We feel as though the world we have shaped is constantly surging beyond our capacity to understand it; that, in pursuing progress, we have created forces we cannot make sense of and which lie beyond our control.

This anxiety is not new: over the past 250 years, the RSA has striven both to be an agent of progress and to make sense of the world around us. However, the modern world presents particular anxieties. These are manifested as a generalised discomfort and as a reaction to specific political challenges such as climate change, mass migration or social cohesion.

These challenges are characterised by their complexity, scale and unpredictability and rising to them will require a combination of skills. We will need to understand them fully and clearly; we must have the imagination to find solutions to them and the skills – as well as the political and social will – to drive and implement change.

We should not be complacent. History shows us that societies unable to appreciate the challenges they face, or lacking the abilities or readiness to address them, can be destroyed. But we should not despair: if the challenges we face are of their time, so too are the potential responses to them.

The RSA is embarking on a major project based on the belief that a set of solutions is emerging that revolves around our growing knowledge about the brain and our desire to shape our neurological processes. Advances in neuroscience and insights into human psychology from disciplines such as behavioural economics and social psychology could help us to think about how we rise to the challenges.

In the past 20 or 30 years, we have learned a lot about the way in which the mind works and its physical underpinnings in the brain. We are beginning to understand how specific mental processes relate to the physical architecture of the brain (as in the famously enlarged hippocampi of London taxi drivers) and how those physical structures are changed by new learning and experiences. Groundbreaking work by professor of psychology, Elizabeth Gould at Princeton University, has demonstrated the existence of neurogenesis (the creation of new neurons) in the brain of adult primates, where it had previously been a central tenet of neuroscience that occurred only before, and immediately after, birth.

More importantly, Gould showed that neurogenesis is directly affected by the external environment and that stressful environments prohibit neurogenesis and damage the brain, but that these effects can be reversed by a change in conditions. This new knowledge has radical and controversial implications for how we think about poverty and equality of opportunity.

Meanwhile, psychologist James Flynn, as he argued in the last edition of this journal, believes that, given the right environment, our brains can increase their cognitive capacity. Over many years his work has documented what is now known as the ‘Flynn effect’: the massive growth of IQ scores from one generation to another. Flynn believes that these gains are based upon real improvements in certain cognitive skills, particularly the use of logic, abstraction and the hypothetical to solve problems.

A greater understanding

In addition to understanding more about how our brains work physically, we are also developing a better understanding of the ways in which people actually behave, even when we are not certain about the neural processes involved. Much recent work in economics, psychology and sociology moves away from a theory-based account of human behaviour, towards sophisticated predictive models of how people actually behave.

Examples of this include psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s Nobel Prize-winning ‘prospect’ theory that models actual behaviour rather than optimal choices when people make decisions about risks. Likewise, sociologist Robert Cialdini’s work in social psychology provides us with a more sophisticated account of how persuasion works in changing our beliefs and behaviour, while psychologist Dan Gilbert provides a compelling analysis of how we predict future happiness poorly but post-rationalise our choices.

These analyses of individual motivation are matched by a greater understanding of the sort of predictive laws that apply to large-scale collective phenomena. For example, American economist Thomas Schelling’s dynamic models of segregation,  which show how small preferences about not wanting to live in a minority can aggregate to create totally segregated communities.

This kind of work is already finding its way into public policy. For example, recent changes in UK policy in relation to blood donation and post-16 education that require people to opt out, are partly informed by the growing influence of libertarian paternalism. In this, the state seeks to accommodate idiosyncrasies of human psychology, such as the way we discount future benefit, by providing structural incentives to make more ‘rational’ choices without overriding the absolute freedom to choose not to.

Thinking and behaviour

Overall, we have more knowledge about the plasticity of the brain and its ability to reorder neural pathways in response to experience. We are starting to understand how this plasticity is affected by external environments and how to manipulate and control it to improve (or at least strengthen) our cognitive abilities. We also know more about how and why individuals and societies behave as they do. But there are still missing links in our knowledge that prevent us from applying what we do know as systematically and beneficially as we might. Moreover, while beginning to influence policy in some areas, this field remains largely an academic discourse and is not subject to wider public debate.  

We are beginning to form ideas about what constitutes the basic ‘hard-wiring’ of our minds: the physical architecture of our brains and the sort of mental processes to which it gives rise. Increasingly, we understand the relationship between neurophysiological processes and our ideas, beliefs and knowledge about the world. We know more about how our neural processes are changed by our experiences and environment throughout our lives and have gained deeper insights into the relationship between cultural systems, social norms and the external factors that shape our thinking and behaviour.

While we understand more about how each of these areas interacts with the others, we do not yet have a consistent theoretical model of what we might call a neurological dialectic. By that, we mean an account of how the fixed structures of the brain, neurological processes and external influences combine to shape the way we think. This is a significant prize, because grasping how this dialectic works is the first step towards being able to influence it. Of course, we are far from such an understanding, and there remains much more that we don’t know about how our brains work. But we do know enough to be able to reflect meaningfully upon our cognitive processes and to take seriously the idea that we may be able to intervene deliberately to shape them. For the RSA, two distinct but related fields of enquiry arise from this. One is around the public policy implications of what we already know about how cognitive processes work. The other is around how new knowledge about brain function helps us to predict and even form the way we think about the world.

Some elements of this cognitive science have been popularised, as evidenced by the success of ‘Mind Gym’ and brain training games. However, there has not yet been a consistent attempt to build an overarching intellectual framework that allows public interpretation and application of its insights. This should concern anyone with an interest in progress and the fulfilment of human potential. The box below gives an example of how our understanding of the physiological processes has enabled change.

Public health to the perfect athlete

Although people have always had a broad understanding of how comparatively healthy particular environments were, it was only in the 19th century, as we began to understand in reasonably precise terms how and why things such as contaminated water, insanitary conditions and air pollution impacted on physical health, that we were able to achieve real progress on public health.

Moreover, our ideas about physical health do not simply involve fixing problems: we have a broadly shared idea of what a healthy body is and what we need to do in order to have one (there are of course important debates around the edges of this). This understanding has become more sophisticated as our knowledge of physiology has grown – though we are still a long way from consensus, as constantly changing health recommendations remind us.

We have always known how to improve the body’s performance: by running a lot, for example, you will become better at running. But as we have come to understand more about the physiological processes involved, we have been able to devise more sophisticated training regimes that increase performance to previously unimaginable levels.

We may not yet be at the point where modern neuroscience is able to deliver an understanding of the brain that would enable comparable shifts in relation to our neurological processes. And even if it could, there remains a host of questions about the ethics of such interventions. Nonetheless, it is clear that thinking about how to improve the cognitive abilities of individuals and our collective ability to conceptualise the world will be crucial in tackling many of the challenges we face in the 21st century.

It has a direct bearing on contemporary policy debates, including, but not limited to, education, mental frailty in the elderly, equality of opportunity, wellbeing and contentment. Applying a real knowledge of the neurological processes involved would make these interventions more effective. For example, how does what we know about neural adaptability in old age help us to think about the way in which we organise residential care for the elderly? Or how do new insights into the impact of external environments on neurogenesis help us to deliver early years childcare policies?

Understanding the way in which our neural processes interact with the way in which we think about the world is crucial because the challenges of our era require us, above all, to deal with complexity. If we are to find ways to mitigate or adapt to climate change, to live effectively in increasingly diverse societies or prosper within a globalised economy, we will need certain key cognitive skills. We will have to process vast quantities of information where little or nothing is certain and where authority is a far more fluid concept than ever before. We will need to be able to analyse and make predictions about increasingly complex feedback mechanisms and have the flexibility to adjust rapidly when these predictions prove inaccurate.

More fundamentally, rising to these challenges may require us to evolve new mental models of the world. We know that these models matter because they determine what we are able to think: what relationships and causalities we can conceive, what problems we can see and what solutions we can imagine. Our mental models of the world also include the sets of habits, social norms and unconscious influences that shape our behaviour.

The impact of these models can be profound. In his book Collapse, the evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond has shown how the cognitive paradigms of societies such as the Easter Islanders, the Maya or the Greenland Norse prevented them from recognising and responding to environmental challenges and ultimately led to their complete destruction.
Do we have the mental models we need to meet the challenges of our time? In a world in which everything happens at once, we will need to reconceptualise notions of space and time, of linearity and of cause and effect. None of these challenges can be addressed by individuals acting alone. We live in a global, interconnected world in which our levels of social, economic and environmental interdependence are greater than ever. At the same time, our mental models of social solidarity and collective agency – the nation state, the geographical community, the plc to name a few – have not kept pace with this interdependence. We must rethink social relations and find new ways of organising ourselves collectively in response to the challenges and opportunities of our age.

Our growing knowledge about our brains and our ability to intervene in our own neural processes may offer us an unprecedented opportunity to shape our behaviours (conscious and unconscious) and to rise to current challenges. This potential will remain unfulfilled unless we can develop a cogent and accessible framework (bringing together science, social science, ethics, public policy) through which the wider public can understand, interpret, debate and exploit these possibilities. Developing this framework is the aspiration behind the RSA’s ambitious new project.

Noam Chomsky once divided the things we do not know into problems and mysteries. Drawing on this distinction, the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker claims that “dozens of mysteries of the mind, from mental images to romantic love, have recently been upgraded from mysteries to problems”. Perhaps so, but if we want to prosper and be happy in the world that our minds have made, they may be problems with which we must all engage.