Changing Minds
Project briefing
Major social change occurs when profound challenges are matched by the emergence of powerful new solutions. In the face of many of today's social challenges a set of new solutions are being proposed. These solutions revolve around our ever growing knowledge about the brain and our growing desire to shape our neurological processes. We are entering a period of neurological reflexivity; a time when we can consciously seek to affect a rewiring of our own and others' brains in order to cope better with the demands of today's and tomorrow's world.
This project seeks to develop a cogent and accessible intellectual framework (bringing together science, social science, ethics, public policy) through which the wider public can understand, interpret, debate and exploit these new possibilities.
What is the problem?
Over the past three decades, scientists and philosophers have accumulated unprecedented knowledge about the way our minds work and the physical underpinnings of these processes in the brain.
This new knowledge takes several key forms:
- We have more robust theories about how our minds evolved and for what function.
- We know more about the physical processes in the brain that underpin mental operations.
- We understand a lot more about the idiosyncrasies of human cognitive processes and are able to offer more sophisticated predictive accounts of why people and societies act as they do.
- We have made new discoveries about the plasticity of the brain and its relationship to external environments.
This has led to the emergence of a "neurological reflexivity", an ability to think about thinking and to act consciously to alter the way in which our minds work.
This has the potential to drive large scale social change in two ways. Firstly, through the application of what we already know about neurological development to a range of public policy challenges, e.g. education, mental frailty in the elderly, equality of opportunity, well being and contentment. Secondly, by understanding more about how to shape our collective models of the world and apply them to the major challenges of our time. This potential will be unfulfilled, however, unless we have a consistent and accessible intellectual framework within which to understand, contextualise and apply these ideas.
Our response
The RSA proposes to investigate these issues through a major new project which will work through three ambitious levels.
- Firstly, by taking the debate about the potential of new brain science to assist social progress out of the academy or the laboratory and into the public arena.
- Secondly, by investigating the public policy implications of what we know about the ways in which individual's cognitive capacity can be enhanced.
- Finally, we will work with leading thinkers to explore how we can enhance our understanding of the relationship between brain plasticity and major shifts in the way we think about the world.
