This week, Horizon, the BBC's 'flagship' science programme, considered the brain and violence in an episode featuring Michael Portillo. It may still be on the BBC's iPlayer, or you could try YouTube.
The choice of presenter worked well. Politicians engaging in this kind of personal exploration can be toe-curling, but not our Mr P. I remember him mainly because of the exultation with which friends and colleagues reacted when he lost his seat as a Conservative MP in the UK general election of 1997, a defeat which came to symbolise the trouncing of a government. In this programme, however, Portillo came across as startlingly nice. Especially when he was cruelly deprived of sleep for hours on end by two artificial babies. His restraint - he somehow managed not to assault either them or the experimenters - was admirable.
So much for the personality, what about the science? Remember, this is a major national network, communicating the cutting edge of brain research. Expect to be informed? Looking forward to some revelations? (You can see it coming, can't you?)
It was the pictures that got me putting on my pedant hat. If you've watched any documentary on brains, you've probably seen these or something very like them. Pretty (and pretty unhelpful) 3-D images of glowing brains, with regions colour-coded (though rarely named). Then a shot of some neurons growing dendrites. In TV-world they hang suspended in space, as if 'empty-headed' should be taken literally. Moving lights represent neurotransmission, but no explanation of what anything actually is or what's going on (for an example which at least makes neurons look more complicated than Horizon did, try here). No sight of anything real, let alone glia, or myelin, or blood. These brains look less like the things in our heads than Lara Croft looks like your average human female.
As for the revelations, they appeared to consist of:
1) people can enjoy violence. No shit Sherlock. But there's more: "the rush we get from dopamine can get us physically addicted to violence". Evidence? One man who said he'd been addicted to fighting. Measurements of dopamine metabolites before and after fighting? Brain scans showing a nucleus accumbens gone berserk? No, just an anecdote with an N of 1.
2) the prefrontal cortex controls the "the emotional centre in our brain". Change the wording from anatomy to function and you get the claim that the ‘rational' mind controls the ‘emotional' bits. If TV'd been around way back when, the gogglebox could have had Freud on it telling us that, or even Plato.
Platitudes about "the emotional centre in our brain" also beg the question: "Which bits are you talking about?" Who knows? From the radiant brains I'd guess they meant the amygdala, but there's more to emotional life than the amygdala, and there's more to the amygdala than generating violent impulses. Likewise for references to the "pre-frontal cortex", which in brain terms is a damn big place with a lot of different processes going on.
An analogy: if someone tells you that in 2003 Britain decided to go to war in Iraq, you might conclude that everyone in Britain thought the war was a good idea, or even that we were all consulted. Not so. The decision was made by a tiny number of people, and there was nothing the rest of us could do about it. I'm not saying the next time you do something dumb you should imagine frustrated prefrontal brain cells yelling at their colleagues, "Are you nuts? What were you thinking?" I am saying that the prefrontal cortex is not a simple functional unit, but a diverse arena with room for contradiction and complexity.
When I've had these kind of conversations with media people, they usually say they want to keep it simple. Anything not tightly focused on the argument's irrelevant; audiences aren't interested in that level of detail. How they're so sure of this I don't know; perhaps they've done surveys measuring the speed with which people's eyes glaze over on hearing the word ‘amygdala'. But then why bother to mention the brain at all? What does a statement like "Fighting is a primeval pleasure controlled by the frontal part of the brain" really add to our understanding of why people fight? Genuine knowledge? Or a sheen of spurious authority? Why this insistence that science has all the answers? It doesn't.
Does this matter? Shouldn't I just lock my pedant hat in a cupboard and watch The Wire instead? Perhaps, but the issue of scientific authority is important, especially when it's used to, in effect, shut down further discussion. We get told "the prefrontal cortex controls aggression" - but nothing about how; if a scientist says it's so that's good enough, apparently. So much for the scientific ideal of open enquiry, which encourages questioning and debate. Just believe, folks, and keep on funding the research.
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