Science and Cruelty

Antidotes to human nastiness

Kathleen Taylor — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:05:16 +0000

Being a victim of cruelty can be fatal. For those who survive, it can be incredibly unpleasant, demoralising (in more than one sense of the word) and painful. Often the scars remain for ages, even for what may appear to be quite minor acts of cruelty - verbal abuse at school, for instance.

Even learning about cruelty done to others can leave you appalled, depressed and unnerved by the human capacity for nastiness.

Writing a book about cruelty affected me this way. Walking down a street, I'd be looking at people and thinking, "You know, it wouldn't take much to turn you all into victims -- or perpetrators".

What I needed was antidotes to cruelty, and I found them. Here are seven of the best, my favourite self-help techniques. Do they work for you? If not, what do you turn to when the horrors on the news make you feel a little sickened by humanity?

1) Friends and family
Nothing new here. If you're lucky enough to have them, the feeling that out of all those myriads, there are a few to whom your existence matters provides a kind of security I've found nowhere else.

2) Music
Another age-old remedy. If we're talking classics, for piercing calm how about Bach's Goldberg Variations; for taking anguish and making it manageable, Schubert or Mahler or the Strauss Four Last Songs; and for moving on from pain, Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody. For sheer exuberant joy, you might want to investigate the Duckworth-Lewis Method -- if you haven't come across this great album, it's real feel-good music.

3) Nature
Well-known effects: getting away from people into a garden or the countryside can help to remind us that there's more to life than human beings being horrible. And taking exercise can help with mood, too.

4) Jokes
Many jokes are cruelty in a sugar pill of humour, but not all. I have a liking for surreal jokes ("How many Martians does it take to change a lightbulb? One and a half.") What kind of humour gives you a warm glow?

5) Classic Novels
Reading is escape, they say. Escaping to the civilised worlds portrayed by, say, Anthony Trollope or Jane Austen; or the vivid lives of characters in Dickens or Eliot, is sometimes dismissed as a failure to face 'the real world'. As if reality is and must be only the worst bits. A book can show you how other people feel -- especially a meaty book like these, which gives you time to get to know the characters. The best authors, like George Eliot, can make you sympathise with people even when they are misguided or deeply unlikeable. I know theorists pour scorn on the idea of literature as facilitating empathy, but I'm not ready to give up on it yet.

6) Science
Turning off the news, deciding people are 'just evil' -- it can spare us the pain, but it doesn't solve the problem. I believe that understanding cruelty gives us the best hope of getting rid of it. Of course, that means more exposure, not less, to begin with. But realising that even the worst kinds of human behaviour may have causes we can change brings the hope of control, and eventual improvement.

7) Housework
I mean it! Finite, achievable tasks, obvious results ... If the news has left you feeling the world's a mess and there's nothing you can do about it, domestic drudgery's a great way to boost your sense of control. Most of the mess will still be there when you're done -- but not all.

What do you think? What have I missed? Let me know your tried-and-tested antidotes.

Could we stop killing?

Kathleen Taylor — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 19:43:46 +0000

Just back from Philadelphia, and a colloquium on neuroscience and violence, organised by the Center for Global Non-Killing, a young but vigorous organisation which aims to reduce and eventually eliminate killing by human beings.

Don't I sound like a jet setter! In fact it's the first time I'd been to the States for so long that the last time I went I didn't have a mobile phone - how sad is that? I'd forgotten how friendly, efficient, smart and optimistic Americans can be. Okay, not all, but the stereotypes which get bandied about in Britain were way off the mark for the people I was meeting. And I got a free day to look round Philadelphia, buying my lunch in Reading Terminal Market and admiring the gorgeous City Hall. No doubt the place has its problems - I gave my change to several beggars - but I thought it a fine city, fabulous architecture and great weather when I was there. One of these days I'd like to take a long vacation in the US, and Philadelphia is definitely on the list of places to explore.

So to the colloquium, in which I'll admit I was braced for wide-eyed evangelism, cloying naivete, or both; but in fact it was extremely interesting. Of the ten people there, two were from CGNK, three were senior scientists, four were at an earlier stage in their neuroscience careers, and one (me) was a science writer. We'd gathered to address the question of whether we thought a world without killing was possible, and what neuroscience could or couldn't do to help achieve that goal. There was plenty of critique during a vigorous, well-chaired discussion which ranged from history and anthropology through sociology and evolutionary psychology to the genetics of risk factors for aggression. Several of us queried what was meant by a world without killing, and there was plenty of debate about the role of neuroscience in addressing complex social problems. One point kept re-emerging: to reduce cruelty, violence and killing, you have to start early. If you'd like to know more, keep an eye on the CGNK website, I daresay they'll be posting about the colloquium.

Meanwhile I'd be interested to know what you think. Could a nonkilling world ever come to be? If so, how? And what would such a world be like?

Creeping up on consciousness

Kathleen Taylor — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 09:53:10 +0000

A thought-provoking paper has just been published in one of my favourite journals, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. I probably shouldn't spend so much time reading PNAS, but there's almost always something of interest, as well as the satisfying feeling of skipping past all the pieces I don't have to read. This particular paper is by Robert Shulman and colleagues, and it tackles the spiky problem of consciousness, bottom-up. You can find the abstract here, at least for the moment. The title is: Baseline brain energy supports the state of consciousness. The claim is that high levels of brain energy are necessary (not sufficient) for people (not brains) to be conscious. That is, consciousness is a property of persons: not brains, but the whole wet, squamous, physiological mess.

When I say thought-provoking, I mean it; this is no casual repetition of what I call the Heinz doctrine of neuroscience: the uninterrogated claim that brainz meanz mindz. These people have encountered Bennett and Hacker's critique of cognitive neuroscience, and have made use of it. They see cognitive neuroscience as beset by problems of interpretation, researchers smuggling in subjective terms and thereby polluting what should be objective measurements.

To avoid this problem, Shulman et al. define consciousness operationally, as ‘the behavioral ability to respond meaningfully to stimuli'. They review research suggesting that the conscious state is associated with widespread fMRI activity and with high frequency neuronal firing - both of which need plenty of fuel. As an anaesthetic induces unconsciousness cerebral metabolism almost halves, high frequency (e.g. gamma-band) electrical activity reduces, and changes in cerebral oxygen consumption occur which appear proportional to changes in neuronal firing rates. Hence the idea that high global brain energy supports and is necessary for the state of consciousness.

Why this approach? Here's what the authors say:

"Our experimental protocols are describing brain properties of the person in the state of consciousness. This approach does not promise descriptions of the contents of consciousness, which would be defining subjective mental processes in objective terms. However, it has identified brain properties for the human in a conscious state that change with loss of consciousness; properties, at the neuronal level which in their interconnections display the characteristics of consciousness.
"Why do we identify the conscious state in so limited a behavioral way, by the human's response to stimuli, which is simplistic compared with psychological efforts to formulate its meaning? Certainly, the property of responding to a stimulus does not do justice to the richness of mental processes usually intended for the word. However, the very jarring nature of this limited test for the existence of consciousness illustrates an important point that we have made above and elsewhere. Namely, to study mental processes, we do not assume them to be already described by cognitive psychology. Generalizations of psychological concepts like fear, memory, attention, or cognition are of great utility in everyday life, but assuming them introduces subjectivity into brain research. In gaining scientific objectivity by avoiding the study of subjective concepts, we have confined our studies to bottom-up neuronal properties that are sketching a neuronal basis for a behaviorally defined state of consciousness."

A pity, therefore, that the authors define consciousness as ‘the behavioral ability to respond meaningfully to stimuli'. Isn't that a hint of subjectivity creeping back in?

There's an intriguing implication of Shulman et al.'s research which especially interests me, not least because it supports an argument I've been making for years! (Published speculations can be found on my website (search for consciousness), or in my book Brainwashing, pp. 182-185.) If consciousness requires high brain energy, then the ‘automatization' which takes place as we learn reflects a transition to less energetic states. If the brain, like the rest of the body, is geared towards efficient energy usage by the demands of survival in our evolutionary past, then consciousness may be a marker of inefficiency. Which makes the prime function of brains not ‘thinking' after all, but rather ‘thinking avoidance' wherever possible.

Think about that, and human behaviour starts to make much more sense.

Of microwaves and their effects on brains

Kathleen Taylor — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 07:44:05 +0000

Recently, having written a book on the topic, I was interviewed for a programme about brainwashing on BBC Radio Four (still obtainable via the BBC iPlayer, for the next five days). The interviewer, Steve Punt, assured me that military experiments had shown it was possible to use microwave radiation to influence the brain, making people hear a clicking sound. It's a start. What it isn't, CIA dreams notwithstanding, is full-blown mind control.

Some of those dreams were so bizarre, and the CIA's experiments conducted in such determined secrecy, that it's little wonder conspiracy theories about mysterious methods of mind control have flourished. Yet such theories long predate the CIA. Back in the days of the French Revolution, a particularly well-developed version arose: the story of the Air Loom, a mysterious influencing machine able to focus powerful rays on the victim's brain and thereby control his thoughts. The Air Loom was said to be controlled by a gang of terrorists who wanted to prolong the war between France and Britain. (For more on this fascinating story, I recommend Mike Jay's book, The Air Loom Gang.)

As technology advanced - telegraphy, telephony, computers, wireless communication - the conspiracies kept pace, always slightly ahead, probing the murky territory between science fiction and schizophrenic delusion. The core stereotype and the narrative, however, seem pretty constant. Someone, somewhere, has achieved unparalleled control of other people's thoughts, beliefs and willpower. This hidden manipulator's malignant activity underlies those uncontrollable social and individual disturbances which we can't fathom: the economic collapses, the political upheavals, the dizzying cultural changes, the reasons behind what we hate about the world. Things may seem crazy, but there's a hidden meaning, if only we could find it.

James Tilly Matthews, who created, in extraordinary detail, the story of the Air Loom, appears to have been a lone believer: today he might be labelled schizophrenic. Many of the more extreme conspiracy theorists may also be prone to what psychologists call ‘magical ideation', schizotypal ways of thinking which see connections everywhere, handing out great dollops of meaning when other less magical minds perceive only coincidence.

But don't dismiss all conspiracy theories as harmless eccentricity. Directed against a group of people deemed ‘enemies', they can spur on lethal, genocidal violence. In the civilised, rational, forward-thinking West, we have plenty of examples of that particular despicable human behaviour, from the witch trials which followed (not preceded) the birth of the ‘age of reason' to the Holocaust, just decades ago. Whether the conspiracy is women in league with the devil or Jews conspiring to run and ruin Europe, ideas that seem laughable to us exerted a terrible cost in human suffering.

Has Myra Hindley's successor just been chosen?

Kathleen Taylor — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 15:51:49 +0000

Uproar in Plymouth, UK, today as a nursery assistant appears in court, charged with sexual assault and the making and distribution of indecent images of very young children. A woman, in a position of trust, perhaps abusing children in her care? Still worse, 39-year-old Vanessa George is reported to be married and a mother of two. It's a parent's nightmare.

It's also a journalist's dream. All those strong emotions: fear, guilt, innocent kids, and the loathing people feel for paedophiles. Also the attention-grabbing value of rarity, because this is an extremely unusual case. Vanessa George is older than your average nursery worker; she's older than your average criminal, and she's female. That doesn't make her unique, as Michele Elliott, director of the children's charity Kidscape, points out in today's Guardian newspaper - but it does make her a highly visible target. Like Myra Hindley, who assisted her lover Ian Brady in the torture and murder of children in the 1960s, George could become a nationwide hate figure.

In their press conferences, the police struck a reassuring note, emphasising the early stage of the investigation and the need to respect due legal process. They also commended the families involved for their calm reactions. Despite that, George's first appearance at court was greeted by an angry crowd, and the van carrying her was attacked.

George may, of course, be innocent (let us hope she gets a fair trial). If she is, her life in Plymouth may nonetheless be over, because the taint of paedophilia, however unjust, is one of the most potent social contaminants. If she is guilty, what motives could have led her to this atrocious behaviour? The love of money? Severe psychological abnormality, such as a personality disorder, perhaps following abuse? Submission, as in Myra Hindley's case, to the will of a much more powerful, dominant and dangerous man? At present we just don't know.

Researching my book Cruelty required me to study some of the worst behaviour ever carried out by human beings. In genocides, for example, the torture and murder of children and babies is routinely justified. I should be hardened by now, but the thought of paedophilia still makes me feel physically ill. I don't have children, but if anyone were to abuse my niece or nephew I'm well aware that my feelings would turn murderous. It's easy to empathise with the furious people outside the court in Plymouth. They sense a danger in their midst, a terrible moral evil, and they want to get rid of it.

It's harder to say: beware those feelings. We evolved to have them, to protect ourselves; but that was when we had no law, no police, no prisons. Those institutions protect us from cruelty. Not just the cruelty of others - they sometimes fail to manage that - but our cruelty. If Vanessa George is innocent, there will still be people who will want to hurt her, or kill her, or drive her out of their communities. If she is guilty, there will be many more. But if we abandon the law when it comes to paedophiles, we weaken it when it comes to everything else.

It's even harder - much, much harder - to acknowledge our feelings of revulsion without allowing them to deprive us of our reason. Yet we need to do this in order to understand why some people abuse children. It's hugely important to study such people, because child abuse can cause damage that lasts a lifetime.

Not all abuse is committed by paedophiles, but some is. How much? We don't know. We don't know much about paedophilia, except that it seems disturbingly common. Why are we so ignorant? Well, paedophilia research is so sensitive that very few people are brave enough to attempt it. Unsurprisingly, the syndrome is a scientific as well as a moral mystery. We're always hearing about new evolutionary explanations for human behaviour, but to my knowledge there is no adequate 'theory' of paedophilia, from evopsych researchers or anyone else.

This is bad news for children, frightened parents and the rest of us. Without understanding the problem, how can we ever start to solve it?

Torture research

Kathleen Taylor — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 18:41:06 +0000

An important study of torture by the remarkable Metin Basoglu has just appeared in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry. Dr Basoglu, who is at the Institute of Psychiatry of King's College, London, studied two groups of torture survivors (432 in total), one from Turkey and one from the former Yugoslavia. The article, which is accompanied by two commentaries, used principal components analysis to look at 'captivity stressors' and relate them to the perceived severity of the torture and to post-traumatic stress disorder in the victims. It provides yet another compelling argument for regarding torture as a social abomination, not a 'last resort'.

To read the list of stressors is to catch a glimpse of a world most people would prefer not to think about. The techniques include:

deprivation (of food, clothes, sleep, water, privacy, medical care, hygiene, sensory stimuli)
psychological abuse (e.g. sham executions, witnessing torture) and threats of torture or death against victims and their loved ones
physical restraint (including forced standing, and the fearsome 'Palestinian hanging' or strappado, in which the person is hung from their hands, which are tied behind their back)
extreme sensory stimuli (e.g. bright lights, noise, heat/cold)
humiliation (often involving excreta)
physical torture (beatings, needles under nails, electric shocks)
sexual torture (including rape)

Basoglu sees torture as having four components:

the perpetrator's intent (the action is deliberate)
the perpetrator's purpose (the action is done for a reason)
the stressors are selected to cause pain, suffering, distress
the victim's lack of control is deliberately enhanced

As so often, the sense of control appears to be the key here. That leads to several predictions, for which the study finds support. For example, political activists, who have been trained to deal with torture and are presumably highly committed to their cause, should feel more in control than non-activists, and thus should be harder for torturers to break. Indeed, one of the research's most astonishing findings, which Basoglu emphasises, is the awe-inspiring resilience some people display under torture.

This suggests that, contrary to what is often said about torture's value in gathering information, torture is best at breaking the innocent and uninvolved civilians caught in the system by mistake - and may fail to work against its real targets. It's also counterproductively good at radicalising victims, thereby storing up future problems for the torturing regime.

(If you were developing a test for cancer, would you want a test which gave positive results for non-cancerous cells, missed cancerous ones, and also damaged patients' DNA, hence raising their cancer risk? Who would? And yet people support the use of torture, which is good at making enemies but hopeless for seeking out truth. If torture weren't so good at making perpetrators - or, more specifically, their bosses - feel better, we'd have ditched its techniques on efficiency grounds alone, never mind the morals.)

If control matters, then the degradation of control inherent in cruel, inhuman and degrading treatments should make for more severe torture; the physical damage done should matter less to the victim. Again, Basoglu finds this.

The study does not mention former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's famous remarks on forced standing: "I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?" Nonetheless it demolishes the Bush government's equivocations over their interrogation techniques. Basoglu shows that what matters in torture is the combination and extent of techniques, and the helplessness they induce. You can't say a specific method isn't torture because it, by itself and taken out of context, doesn't actually cause severe physical damage. Physical damage is not the worst harm done in torture.

The philosophical riddle of the grains of sand asks, when does a group of grains become a heap? One grain isn't a heap, nor two, nor three, so adding one more grain can't turn 'some grains' into 'a heap' - yet a heap is what you get. Likewise for torture. Each technique by itself may seem innocuous (especially to the unthinking or wilfully ignorant). Put them together, and the suffering becomes unbearable.

Reference: Basoglu, M. (2009). "A multivariate contextual analysis of torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatments: Implications for an evidence-based definition of torture." American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 79(2): 135-145.

(Apologies to Dr Basoglu for font limitations, which prevent me rendering the Turkish symbols in his name.)

Milgram with bugs (II): Thinking and Findings

Kathleen Taylor — Wed, 27 May 2009 06:49:28 +0000

To see how killing can lead to more killing, a team of researchers got their volunteers to witness and join in the (faked) extermination of invertebrates. Pill bugs, similar to the woodlouse in the picture, were used.

In my words, not the authors' (except for the quotes), this is why they did what they did.

THE ARGUMENT

• killing is a horrible thing to do, and thus "provokes psychological discomfort or threat in the killer".

• this "cognitive dissonance" (Leon Festinger's term) prompts the killer to try to stop feeling so bad.

• One way to ease the misery is to try to justify the killing.

• Justifications can look to an external source, e.g. obeying orders; or, more frivolously, the T-shirt slogan: My rice krispies made me do it.

• Killing someone, however, is such a powerful expression of personal agency that blaming the boss, the cereal (killer?) or anyone else, can seem an inadequate response. So what to do?

• Well, the killer may reinterpret the killing, "to view it as other than it is". E.g. ethnic cleansing; massacres in El Salvador described as La Limpieza (the Clean-up); and so on.

• However it's done, if the behaviour is justified it tends to be maintained, or even reinforced.

The basic idea is that if people are persuaded (in a lab environment, with all the pressure to be helpful-and-obedient-to-scientists that Milgram noted) to commit an initial killing, this is a threat to their self-image as nice guys or gals.

How big a threat? That depends on how much they care about bugs. One aspect of this is perceived similarity: did the volunteers see themselves and the bugs as part of a unified creation sharing the earth, or were they more in the Réné Descartes animals-are-soulless-machines camp? The greater the perceived similarity (cunningly measured by questionnaire some weeks earlier), the greater the threat, so goes the theory.

Eighty-two volunteers (psychology students) were recruited. Those of you who love pill bugs will be glad to know that two refused even to start. Six more reckoned (correctly) that the bugs weren't really being killed. That left 74 woodlouse-mashers. Some were persuaded to feed a bug into the (fake) shredder; others only saw it being done. Then they were left alone with a row of bugs in cups and instructions to get exterminating.

THE HYPOTHESIS

Participants who experienced more threat from doing the initial killing would work harder to justify themselves, and so be readier to carry out the self-paced killings
Those who didn't initially kill, and who felt some similarity with the bugs, would be more reluctant to kill
Thus the researchers predicted an interaction between perceived similarity and numbers of bugs killed during the (self-paced) extermination task.

THE FINDINGS

Sure enough, when people didn't do the first killing, those who felt more like bugs were more reluctant to mash the little critters. But when they had already killed, perceived similarity didn't matter (no relationship with numbers killed). In a second experiment, the initial death toll was upped from 1 to 5 bugs, and that made 'similars' kill more, not fewer bugs. They also killed more than did people who didn't see themselves as like bugs. Perhaps most disturbingly of all, among participants who initially killed 5 bugs, more self-paced killing was associated with higher scores on a measure of mood. In other words, killing more made them feel better.

This isn't just about brutality desensitising people, because participants who saw themselves as more like their victims killed more than people who didn't. Nor is it just that participants were 'primed to kill' by the initial killing - because, again, similarity mattered.

The researchers acknowledge their study's limitations. Bugs aren't people; labs aren't battlegrounds. But they think their method could be useful, and they say the findings shed light on what we know from the study of genocides and other mass killings. Killing once can make future killing easier. Much better not to start at all.

Reference:

Martens, A., S. Kosloff, et al. (2007). "Killing begets killing: Evidence from a bug-killing paradigm that initial killing fuels subsequent killing." Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 33(9): 1251-1264.

Milgram with bugs (I): the Method

Kathleen Taylor — Tue, 26 May 2009 12:20:59 +0000

A while back I came across a fascinating paper in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (Martens et al, 2007), in which the researchers had asked how killing can become self-perpetuating even when no one retaliates. This is clearly relevant to, for example, genocides and massacres. The researchers suggested that continuing to kill in such situations may help to justify the earlier killing.

In this post and the next, I'll take a close look at this research and some of its implications, starting with the big question:

How do you test a claim about deliberate killing within the limits of ethical research?

THE METHOD

Experimenting on murderousness ain't so easy. As Doc Martens and Co. point out, with glorious understatement: "For obvious reasons, however, laboratory procedures to date have not permitted direct and systematic investigation of why killing may promote further killing." To get round the ethical hole, they ... well, I'll let them tell you themselves.

"To examine these ideas, the authors developed a bug-killing paradigm in which they manipulated the degree of initial bug killing in a "practice task" to observe the effects on subsequent self-paced killing during a timed "extermination task." "

My first reaction: "You did what? You heartless (etc)!"

My second reaction: "What kind of bugs anyhow?" As if moral outrage depends on the exact species of invertebrate. (Doesn't it? Even people who extol the wondrousness of caterpillars, or go on about how useful spiders are, usually agree there are some kinds of critters you can just go ahead and squish.)

So I looked up the paper and learned that they were pill bugs. Then, being British, I looked up pill bugs (y'what?) and learned that they were woodlice. Harmless little things. Crustaceans. The flat ones running for cover when you lift a flowerpot.

Reading on, time to relax: no bugs were harmed in the making of this article. The researchers modified a coffee grinder to make a shredder, complete with crunching sounds. Yup. Doc Martens and co. put bugs in their coffee grinder.

But it was all as fake as the shocks and the actor's yells that Stanley Milgram used in his well-known experiment on obedience. Same principle though: make the person think they're causing harm, and see how willing they are to do more of it.

In my next post, I'll look at the thinking behind the study, and its results.

Reference:

Milgram on TV

Kathleen Taylor — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:47:47 +0000

In response to the comment on TV and ethics, I also wondered about Horizon's reconstruction of the Milgram experiment. It took me a while to believe my eyes, to be honest, as I was, like the commentator, under the impression that such research would not be the done thing nowadays. I presume the researchers involved in the programme thought otherwise.

For comparison, colleagues at Oxford recently did a study which involved presenting Catholic priests with statements supporting and challenging their belief. The ethics committee insisted that counselling should be made available, in case the priests were upset by reading statements which did not agree with their particular faith. You might think priests, in our society, would be used to disagreement, but that argument didn't wash.

However, I'm no expert on psychological research ethics, and could really use some guidance here. So I've emailed the British Psychological Society to ask their opinion of the ethical issues arising. No reply as yet. I include the email (sent to enquiry@bps.org.uk) below.

Hello,

I have been reading the BPS ethical guidance on your website and wondered if you could advise about a specific case, namely the recreation of the Stanley Milgram obedience experiment for last night's Horizon [web link included]. Participants were apparently recruited for a learning experiment, filmed without their knowledge and led to believe they were causing serious harm to another person.

As a result of writing a book on the psychology of brainwashing, I have previously been asked by television producers whether I would be willing to take part in a recreation of this (and the Zimbardo) experiment. I declined, being under the impression that to do so would go against best ethical practice.

Please can you advise: is this the case? And more generally, what are the ethical requirements for television recreations of psychological experiments?

Thank you.

As I say, no response from the BPS as yet. So if anyone can advise on this I'd be delighted.

Beyond the Horizon: Michael Portillo on violence

Kathleen Taylor — Thu, 14 May 2009 14:51:39 +0000

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.