There’s a great article on ‘Character’ in this month’s Prospect by Richard Reeves, an old friend of the RSA and the newly appointed director of Demos.

His piece is a convincing attempt to reassert a liberal account of the importance of character – ‘an old idea with a contemporary relevance’. He defends liberalism against the charge that it has somehow eroded character and he defends the value of good character against the idea that it is somehow illiberal.

“Good societies’ he concludes ‘need good people’.

Along the way there’s a really interesting discussion about what character is and where it comes from which avoids getting bogged down in sterile nature-nurture debates.

Reeves argues that while “it is clear that some character traits are inherited… the weight of evidence is that good parents provide good insulation against inherited negative traits.” And he cites research by Stephen Scott of KCL to this effect.

This is a really important point: one of the key insights of modern cognitive science is to illuminate (if only partially) the ways in which different factors combine and interact to inform our character and behaviour.

So we can see how genetic inheritance, neurophysiological processes, cultural and physical environments, and conscious decision making all have a part to play in making us what we are. We do not have to choose which of these is the ‘real’ key to who we are, but can attempt to understand and unpick how they work together in different contexts and at different times.

Reeves shows how this approach to character has concrete policy implications in areas such as early years care, skills provision and parenting, but it also illustrates a wider point.

A scientific approach to understanding behaviour does not, as is sometimes claimed, commit us to neuro-determinism, evolutionary-conservatism, or genetic-fatalism. Understanding the processes that make us think and act as we do, does not condemn us to blindly act them out, but frees us to follow or resist them as we choose.

New on the RSA website this week, video of Richard Thaler’s lecture here and an interview with our own Matthew Taylor.

Admidst all the recent Nudge-mania it’s good to get back to what the man himself says – and his claims are considerably less overblown than some that have been made.

But of course not everyone is convinced. James Harkin, for one, writing in today’s Guardian is sceptical. I think, as I’ve argued before that Nudging has its place as long as we remember that it is about means and does not save us the hard work of thinking about what social goods we want to achieve.

There was a long piece by Phil Hogan in Sunday’s Observer on memory loss and how to avoid it. He travels to San Francisco to find out about the latest neurological insights into how memory works and what happens in our brain when it fails. Then he goes to New York to watch the finals of the (rather awful sounding ) Memory Championships.

Two things struck me:

One was that the scientists he spoke to were clear that there was little or no evidence of generalisable improvements in cognitive capacity from the sort of brain training that the Memory Champions advocated.

That’s pretty important given how much of this stuff people are trying to flog us.

Second was this comment from Professor Alan Baddeley at York University

‘Forgetting is very useful. You’d be in a mess without it, like being without the garbage man. The memory encodes things so that, on the whole, you can get hold of what’s important and the things you need most often. Forgetting is a very well-designed aspect of that.’

We’re so used to thinking about forgetting as the failure of memory that we forget just how valuable it is. Perhaps we should think of it not simply as ‘not remembering’ but as a positive value in its own right.

I’m not familiar with the science in this area but I was reminded of the Borges story ‘Funes the Memorious’. After being thrown from a horse the eponymous Funes finds his memory is infallible, but this is more curse than blessing. As the narrator says of him:

“I suspect, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details.”

Dementia and senility are terrible afflictions and we should welcome the extent to which modern neuroscience promises to mitigate and eventually overcome them, though this is still sadly limited. But in pursuing this essential goal we should not be fooled into seeing memory itself as simple benefit.

As Borges reminds us, “The truth is that we all live by leaving behind”.

As this blog starts to get a bit more traffic – and thanks to everyone who’s visited, commented or linked – I thought it might be useful to say a little more about what the RSA’s planning to do in this area.

This Power Point is an attempt to set out in simple terms the thinking behind the RSA’s new project and what we are hoping to do.

cognitionpp1

I wrote it for a presentation I did for some nice people from Arkanum Consultancy – but I found it really helpful in clarifying my thinking and thought it might be interesting for others. It was designed to be spoken to but I think/hope it’s pretty self-explanatory.  Of course details and timings may all change in response to events and to the useful feedback everyone is giving.  All comments welcome…

Elections are on everyone’s mind today following Labour’s disastrous showing in Glasgow East.

Thinking about the electoral process made me wonder if there was a tension between what we know about cognition and a commitment to democracy.

One of the consistent themes to emerge from a number of behavioural and cognitive sciences in recent years is that the conscious decision-making part of our mind has a lot less primacy than we like to think.

We know that the neurological processes that generate our conscious thoughts are dependent on chemical and electrical reactions in other parts of our brains of which we are completely unaware. More worryingly still, recent research published in Nature found that “the outcome of a decision can be encoded in brain activity of prefrontal and parietal cortex up to 10 s before it enters awareness”.

What price free decisions then?

But of course democracy is rooted in the idea that we are rational decision-making agents capable of exercising free will.

I’ve referred in an earlier post to the debate about whether neuroscience abolishes free will. This normally finds its way into the public arena in relation to criminal responsibility  - “it wasn’t me m’lud; it was my brain” – but its implications for democracy are even more profound. (Drew Western covers some of this ground in his book the political brain.)

Without free will democracy looks absurd. Of course, it may be the most absurd system except for all the other systems that have been tried, but I think that many of us would feel uncomfortable with the idea that the democratic process is simply a complex way of post-rationalising unconscious and unwilled reactions.

As I’ve said before, I think there are both philosophical and scientific reasons to resist the idea that we have to give up on free will, but I’m not sure the argument is yet won – in any event the relationship between free will and democracy shows us how these debates have very real meaning and are not just academic abstractions…

Matthew blogged yesterday about the (inevitable?) backlash against the ubiquity of nudging. He suggests that nudging is most likely to be useful at a local level and concludes that “Changing behaviour is hard. Nudging is a useful technique but it doesn’t abolish the classic dilemmas of policy making.”

I think this is right (and not just because he’s my boss).

There are three key features of the discussion around nudging that are particularly interesting.

The first is the debate about what sort of issues nudging best addresses and at what level.

The second is the persistent uncertainty about whether this is an idea that sits more happily on the big-state left or the small-state right (libertarian paternalism may not be an oxymoron but it does seem to encourage this debate).

In part this debate comes out of the fact that nudging appears to be non-ideological, simply a means of helping us to more easily achieve rational ends.

This leads to the third element: it is often suggested that nudging is a way of “fixing” adaptive discrepancies between the way we evolved and the way the world now is. So for instance we evolved to crave sugar in an environment in which sugar was scarce and have not adjusted to a context in which it is plentiful. Hence obesity and hence our need for nudging.

This again, underlines the non-ideological nature of nudging – it simply helps us to become better suited to the environment we live in and who could take issue with that?

But of course nudging is not free of values it simply defers them. If I am nudged to save money for the future and improve my health, it is only because we have as a society decided that health and prosperity are values that we want to pursue. There’s nothing rational about the choice of ultimate ends and Libertarian paternalism has nothing to say about it.

And neither does evolution. Natural selection does not have a goal; it has no moral or prescriptive content. It is at its most essential level simply an account of which biological adaptations have historically proved best suited to their environments. As such it tells us nothing about how we should live now.

That is an essential task of political debate and neither behavioural economics nor evolutionary psychology can do it for us.

Thanks to Tessy Britton for highlighting this fascinating study from the Netherlands which I had completely missed.

It concludes that the effectiveness of our cognitive function is influenced not just by physical environment but by social context in which we operate. So if I’m in a situation in which I feel socially disadvantaged my brain will not work as well as if I feel “empowered”.

If we really understood this, the implications for how we organise education or workplaces could be pretty profound. How should we manage people in away that helps their brains work better?

As Tessy points out it’s also another example of how this area has an amazing capacity to generate new jargon. Partly I suspect because you can put “neuro” in front of pretty much anything…

Interesting conversation between Tom Wolfe and Michael Gazzaniga, in this month’s Seed.

The conversation is wide ranging, but what most struck me was the discussion of free will. It’s often argued that advances in cognitive sciences reveal free will to be an illusion, that our thinking is determined by our neurological processes – there is only mechanism and we can finally lay to rest the ghost in the machine.

Matthew Taylor alluded to this in his recent discussion here. It was also central to a conversation between Ray Tallis and Pierre Magistretti that the RSA hosted at the Cheltenham Science Festival.

For different reasons, Tallis and Maigistretti were both of the view that neuroscience didn’t have to do away with free will. I’m inclined to agree with Tallis that given how evident to us our ability to think and make decisions is (after all it seems to be the thing we know best) it is an odd intellectual gesture to say that because we cannot find it in the brain it simply doesn’t exist.

On one level this is a question of trying to reconcile different levels of reality. Free will is experientially real to us. The empirical and experimental data that tell us about the neural processes behind our decision making are equally real (though of course our knowledge of them is based upon rational and perceptual processes that are at root experiential) – but isn’t the most useful task to accept these different layers of reality and to try and decide how they relate to each other rather than attempt fruitlessly to decide which real is most real….?

Nick Laird writing in the Guardian review’s book column wonders why more poets haven’t engaged with the insights into human behaviour that science gives us.

“In general” he says “modern poets have taken more easily to Freud than Darwin.” But should we hope for a poetry of science and what would it be like? “Will it engage with scientific vocabulary? Or register the possibility of new vistas?”

Laird refers to Miroslav Holub as the great scientist-poet of modern times – but I’m not sure this is right – Holub was certainly a great poet and I’m sure he was a great scientist, but while he draws upon a scientific vocabulary, his use of it is essentially metaphorical.

Take this from his poem ‘Heart transplant’:

After an hour

there’s an abyss in the chest

created by the missing heart

like a model landscape

where humans have grown extinct

…

Atrium is sewn to atrium

aorta to aorta

three hours of eternity

coming and going

And when the heart begins to beat

and the curves jump

like synthetic sheep

on the green screen,

it’s like a model of a battlefield

in which Life and Spirit

have been fighting

And both have won

The language here is scientific, specifically medical, but it is used to reflect upon love, alienation and the fear of death as conscious experiences not as unconscious processes. Crucially the heart is used metaphorically in its romantic incarnation as the seat of emotion – not literally as a muscle that pumps blood round the body – indeed the latter usage is subordinated to the former….

So I’m still left wondering what a poetry of new scientific vistas would look like. Perhaps it is a category error. Perhaps poetry and science explain us in such different ways that they cannot fully merge. Or maybe there are other examples from Holub or from other poets that come closer?

There has been a lot of coverage of new thinking in the cognitive and behavioural sciences in the press this week.

Two pieces in the Guardian on Tuesday: in G2 there was a profile of Jill Bolte Taylor, the remarkable American neuro-anatomist who suffered a massive stroke which she analyses with unnerving calm in one of the most downloaded TED lectures of all time. Her most recent book argues that understanding the biochemical processes that underpin our emotional states will allow us to control them better.

Meanwhile, in the main paper there was a fascinating report on how Israeli neurologist Alon Friedman is planning a study on the neurological impact of stress on children in Gaza and the long term damage that this can cause to their brain function.

What lies behind the very different work of Friedman and Bolte Taylor is the belief that understanding neurological mechanisms can help us to plan more effective interventions.

There are two common objections to this which we have often come across whilst planning the RSA changing minds project.

The first is that it is too reductionist or mechanistic an account of human behaviour. We cannot explain everything (or the most important things) about our thinking simply by reference to neurological processes and without acknowledging environmental factors or conscious decision making.

The second is that understanding neurological mechanism does not in reality add very much to our responses to these issues. We do not need to understand brain plasticity to know that living in a war zone will be psychologically damaging to children or to know that we can manage or overcome our emotional states. What value is added by explaining these things in terms of neurological processes?

I think both these objections can be resisted. To claim that neurological processes are an influence on our behaviour and capacities is not to deny that other factors influence them. Indeed both these stories could be seen to be about the interaction between neurological processes of which we are unconscious and external factors or conscious thinking. The real challenge is to understand how all these elements interact to shape the way we think.

The question about added value is harder to answer – but it seems clear that understanding how mechanisms work can be helpful at least some of the time. To take a couple of analogous examples, although we have always had a broad understanding of how comparatively healthy particular environments were, it was only in the nineteenth century as we began to understand in reasonably precise terms how and why contaminated water, insanitary conditions, air pollution etc impacted on physical health that we were able to achieve real progress on public health.

Similarly, we have always known how to improve the body’s performance: that 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.

So understanding how things work can certainly help us to make them work better in some cases – whether this is true of our neurological processes may be a moot point but it can only be resolved if we do the work to find out what those mechanisms are and how they relate to the way we think.

Friedman and Bolte Taylor are both talking abut the neurological hardwiring that impacts on our behaviours. This is certainly a crucial part of understanding why human beings behave as they do but there are other disciplines that offer equally valuable insights.

On Wednesday Danny Finkelstein’s column in the times was dedicated to the political influence of evolutionary psychology, behavioural economics and social psychology. Behavioural economics has been everywhere this week with piece on nudging by George Osborne in the Guardian causing a big stir (including this response on the Telegraph blog from our own Matthew Taylor). Richard Thaler spoke here at the RSA on Thursday and the room was heaving at the seams so there’s clearly a popular appetite to learn more about this thinking. But as Finkelstein points out its political application is patchy. So while we may talk about behavioural nudging in relation to savings policy, it has not figured in the debate about knife crime (indeed as Finkelstein points out the current hysteria around the subject ignores all the lessons from social psychology about how normalising behaviour tends to encourage it).

It’s certainly true that we need to look across the policy landscape at how insights from all these different disciplines map onto real world problems.

Finkelstein was kind enough to describe the RSA as one of the leading think tanks in this area and it’s definitely one of the things that we want to be doing with our new project. But there’s another way in which it’s also important to bring things together. The disciplines Finkelstein refers to (not to mention all those he doesn’t) are all very different, they start from different places and proceed through different methodologies. Evolutionary psychologists and neuroscientists and behavioural economists may have very different accounts of why people behave and think as they do in particular instances, let alone what it means in policy terms.

Obviously there’s a huge amount of work going on in all these disciplines. The RSA wouldn’t claim expertise in any of them – but we can provide a space in which experts from different fields can come together with policy-makers, practitioners and members of the public to share insights ask questions of each other and test ideas for how to use these sciences of thought and behaviour to address some of the key challenges of our time.