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The Naked Brain: How the Emerging Neurosociety is Changing How We Live, Work, an |  |
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The Naked Brain: How the Emerging Neurosociety is Changing How We Live, Work, an | |
But if traditional neuroscience is disturbing, the really creepy stuff is on the horizon, reports neuroscientist Richard Restak in The Naked Brain. Marketers and politicians would like to literally get into our minds, using the results of brain scans and psychology experiments to alter perceptions of reality. They might use "backward framing" to mold people's memories. (In one experiment, 16 percent of adults remembered seeing Bugs Bunny at Disneyland, where, as a Warner Bros. Looney Tunes character, Bugs could never be.) Or a political party might take advantage of the fact that people trust candidates who resemble themselves. "It would not be all that complicated," Restak writes, "to send you a morphed picture of a political candidate incorporating elements from your own face drawn from, say, your driver's license photo." Each house, each voter, gets a slightly different contender.
Yet despite the hype on the book's dust jacket, Restak is more interested in summarizing science than in speculating how people might be manipulated by it. He rings alarms, but only occasionally; instead, he spends chapter after chapter recapping experiments and supplying newspaper-like quotes from experts. Taken individually, the experiments are fascinating, and Restak, who has written self-help books, encourages readers to try the simpler ones at home. But the constant jumping from one to the next makes The Naked Brain seem less written than pasted together. While the writing is clear, and Restak is sympathetic to how complicated the material can be for lay readers, there's too much information stacked too closely.
It's a shame because the philosophical discussions lurking in these pages never get the space they need. Take the scant eight pages he devotes to racial stereotyping. Restak suggests that readers visit a Web site where they are asked to sort images that pop onto the screen. First, they sort pictures of white and black people -- half to the left, half to the right. Next round, they do the same for positive and negative words such as "awful," "fantastic" or "lovely." Third, there's a combination round: Good words and pictures of black people are sorted to one side, white people and bad words to the other. Finally, uncomfortably, those pairings are reversed. Many people taking the quiz can sort more quickly and accurately when black and bad are coupled.
So they're bigots, right? Restak differs:
"According to this assumption, automatic responses reveal the 'real' you . . . with the follow-up response [i.e., battling the prejudice] entailing nothing more than an attempt to make nice. But when you think about it, why should those automatic responses over which we have no control be granted precedence over more thoughtful reactions, which reflect our consciously espoused beliefs and values?"
He cites the case of a black man married to a white woman who, in a moment of passion, called her husband a racial slur. The woman's frontal lobe -- which processes reason -- was overwhelmed with anger from a reptilian part of her brain. Restak would argue that it's the interplay of the automatic and thoughtful portions of her mind that determine her "true" personality, with weight given to the latter. The husband didn't see it that way. The marriage disintegrated.
But should it have? For one slip that she "deeply regretted"? Restak devotes just one paragraph to this conundrum. Other tantalizing debates that neuroscience could frame and focus -- Should introverts be allowed (or encouraged) to convert into extroverts by swallowing pills? Should employers screen applicants with MRIs? -- are relegated to the afterword.
But Restak's preference for proven science over speculation reveals another theme of The Naked Brain: Neuroscience has limits. The mind is too intricate for scientists to sort out from a brain scan who will drink Coke or Pepsi, much less to address deeper concerns. "The answers provided by neuroscience aren't necessarily definitive," he writes. "Indeed, they often aren't as valid as information gathered from traditional sources (asking questions, making behavioral observations, etc.)" Keeping limits in mind will be hard, however: Human brains are wired to want more than they have.
Reviewed by Sam Kean
Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
"Restak compresses a lot of scientific data into accessible language and keeps the narrative conversational...an informative and entertaining book."
– Library Journal
"A good summary of current research, along with some lurid alarm-sounding."
– Kirkus
"An enjoyable primer on the future neurosociety."
– Psychology Today
"An entertaining...primer on how the brain functions...Restak demonstrates his true talent for applying the scientific to the social."
– Body + Soul
From the Hardcover edition. --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.
Review
"Restak compresses a lot of scientific data into accessible language and keeps the narrative conversational...an informative and entertaining book."
– Library Journal
"A good summary of current research, along with some lurid alarm-sounding."
– Kirkus
"An enjoyable primer on the future neurosociety."
– Psychology Today
"An entertaining...primer on how the brain functions...Restak demonstrates his true talent for applying the scientific to the social."
– Body + Soul
From the Hardcover edition.
文摘 1
The Emergence of the Neurosociety
Brain Imaging: Peering into Bertino’s Brain
As a first step in appreciating the impact of social neuroscience, it helps to understand the power of imaging techniques to provide a window into events happening within the brain.
The earliest techniques capable of revealing the brain’s inner processing carried a definite risk of injury and sometimes even death. Consequently, they were restricted to patients suffering from various brain diseases. As a result of this emphasis on disease, we presently know more about the functioning of abnormal brains than we know about normal ones. As a neurologist, I’m especially aware of this paradox. Ask me about the brain dysfunctions associated with strokes or autism or even some forms of learning disability and I can explain the difficulties in more detail than you probably want to hear. But ask me how the brain of a genius differs from that of his or her less intellectually gifted counterparts and the explanation isn’t going to take long at all.
Not that we can’t learn a lot about the normal brain on the basis of studying abnormal brains. Even a study of the diseased brain often provides some helpful insights toward furthering our understanding of the normal brain. My favorite example of this comes from the observations of the late-nineteenth-century Italian experimenter Angelo Mosso.
In the course of his research Mosso encountered a peasant, Bertino (no last name is recorded), who several years earlier had suffered a head injury severe enough to destroy the bones of the skull covering his frontal lobes (located immediately behind the forehead). The resulting opening, covered only by skin and fibrous tissue, provided Mosso with a window through which he could directly observe the pulsations of Bertino’s brain. Similar pulsations can be observed in a newborn baby during the first few weeks of life prior to the growth and
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