Matthew's RSA blog

Leaving...

This blog is being deleted. Please make sure any feeds you have are pointing to the newer site.

Mass Migration

My blog has now moved - it can be found on our new RSA website.

Holding Pattern

I've just returned from a week's holiday refreshed and ready to go.

The new website is up and running beautifully, with only a couple things still to be sorted out. One of which is my blog. Currently we're still using Typepad (obviously) but soon this blog will be accessed directly through our website.

In order to facilitate the process of transferring my blog archive over to the new site I've decided to put a hold on the blogging. I will post a message to let regular visitors and subscribers know when we're up and running with the new site later this week.

In the meantime Ewan McIntosh has highlighted the new website in his blog - so many thanks for that, and also for all your help and support!

I hope you're all enjoying the new site.

Before the Bank Holiday

First of all I would like to say a big thank you to the staff here at RSA for burning the midnight oil for the past week in the final push to launch the new website. It went live yesterday evening, but apparently takes 24-48 hours to propagate around the world to all the different servers. So keep checking the site, it will soon have a fresh face and greater functionality.

Thinking about brains, as I have been this week, I was interested in the Thought for the Day on the Today programme this morning. Abdal Hakim Murad explored the Muslim take on the Academy of Medical Sciences report about the use of brain enhancing drugs.

The issue of psychoactive substances is not a new debate in the Muslim tradition. For example, coffee is allowed because it enhances brain function, but alcohol is not because it impairs the mind. In his three minute slot Abdal Hakim Murad moved from this issue to a broader perspective arguing that humanity is distinguished by the God given miracle of consciousness.

Many scientists and philosophers would replace ‘God-given miracle’ with ‘evolution-given illusion’. One of the challenges in debates about the brain is the way empirical and policy questions about advances in neurological research jostle up against  what philosopher Owen Flanagan has described as ‘the really hard problem’ of meaning and consciousness.

This week I’ve been interviewing some excellent candidates for a new Fellow outreach coordinator for Scotland. It is clear that the Scottish Fellows are going full steam ahead, delivering not only the RSA mission, but thinking hard about how to build a distinctively Scottish brand identity and agenda.

So it was perhaps not surprising that at our excellent new Fellows evening last night, a Welsh Fellow was astonished to hear from me that the Welsh fellowship is subsumed into our West and Wales region. Of course, this reflects the pre-devolution development of the RSA and I don’t sense any unhappiness in the region with its current configuration. But I guess it’s only a matter of time before our Fellows in Wales are seeking to develop their own relationship with the devolved administration.

I’m on holiday next week for the school half term – but between my holiday postings and contributions of colleagues the daily blog will continue.

Cognitively enhanced

Over recent blogs I’ve been rehearsing some thoughts about what I call neurological reflexivity. The idea being that instead of a world in which what matters is what we think increasingly we are engaging with the question of how we think.

So it was timely to wake up this morning to hear on the Today programme about the report of the Academy of Medical Sciences’ report on Brain science, addition, and drugs. Following on from the Government Foresight project, Drugs Futures 20205, this commission was set up to investigate the societal, health safety and environmental issues raised by the Foresight report. It analyzes the scientific and ethical issues of drug development, use and abuse.

While there are some interesting findings about drug misuse and treatment, which are gratifyingly in line with the RSA Drugs Commission, what interests me here are the implications, both scientific and ethical, of using cognitive enhancement drugs on otherwise healthy individuals.

What the report argues is that because cognitive enhancement drugs are developed for use on unhealthy individuals (victims of stroke, Alzheimer’s or other degenerative neurological conditions) not enough is known about the long term side on healthy brains.

They argue that further research into this is necessary, particularly as the current drugs are increasingly available on the grey-market, and could be misused, for example, by students seeking to enhance exam results. Playing with brain chemistry must be an exact science given the scope for unpredictable and long term side effects.

There are major ethical implications of cognitive enhancement. John Harris, who spoke here last year,and others have powerfully attacked the superstition that we shouldn’t ‘unnaturally’ enhance our physical capacity. What he argues is the categorical difference between eye glasses and brain supplements? The more pressing dilemmas concerns equality of access and ‘devaluing unaided achievement’.

People who can afford to pay for their daily dose of cognitive enhancers will have an extra unfair advantage over those who cannot. These will probably tend to be the same people who already benefited from the environmental factors that seem to most enhance IQ.

The point about unaided achievement is that we have a strong – albeit complex and tacit – belief that achievement should result form the combination of talent and effort (we are also, according to opinion polls, happy to recognise the role that luck can play). But if performance in education, athletics, perhaps one day relationships, is dependent less on ability and effort than on access to drugs or on the interaction of these drugs with our personal physiology then, notwithstanding equity issues, this seems to challenge our most basic assumptions about human endeavour and status.

These are deep waters. They require a discourse that brings together scientists, social scientists, philosophers and policy makers. The public needs to understand and engage  with dilemmas that have quickly moved from science fiction to pharmaceutical reality. And these are some of the key purposes of the RSA cognition project that we will be launching in a few weeks.      

All systems are go!

Thursday, 21 May 2008, 16.30 is when we will be initiating the go-live procedure for the new website enshrined in the diaries of all the staff here at JAS and beyond and I’m immensely proud of the web team for their Herculean efforts in making this new website possible.

There are many new features which will enable Fellows and the wider public to gain a better understanding of our work. The blogs, of which mine will be but one, are windows our different areas of work. This blog will become much more of a test bed for my thoughts and ideas regarding new enlightenment thinking, pro-social behaviour, neurological reflexivity and new collectivism: in short how we become the people and society that we need to be in order to respond to the challenges of progress.

One of the great things about the RSA is our fantastic lecture series. Just this week we've had, Matt Frei, Jon Ronson, Misha Glenny, Philippe Sands QC and Darius Rejali. Because of the high quality our lectures are almost always full, though it's always been possible to do audio podcasts on our site, we are now launching Vision. These will be videos of our best speakers, enabling more people to see our amazing public lecture series and join in the debate about issues raised there.

Another video feature that Meet a Fellow, where we showcase the diversity of our Fellowship, allowing a wider audience to see the work that they do and the issues close to their hearts.

There might be some ‘downtime’ tomorrow afternoon, during the transition from the old to the new site. So if you can’t see it please try again after a little while. Any please send any comments or feed back to webmaster@rsa.org.uk.

Rationally irrational

Yesterday in writing about my ideas regarding neurological reflexivity I highlighted the work of behavioural economists in demonstrating the weakness of the homo economicus model, or the myth of rational man. This is the idea that citizens with perfect knowledge will behave in a perfectly rational way.

Of course in the real world people do not have perfect information, but are often bemused by the flood of this imperfect information. Secondly, behavioural economists have pointed out the seemingly irrational nature of the decisions we make based on this partial (in both senses) information.

There has been a massive explosion in books on this field of study, the latest is by Dan Ariely discussed in today’s Guardian.

The relevance of this to my fundamental argument is that these economists are not focusing on what we think, but as I said yesterday, how we think. What are the psychological and neurological processes that affect our decisions? And that is why this field of study forms such an important component of my thinking on how we become better at dealing with the challenges of progress. By understanding our decision making processes, by recognising that they are not entirely rational as we would sometimes like to believe, we can begin to make better choices.

Can't wait to do it again

Last week several RSA colleagues volunteered at Surrey Docks Farm. I asked Anna Leikkari who organised the day to tell us more - 

"Last Friday the RSA organised its first ever Volunteering Day on Surrey Docks Farm in South East London.

The idea of the day was not only to make a positive and hands-on difference in the city of London in a small but scalable way, but to build team spirit and shared purposes across the organisation and unite Fellows with other Fellows and like-minded people, making new connections and potentially come up with ideas for new networking initiatives and projects (see current ones on the RSA Networks platform).

We picked Surrey Docks Farm as our project site as it has been recognised as one of the most innovative and successful city farm education projects in England, and was in great need of voluntary help as it relies on voluntary sector grants and donations, and does not employ many full-time staff.

The day was brilliant. 10 RSA staff and 13 Fellows arrived at the farm at 10.00 am and after a thorough briefing we divided ourselves into three groups and set to work.

The projects we were given were varied: carrying and organising heavy concrete slabs, wooden beams and bricks, clearing a large shed for bee keeping materials and the grounds free of rubbish and broken equipment and materilas, filling a large skip, turning hard ground around for planting vegetables and flowers, weeding a massively overgrown children's storytelling area... and many other jobs that, at the end of the day, had visibly transformed the site. The farm manager said we were the best volunteering group she has ever had and was extremely pleased with the results!

Everyone who participated on the day said they would love to do it again and would love to see it become a regular occurrence. It was a great way to get Fellows and Staff together and some of the conversations we had during the day and afterwards in the Wibbley Wobbly riverboat pub were truly inspiring.

Personally, I felt elated at the end of the day as I think we had really made a difference on site, thus affecting many lives – especially those of children and young adults with learning disabilities who regularly come to the farm to learn about sustainability, the environment and farm animals. My most vivid memories will be of Jonathan (Deputy Director, Programme) lifting gigantic concrete slabs off the ground with a wrecking bar, of Rosie (Ideas Assistant) dancing her way through the site with a bee-keeper dummy and of all the happy faces of the volunteers when they were giggling at the little piglets and kid goats.

The fact that everyone was already talking about the "next RSA volunteering day" halfway through the day told me that it was a success and that we should do it again soon.

A massive vote of thanks to William Wong who, as a Fellow and colleague helped organise the day!"

Thinking about thinking

This time last week I said I would start using the blog to discuss the ideas I am developing for my second annual Chief Executive’s lecture, due to take place here at JAS on June 30th.

A key theme is what I call neurological reflexivity. But I’d be the first to admit that this concept needs a great deal more work. The notion is that advances in related fields of inquiry and activity together amount to what could become a paradigm shift. One way of putting this is that instead of being concerned primarily with what we think about the world and how we act on this we may increasingly be concerned with how we think about the world.

By ‘what we think’ I mean conscious thought expressed through the always and ever present ‘voice’ in our heads, and though intentional verbal and written communication. By ‘how we think’ I mean the ways in which the unconscious processes of our brains condition our thoughts and behaviours.

There have been advances in a number of fields which are concerned with the how of thinking:

Evolutionary psychology and anthropology have provided important insights into physiological (and cultural) determinants (and variants) in the working of the brain.   

Neuroscience is starting to help us understand the workings of the most complex organism in the known universe (the brain). Have a look at Christopher de Charms on TED for a recent example of the advances being made.

Behavioural economics, social psychology and empirical sociology are providing new insights into the patterns and idiosyncrasies of human behaviours. This includes:

• the way our minds trick us (for example, making us think our thoughts precede action when on closer examination it is clear that the action precedes the thought)

•  systematic irrationality (for example, we are much more resistant to putting aside £50 for a good purpose now than we are to committing to putting it aside next week)

• the way unconscious preferences lead to social outcomes (for example, ethnic zoning is less a consequence of racist attitude or policy and more the aggregate consequence of each individual’s instinctive desire to avoid living in a minority community)

There appears to be a growing popularity of various interventions that seek to impact not primarily through conscious thought (as in traditional learning or psycho-analysis) but through shaping unconscious patterns or capacities; for example the rise and rise of various forms of cognitive and behavioural therapy and of various ‘brain gym’ products.

The questions - keeping me awake at night as the date of my speech nears – are whether these different spheres of investigation can be usefully related to each other, whether together they amount to a single describable and significant change in human understanding, and if so what might be the implications?

Appropriately enough, given the topic. this is slightly doing my head in at present so any reflections or advice for further reading will be gratefully received.

Do as I say, not as I do...

Yesterday we had David Runciman discussing his book Political Hypocrisy. Then today, Mangus Linklater comments on a similar phenomena in The Times.

Runciman begins his thesis by arguing that the easiest way to defeat a political opponent is by showing them to be a hypocrite. He then takes us through a history of policital hypocrisy and ends by defining two types of hypocrisy in the political sphere.

The first is personal hypocrisy, when, as in the case with Eliot Spitzer in New York, ones personal behaviour doesn’t match up to the political ideals that you have been advocating. The second is political hypocrisy, when a politician draws a veil over the political realities of a policy in order to deceive the public.

We, the public, are obsessed with personal hypocrisy which blinds us to the political hypocrisy taking place all around us. We hold politicians to impossible standards, comforting ourselves with the thought that they chose to live their life in the public eye, and therefore they must be the best of us.

And yet I wonder, given that we are all hypocrites in one way or another, aren’t these politicians that we castigate just demonstrating that which we say we want – humanity. There is nothing more human than the desire to hide your worst self, and surely that is even clearer in the mind of a politician.

We need to realise that if a politician has made mistakes in their life, or changed their view on a political position, that may well make them better people, and better able to make good policies in the future. It is not a character flaw to change your mind.

What is different and objectionable is when people judge others. That’s ultimately why the Conservative’s ‘Back to Basics’ policy failed. It sounded as though they were judging the public, and so when their personal peccadilloes came to light it was so profoundly damaging.

The public is easily swayed by the rhetoric of hypocrisy precisely because the public has lost trust in politics and to a certain extent in themselves. Although the argument still rages, again see the Daniel Finkelstein piece from this week, we can at least say that rising affluence is not resulting in rising levels of contentment and fulfilment. People are apparently less happy today, less content despite being more materially affluent than any time in history. The perception gap that I have referred to so many times is part of the public hypocrisy – enough is never enough.

Arguably, democratic politics contains at its very heart a meta-hypocrisy. On the one hand politicians pretend that it’s about doing what people want, when in fact representative democracy is little more than the process by which we can get rid of bad governments.

On the other hand politicians claim the public complains too loudly about their every decision; as if, somehow, our politicians would attain a state, where their behaviour would delight us.

We the people are constitutionally dissatisfied. These two myths, that of democratic accountability and of political venality are the two expressions of the position we find ourselves in – we are a people unwilling to be governed and yet not ready to govern ourselves.

This is a much more profound ‘hypocrisy’ than politicians who call for virtue but are sometimes guilty of vice.

I completely agree with Runciman’s recognition that hypocrisy is a particularly English, or at least English-speaking phenomena. I was reminded of the fact that not all countries have this puerile obsession with politicians bedrooms by the famous Mitteraund response to the Parkinson and Hawke affair when he said “Imagine having to resign because of adultery. If we did that in France, there would only be the poofs left in the cabinet!”