Matthew's RSA blog

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.      

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.

Thinking about brains

Over the next few days and weeks I am planning to use my blog to outline the argument I intend to make in my second annual chief executive’s lecture to the RSA.

Last year my subject was ‘pro-social behaviour’. The argument, in a nutshell, was that we will not be able successfully to respond to future challenges and opportunities unless we recognise that we as citizens need to change our attitudes and behaviours. I argued for a political discourse that was less ‘Government-centric’ - what should those in power be doing for us - and more ‘citizen-centric’ - what do we have to do to achieve the things that we want.

Since last year there have been a number of further contributions to thinking about citizen behaviour. The most recent is a short pamphlet from DEMOS featuring essays about public behaviour from leading politicians. The pamphlet is edited by Duncan O’Leary, who also pens an interesting concluding chapter. O’Leary argues that the utilitarian argument for intervening to change behaviours (in areas from parenting to public health) should be supplemented (and in same cases tempered) by an account of how we enhance the capacity of all citizens to feel in control of their lives as individuals and members of communities.       

O’Leary is right. For my lecture I chose the unwieldy phrase ‘pro-social behaviour’ to signal that thinking about future citizenship should start from a positive question about human capacity. This is the idea I want to build on in this year’s lecture.

I am interested in two dimensions of human development. The first element concerns individual human capacity and, in particular, what we beginning to understand about the content, adaptability and idiosyncrasies of our cognitive processes.

I will argue that we are entering ‘an era of neurological reflexivity’, by which I mean a time when we can begin to adapt behaviours and policies to a richer understanding of how our brains (and not just our conscious minds) work.

Observer readers will have seen a major article yesterday about IQ and whether and how it can be enhanced. This is just part of a bigger debate about how we can shape our brains to better adapt us to today and tomorrow’s world.

I want to link this idea to a theme I have explored in blogs and articles earlier this year; new collectivism. The claim here is that people are willing – are indeed enthusiastic – about working with others to create a better future but that they want to do this ways which fit with modern lifestyles and expectations.

I am not as clear as I need to be about how to link these two ideas but that’s one of the things I hope to work through in coming blogs.