Matthew's RSA blog

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.

The changing climate of climate change

There would appear to be a change in the air – and I’m not just talking about the weather. At the Commentariat event last night (fun, if slightly self indulgent) I heard someone from Spiked magazine confidently criticising the commentators’ consensus around climate change. This wouldn’t normally have been so worrying, but it was the third time in a day that I’d heard this kind of dissent.

This time last year it appeared that all the UK, and even some American, politicians were on message with what could broadly be called the Stern Hypothesis: the climate is changing, humans have contributed hugely to this change, we should and must act now to mitigate our impact and adapt to those changes we can’t mitigate. But today people seem to be emboldened to question this scientific orthodoxy.

Richard Littlejohn, one of the most widely read columnists in Britain, recently wrote about how politicians are using ‘dodgy climate change hysteria to keep increasing taxes’. His overall point is that climate change isn’t happening, that the earth’s temperature is cooling (though I’m not sure what his source is), and that the Government’s agenda to implement green taxes is hurting the man on the Clapham omnibus (or rather in the 2001 Renault Espace).

Indeed, even looking to the American elections, climate change doesn’t seem to be an issue in the interminable Clinton v. Obama contest, and their increasing tone of protectionism doesn’t bode well for their commitment to global issues.

In some ways both Littlejohn and the American politicians are right. As people’s finances are increasingly stretched, and a downturn in the housing market means that people feel less well off, they may feel that all this talk of paying more taxes to facilitate climate change mitigation, or changing their lifestyles to reduce emissions and waste, is too much to ask when they are concerned about more pressing problems like paying their mortgage.

It was always going to be difficult to empower the individual to feel responsible for their own contributions to climate change, particularly when changes in global politics means that many less developed countries are justifiably piqued when asked to reduce their emissions (and economic growth) by developed nations who got us into this trouble in the first place.

Sceptics like Littlejohn are helped by the misnomer of ‘global warming’ – in fact climatologists would say that there is no inconsistency with the argument that humans are responsible for changes in our global temperatures and a drop in temperatures – the point is that our actions are impacting on the world, and this may take the form of some cooling and some warming, the point is that the climate is changing.

I don’t believe that ethical living, as some put it, is incompatible with a retrenchment in the family finances, quite the opposite. There are ways to live a full life that don’t involve driving a petrol guzzling car, or buying clothes made by children in distant countries, and there are ways to make such a lifestyle affordable as well. Paying more taxes to enable the government to deal with those elements that are outside our control, like what happens to the waste we inevitably create, is just a further cost that must be factored in.

There is a third, more hopeless view, falling somewhere between Stern and Littlejohn, which argues that it is pointless to tinker with car emissions and plastic bag bans because people will only make drastic changes in their lifestyle when they are forced to, the tragedy is, that assuming the science is right, by this time it will be far too late.

How multiple are you?

Thanks to Graham Rawlinson, one of the Fellows who organised the successful open space event in Chichester last week. On hearing the RSA is planning a major project on the policy implications of new insights into the workings of the brain, Graham recommended to me Multiplicity by Rita Carter.

It is an interesting combination of a science and self-help book based on the argument that we are made up not of one unified personality with many facets but of many different personalities.

This does not mean we are all suffering from Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), but that external stimuli affect which of our personalities is in the driving seat at any time and that in turn our ways of thinking and reacting depend on which personality is in charge.

Unlike those who suffer from MPD, our personalities are in touch with each other and draw on the same bank of memories but they are distinct entities with different characteristics.

Carter - who we hope to get to the RSA as a speaker - cites evidence of multiple and hidden personalities from several sources; those who are unusually aware of their different personalities, psychotherapy case studies and hypnotism.

Among her more compelling points is the comparison of personality switching with 'ambiguous illusions' such as the Necker cube (the line drawing in which one face of the cube can either appear to be at the front left or at the back right but never both at once). Carter also argues convincingly that a key aspect of socialisation is our capacity to believe, and project, the illusion that we possess a unified single personality despite the evidence to the contrary.

Also fascinating is her argument that a key characteristic of modern culture is the greater freedom we have to indulge and experiment with different personalities. Less clear are the implications of the distinction between one personality with many facets and many personalities, connected to each other and with common memories.

Carter's argument is that we can live more effective and contented lives if instead of bemoaning the weaknesses of our single 'I' we learn to manage the 'household' of different personalities that inhabit our minds.

If we can persuade Rita to speak at the RSA I hope we get a chance to explore both the science and practical implications of her fascinating thesis.

Brains and behaviours

I continue to be fascinated with the research emerging from the new field of social neuroscience. This involves a multi-disciplinary approach to exploring the interaction between the hard wiring of our brains and our social behaviours.

For too long biological and social explanations of behaviour have been seen as incompatible. Instead we should be seeking to combine insights from science, social science and philosophy into an integrated understanding of human behaviour and development. I hope this emerges as a big theme for the RSA lecture and research programme over the coming year.