Brains On Purpose™

Summaries of several of the presentations from last month's APS conference

If you get a chance to attend next year's Association for Psychological Science conference, do it! Not only was the registration fee extremely reasonable, but the programs were very good. In fact, there were too many to choose from; I missed several that occurred at the same time as others I chose to attend.

Now, at the APS Web site, you can read summaries of many of the sessions. Click to "attend" retroactively.

"The Limits of Neurolaw"

Abstract:

This brief essay is a response to Professor Lamparello ‘s ambitious article in the forthcoming symposium collection in the Houston Journal of Health Law and Policy. Professor Lamparello suggests that cognitive neuroscience might finally provide the criminal justice system with a reliable method of crime control. Unlike previous proposals under the fashionable neurolaw framework, Lamparello suggests that the value of the technology neuroscience brings to the table lies not in overturning the entrenched legal doctrine of mens rea or responsibility, but rather in its utilization to make predictions of future dangerousness. Those offenders who possess neurological abnormalities should be civilly committed after serving their prison sentences, according to Lamparello, just as many sexually violent predators are civilly committed today in light of the Kansas v. Hendricks and Kansas v. Crane. For reasons I discuss, I believe such policy prescriptions are unnecessary and unwise.

Click to read the rest of "The Limits of Neurolaw" (Houston Journal of Health Law and Policy at SSRN).

The science behind the allure of 'bad boys': Dr. Jeff Schwartz explains

Dr. Schwartz visited the studios of CBS Los Angeles to talk about women being attracted to men who are proud and moody. Click "Scientific Proof Behind The Allure Of ‘Bad Boys’" to watch the interview. Or watch below.

In brief, he said that, yes, women may be attracted to these men at a hormonal or brain level, but we are not our brains and we can transcend these animal impulses. If we each consult our inner Wise Advocate, it will enable us to recognize signals that are brain-based and assist us in rising above these signals, in order to make decisions that are in our best interest. His new book You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life, which comes out tomorrow, explains all of this in depth, including how to be in frequent touch with your Wise Advocate. I have read the book, and highly recommend it to you if you want to operate at your highest potential.

Jeff Schwartz: CBS Los Angeles Interview from BrightSightGroup on Vimeo.

"Speaker–listener neural coupling underlies successful communication"

Abstract:

Verbal communication is a joint activity; however, speech production and comprehension have primarily been analyzed as independent processes within the boundaries of individual brains. Here, we applied fMRI to record brain activity from both speakers and listeners during natural verbal communication. We used the speaker’s spatiotemporal brain activity to model listeners’ brain activity and found that the speaker’s activity is spatially and temporally coupled with the listener’s activity. This coupling vanishes when participants fail to communicate. Moreover, though on aver- age the listener’s brain activity mirrors the speaker’s activity with a delay, we also find areas that exhibit predictive anticipatory responses. We connected the extent of neural coupling to a quantitative measure of story comprehension and find that the greater the anticipatory speaker–listener coupling, the greater the understanding. We argue that the observed alignment of production- and comprehension-based processes serves as a mechanism by which brains convey information.

Click to read the rest of "Speaker–listener neural coupling underlies successful communication" (PNAS Early Edition).

If only our clients were consistent! One way to learn about the many people within each of us

Free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man.
--Flannery O'Connor in her preface to the second edition of Wise Blood

What a succinct and accurate way to describe the dilemma of our subpersonalities, those many people living within us. Have you ever had one part of you want one thing and, at the same time, another part just as vigorously want something altogether different? Or acted one way only to find yourself acting in an inconsistent way but a few hours (or even minutes) later?  Or had clients unexpectedly or inexplicably change? Then you have probably experienced subpersonalities in action.

As William Harryman explains in his blog post "Subpersonalities -- Definitions and Origins" (Intergral Options Cafe), "nearly every school of psychology recognizes some form of subpersonalities, parts, or selves." He then goes on to summarize several of the schools' ways of characterizing our inner selves. I have talked about two approaches, psychosynthesis and Bonnie Badenoch's inner community, before; click to read my post "The obligation of a mediator to practice good mind hygiene, and an interview of Bonnie Badenoch on being brain-wise."

Harryman quotes Molly Brown about the subpersonalities of psychosynthesis:

This online book can serve as a good tool for mediators: BRAIN-BASED TEACHING IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Learning is a part of dispute resolution (as I have discussed before at this blog) so learning about learning can be very helpful for conflict professionals. Here's a real treat for those of you interested in neuroscience and teaching/learning. Click to read Brain-Based Teaching in the Digital Age [pdf]. Even though the author is talking about the education of children, the book has value for us too, older kids that we are.

From the Introduction:

In Part 1 of the book, I tell you how digital technology is changing the brain and discuss what’s new and applicable from brain research. In this section, I also explain how some of the brain-based teaching principles apply in the digital world. In Part 2 of the book, I talk about the whole child, learning environments, and the importance of group learning. Part 3 covers music, mind mapping, and memory. In Part 4, I explore the topic of how to try to balance 21st century technological skills with people skills and look at some options for what future learning will be like. Each chapter includes “instant messages” with bits of useful information.

Throughout this book, we will focus on the need for our students to have emotional intelligence, creativity, and the ability to synthesize information to be successful in a world that is changing from an information age to a conceptual age. I ask you to consider the material presented here, whether you are a digital native or a digital immigrant. The brain is changing, and so can you.

"Predators and Punishment"

Excellent article for anyone interested in legal responsibility. Abstract:

Psychopathy is characterized as an emotional disorder tightly woven with persistent antisocial behavior. Prevailing legal doctrine and social norms hold psychopaths responsible for their conduct and punishment legitimately flows to psychopaths who violate the law. Recent scholarship, however, has challenged that view by claiming the emotional and cognitive deficits inherent in psychopathy should preclude culpability for some psychopaths. This view necessarily imposes a substantial modification on how the law conceptualizes culpability that is ultimately unwise. Legal responsibility entails the capacity for rationality and psychopaths comport with the established meanings of rationality as understood by the law and the communal intuitions which guide it. Extant scholarship indicates psychopaths are rationale agents and can be fairly subjected to punishment for conduct which violates the law. The law should reject efforts to include psychopaths within its excuse jurisprudence.

Click to download "Predators and Punishment" (Psychology, Public Policy, and Law at SSRN).

Still ANOTHER top-10 list of myths about the brain

These lists seem to float by on Twitter and Facebook like tropical fish in a tank. They often overlap but each is different, too. Today I sighted another drifting along on Facebook. For you list watchers, here's a short list of lists:

• Top Ten Myths About the Brain (Smithsonian)
• Top 10 Myths About the Brain (Discovery Health)
• Ten myths about the human brain (MindCafe)

Do older parties to mediation see transgressions differently from younger ones?

This neurodevelopmental study simply reminds us that many factors enter into the thoughts, feelings and judgments of parties in conflict, including perhaps age. In the study, the oldest participant was 37; research on the older popluation might be interesting.

Abstract from "The Contribution of Emotion and Cognition to Moral Sensitivity: A Neurodevelopmental Study" (Cerebral Cortex) [pdf]:

Whether emotion is a source of moral judgments remains controversial. This study combined neurophysiological measures, including functional magnetic resonance imaging, eye-tracking, and pupillary response with behavioral measures assessing affective and moral judgments across age. One hundred and twenty-six participants aged between 4 and 37 years viewed scenarios depicting intentional versus accidental actions that caused harm/damage to people and objects. Morally, salient scenarios evoked stronger empathic sadness in young participants and were associated with enhanced activity in the amygdala, insula, and temporal poles. While intentional harm was evaluated as equally wrong across all participants, ratings of deserved punishments and malevolent intent

Your power IS in your focus: New book YOU ARE NOT YOUR BRAIN coming out in a week

Amazon lists June 9, as the date You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life will start shipping. My experience is that new books often come out a few days before the date Amazon lists. Therefore, the book will likely be available in a week—at the most. In the meanwhile, you may read a blog post by Dr. Rebecca Gladding, Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz's coauthor. She says it is the first of several about the book's messages.

Excerpt from "What Drives Your Habits?" (Psychology Today blogs):

Consider these two scenarios: 1) someone who eats her favorite snack whenever she is stressed out versus 2) a person who gets pleasure out of checking his email all day long. In isolation, those actions do not seem that bad or problematic. But what if the woman eating food whenever she is stressed finds that she is gaining weight and actually feels worse about herself and the man checking email ends up wasting so much time that he has to stay late every night, thus causing him to miss out on other important aspects of his life?
 
What binds these habits together and drives our behavior is the brain and how it works. No matter whether we are trying to alleviate anxiety or feel pleasure, our brain does the same thing: it compels us to act in a very rote, automatic fashion without much awareness of what we are doing. We act because a certain feeling comes over us or a specific set of events occurs. And, even if that action is not helpful to us, we still do it because our brain is telling us we must.

How does this happen? Whenever we repeatedly focus our attention on something, including performing

Everybody's talking about the word—Emerge, emerge, emerge, emerge's the word*

A word recently has been in my thoughts; that word spends a lot of time in my mind. In fact, I had been seriously toying with the idea of honoring one of the letters in CARVE, acronym for key parts of my dispute resolution model, by letting it stand for the word.

Then when I heard the word a number of times last week at the annual Association for Psychological Science, the matter was decided, the deal was done. Emergence is a very popular topic right now, deservedly so, and that's what the "E" in CARVE now stands for.

I had been thinking about emergence because it describes well the criticism and impatience I have with much of what is being said by popularizers about neuroscience, including some of the people talking about the brain and its role in conflict resolution. Their approach to neuroscience is reductionist, and goes something like this: We know "A" about the brain and so this happens, and we know "B" about the brain and so that happens. Because of "A," people do this, and because of "B," people do that. If only it were that simple! And if only we knew as much about "A" and "B" as these people put forth with such certainty.

Emergence adds another layer of complication with which we must contend and wrestle: another layer, another twist, about which we may or may not learn as more about the brain is discovered. Using our example of "A" and "B", emergence simply means that "A" and "B" together may create "C" and that "C" may not be predictable or intended or consistent. It is not as simple as 2 + 3 = 5; more like 2 +3 = 7 today, and 4 tomorrow, and nothing on Wednesday.

Let's look at what a couple of the speakers at the APS conference had to say.