The naked brain - how the development of the brain society changes our lives

Will employers and advertisers scan our brains? Introduction: Welcome to the Brain Society * New book published by Aryeh Nir, by Dr. Richard Restak, from English: Yehudit Bar Lev, scientific editing: Zvi Atzmon

In the first half of the 21st century we will better understand the human mind, and this understanding will cause a revolution in our concepts about ourselves and our relationships with others. The importance of this revolution is so great that I think it is appropriate to talk about the development of a brain company.
As citizens in a brainy society we will have to get used to developments such as:

• Tests aimed at revealing to others some of our thoughts and tendencies, which we would prefer to hide
• Brain scans designed to test our suitability for certain jobs
• Tests that claim to explain why we are romantically attracted to certain people, and repelled by others
• Advertising campaigns that use brain scans to predict which products we will buy
• Chemical substances to increase the activity of the brain, designed to turn us into insatiable consumers, who even purchase products and services that we do not need
• Creating profiles of our brains, to check which political candidate we will vote for
• Examining response patterns of the brain, which reveal the emotions that movies and TV shows evoke in us

Such developments will become part of our daily lives in the first quarter of the 21st century, as we increasingly use brain-related terms and ideas to describe our inner experiences and our own and others' behavior.
In trials of violent crime defendants, for example, abnormal brain scan images are commonly presented as mitigating factors. The argument "something is wrong with his brain, and that made him do this", replaces the traditional "something is wrong with him". Brain scans are also offered as a means to diagnose reading and learning disorders, to "explain" mental illnesses and also to find ways to treat them.
By the way, if you doubt that a distinctly technical field like neuroscience will have such an impact on society ("it's hard for unskilled people to understand this"), think about the social effects of three equally demanding fields that developed in the 20th century: computer science, physics and psychoanalysis. Terms such as virtual reality, fast forward, blackout, relativity and spitting are part of our vocabulary. Brain imaging affects our concepts of ourselves to the same extent today.
"Images of brain scans that we see around us - in newspapers and magazines, on television and in the movies, have changed our concepts of our brains more than anything else," says Bettian Holtzman Kowells, historian and author of the book Naked to the Bone: Medical Imaging in the Twentieth Century. Medical imaging in the 20th century).
Furthermore, the developing knowledge about the brain caused the creation of a new field of thought in social neuroscience: the application of neuroscience in social interactions. Thus we have dramatically diverged from our usual observation of human behavior.
Social and biological approaches to the study of human behavior have generally developed in separate, sometimes even opposing, trajectories. For example, when you studied psychology or social science in school, you learned to describe in abstract terms the mutual influences among individuals, groups, societies and cultures. Anthropologists, economists, linguists and others have provided alternative "explanations". Experts in these varied fields behaved like the blind men in the fable touching the elephant: each expert based his explanations on that part of the phenomenon he encountered. Events that took place in the minds of the people, the subjects of the study, were rarely addressed.
Until recently, neuroscientists were also limited in their approach. In the last two hundred years they have studied the brain alone, as one examines a watch. To understand how a watch works there is no need to consider its environment (except for extreme conditions such as heat or humidity). You just have to remove the cover - and mess with the parts that make it up.
Social neuroscience presents a completely new dimension, recognizing that the brain is not like a clock at all, but rather it works differently, depending on a social relationship; And it is possible to understand thought and behavior only by merging a social view and a psychological view with neuroscience. The blind must start talking to each other, sharing their experiences, their questions and their theories.
The most fundamental insight provided by social neuroscience deals with the social nature of the brain. The recognition of this was born for the first time in the seventies of the 20th century, with the discovery that physical contact is even more important to monkeys than food in determining the affinity between mother and child. And thanks to Hari Harlow, a higher mammal researcher at the University of Wisconsin, for this discovery.
Harlow removed monkeys from their biological mothers a few hours after their birth, and raised them without further contact with the mothers or with a human surrogate. In his most famous experiment, he prepared two "substitute mothers" for the babies, which were made of a wooden frame covered with a metal mesh or towel cloth. The babies preferred the "mother" made of towel cloth, and clung to her even when the feeding bottle was connected to the mother made of metal mesh - excellent proof that newborn monkeys have an innate need for the softness and warmth of maternal care, and if deprived of this they will choose the nearest substitute.
Other researchers then discovered what was going on in the minds of the monkeys when performing Harlow's experiments. An early loss of physical contact with the mother reduces the number of steroid receptors involved in the stress response in their brains. Monkeys with reduced steroid absorption have difficulty coping with stress. And since these changes in the receptors are permanent, an animal deprived of contact with its mother remains vulnerable throughout its life to diseases related to stress. Harlow's experiment showed that the lack of normal social interaction causes changes in the brain, and these in turn cause fundamental changes in behavior, which remain constant for life.
Another discovery that helped in understanding the social nature of the brain appeared ten years later; Two experts on the subject of the effect of drugs on the behavior of animals discovered an important principle when they examined the effects of amphetamines on the behavior of male rhesus-cockroach monkeys. Since the drug affected identical areas of each monkey's brain, one would expect that all monkeys given the same drug would react more or less identically. And that's what happened at first. But the researchers discovered something completely different when they looked at the results of their experiment from a different perspective.
After taking into account each monkey's dominant position in the social hierarchy, the researchers found that amphetamine increases the dominance of monkeys high in the social hierarchy, but it also increases the submissiveness of monkeys near the bottom of that hierarchy. In other words, the researchers only found differences in the monkeys' responses when they combined a biological study with a social study. Research carried out later by other scientists confirmed that both the biological and the social factors must be taken into account in order to understand the behavior and emotions of Ashram. And these things apply not only to animals but also to us.
For example, you probably wouldn't have to think much to confirm, from personal experience, that threats to social identity cause physical consequences. Most of us get depressed or in a bad mood when others ignore us or when our partner talks about divorce or when our boss says we should look for another job. We get angry when co-workers make fun of us or when they refuse to accept us as members of the club. In fact, our everyday language is rich in descriptions that combine the biological and the social: "hurt" feelings, a "bruised" ego and a "broken" heart are all metaphors for describing painful experiences, which can be caused by social interactions gone wrong.
Social neuroscience will allow us to move away from metaphors in the coming years, the more we understand the relationship between the brain and our most personal and intimate thoughts.
Social neuroscience is today a young field of thought, similar to aeronautics at the time when the Wright brothers made their first flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Who could have predicted then the development of commercial aviation, which today we take for granted? And so also when we try to predict today the effects of social neuroscience on our private and collective lives.
For several years I followed the rapid developments in the field, and I became convinced that at this early stage it is impossible to accurately predict the future. And so, instead of trying to predict or create a synthesis of social neuroscience ahead of its time, I decided to describe to you how we already today observe in new and different ways our most personal qualities, such as trust, telling the truth, love, affection, empathy, ethics, competition, domineering and obedience. Neuroscientists today examine these features using imaging facilities and other research devices that are able to measure brain activity in time intervals ranging from hours to milliseconds. Their findings have implications for marketers, political scientists, and experts in fields not traditionally associated with brain research.
This book describes their research; offers thought experiments that you can perform on your own to test and predict your brain's response to puzzles and social riddles; and tells how social neuroscience affects our concepts of ourselves and our actions. In the next ten chapters we will examine what social neuroscience has to tell us about topics such as marketing, economics and even ethics and morality.
In short, the book is about the brain society we live in today and the changes we can expect to take place in our lives when the applications of social neuroscience move from the laboratory to the boardroom, to the showroom, and to the bedroom.