The past decade has seen an explosion in neuroscience research examining everything from bat echolocation to young children’s processing of language. Competition is fierce; leading research groups closely guard their experimental secrets for fear of other groups preempting their findings. Judging from the frenetic pace of publication, this is only the beginning.
While our knowledge has advanced by leaps and bounds, the abundance of disparate data begs for unification. Reading many contemporary neuroscience papers is akin to sifting through a puzzle box. The pieces are mostly there and they seem to fit together somehow. What’s conspicuously absent is the theory necessary to assemble the pieces into a functional atlas, which we hope will go a long way toward explaining the peculiar emergent phenomenon that is consciousness.
One way to expose direct links between neurophysiology and behavior is to study the neural correlates of actions and experiences. In lay words, these studies try to identify which areas of your brain are activated when you feel a certain way or do something specific.
Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and her colleagues at the University of Southern California’s Brain and Creativity Institute wanted to identify the brain systems involved in social emotions, like admiration for the courageous firefighter who risks his life to rescue a baby from a fire or compassion for a friend going through a tough divorce. Since these emotions play an important role in guiding our behavior toward other people, understanding the biology of these social emotions might shed light on the nature of moral decision making.
Dr. Immordino-Yang and her colleagues published their findings in last week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. By reading to subjects a series of stories tailored to evoke admiration or compassion while recording brain activity, the scientists found that the experience of these social emotions elicits activity in brain areas that regulate basic survival — heart rate, blood pressure, hormone levels and the internal functioning of the gut and viscera. In an unexpected twist, they also found that emotions about the mind of another person — like admiration for virtue and compassion for psychological pain — take longer to trigger brain activity in those areas than comparable emotions about the physical state of another person — like compassion for physical pain.
The study confirms what poets have known since the dawn of civilization: Emotions are grounded in “gut feelings.” Somatic sensation, particularly the gut, is a platform for responding to other people’s social and psychological situations. The latter, unanticipated finding is generating far more hype. Since social emotions have a slow onset, rapid-fire media — especially those with the rapid succession of images — may short circuit the full experience of compassion or admiration for the people shown on the screen. Thanks to media attention, Dr. Immordino-Yang’s paper was the fifth-most popular Twitter topic last week.
Skepticism is well warranted. Correlation studies like this one are justifiably derided for their lack of explanatory value and causal ambiguity. In particular, conclusions about digital media are a stretch of logic that stands on extremely shaky ground. Journalistic treatment of this paper is indicative of a larger problem in science journalism: Legitimate scientific findings are misunderstood by the lay public because the media grossly exaggerates their importance in the interest of sensationalism.
Still, it never hurts to dream. Neurobiological knowledge has immense appeal in direct application to technology, especially if you’re a sci-fi junky. An understanding of the neural substrates of emotion could plausibly be parlayed into better modes of communication. Perhaps we could infuse those oh-so-ambiguous text messages with feeling by stimulating parts of the brain associated with certain emotions as the message is read.
Although the ultimate prize of understanding consciousness in all its grand complexity remains a distant afterthought, we are making tremendous strides. The contest is more marathon than sprint, but the spirit of the runners is still summed up in those three little words.