Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Seeing is Believing
From time to time, my colleague Jake Dunagan cites a study showing that the image of a brain makes people more likely to believe that whatever they're reading is legitimate. So, at some level, I wasn't surprised to see this very good, if somewhat misguided story about the effects that bullying has on a child's development--and how recent advances in neuroimaging are making those effects seem a lot more tangible and weighty than mere statistics and psychology.
But when it comes to the actual harm bullying does, the picture grows murkier. The psychological torment that victims feel is real. But perhaps because many of us have experienced this sort of schoolyard cruelty and lived to tell the tale, peer harassment is still commonly written off as a “soft” form of abuse — one that leaves no obvious injuries and that most victims simply get over. It’s easy to imagine that, painful as bullying can be, all it hurts is our feelings.
A new wave of research into bullying’s effects, however, is now suggesting something more than that — that in fact, bullying can leave an indelible imprint on a teen’s brain at a time when it is still growing and developing. Being ostracized by one’s peers, it seems, can throw adolescent hormones even further out of whack, lead to reduced connectivity in the brain, and even sabotage the growth of new neurons.
These neurological scars, it turns out, closely resemble those borne by children who are physically and sexually abused in early childhood....By revealing the internal physiological damage that bullying can do, researchers are recasting it not as merely an unfortunate rite of passage but as a serious form of childhood trauma.
What struck me about the passage above was the sheer weight that seemed to be ascribed to seeing effects in the brain. Bullying is more because it "leave[s] an indelible imprint on a teen's brain;" bullying does not merely produce "hurt feelings" but creates "neurological scars." The underlying message is: Brain scans are real and meaningful; reports of emotional distress are not.
My concern with the article is similar to a point that Ben Goldacre recently made in the Guardian about the dangers of getting sucked into the belief that seeing things on our bodies makes them somehow more real.
All mental states have physical correlates, if you believe that the physical activity of the brain is what underlies our sensations, beliefs and experiences. So while different mental states will be associated with different physical states, that doesn't tell you which caused which.
Far stranger is the idea that a subjective experience must be shown to have a measurable physical correlate in the brain before we can agree that the subjective experience is real. If someone is complaining of persistent low sex drive, then they have persistent low sex drive, and even if you could find no physical correlate in the brain whatsoever, that wouldn't matter: they still have low sex drive...
Many people find fatty food to be pleasurable, for the taste, the calories and any number of other reasons. When a brain imaging study showed that the reward centres in the brain had increased blood flow after subjects in an experiment ate high-fat foods, the Boston Globe explained: "Fat really does bring pleasure."
Goldacre concludes that "it's a slightly strange world when a scan of blood flow in the brain is taken as vindication of a subjective mental state," but I think there's a bigger danger here: That problems we can see--on our brains, in our genes--are fundamentally different, and require a much greater level of response than what someone says they feel, or even what someone does.
And this seems misguided. Bullying is not somehow worse because we can see "neurological scars"--the act of bullying created those scars long before we had advanced neuroimaging technologies. We simply have the technology, and the science, to measure those scars.
My sense, though, is that this assumption--that meaningful emotions will be visible on our bodies--will become increasingly commonplace in the coming decade, as advances in neuroimaging make it easier to find those biological imprints. And as a result, it seems likely to me that states or stimuli that don't have corresponding biological measurements--because we can't find them, or because we haven't bothered to look--will increasingly be states and stimuli we ignore, whether or not it makes good sense.