COWEN: Are we less creative if all the parts of our mind become allies? Maybe I’m afraid this will happen to me, that I have rebellious parts of my mind, and they force me to do more interesting things, or they introduce randomness or variety into my life.
BOYDEN: This is a question that I think is going to become more and more urgent as neurotechnology advances. Already there are questions about attention-focusing drugs like Ritalin or Adderall. Maybe they make people more focused, but are you sacrificing some of the wandering and creativity that might exist in the brain and be very important for not only personal productivity but the future of humanity?
I think what we’re realizing is that when you intervene with the brain, even with brain stimulation, you can cause unpredictable side effects. For example, there’s a part of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. That’s actually an FDA-approved site for stimulation with noninvasive magnetic pulses to treat depression. But patients, when they’re stimulated here . . . People have done studies. It can also change things like trust. It can change things like driving ability.
There’s only so many brain regions, but there’s millions of things we do. Of course, intervening with one region might change many things.
[---]
COWEN: Ultimately, do you believe in reductionism — that what is the brain can be understood by physical science, and by materials, and by cause and effect the way we would understand, say, a computer?
BOYDEN: If you say, can we understand the brain in terms of chemical underpinnings, I would say yes.
COWEN: And consciousness?
BOYDEN: Again, I think we don’t have a good definition of consciousness in the sense that we cannot detect it through a consciousness meter, and we don’t have a creation method of consciousness engine. So the jury’s still out on that front, but I hope to study it.
Science can fail. There are certain things that science can’t yet answer, like what happened before the Big Bang and so forth. But I think we have to give it our best shot.
[---]
COWEN: I worry sometimes that would make things worse. I think of people on Twitter: they see what each other have to say; they like each other less. There’s some partial evidence that, if you try to mentally put yourself in someone else’s shoes, you realize that what they think conflicts with your values, and you may be less inclined to agree with them. Is it possible we have too much empathy, and we should just be more objective, more Spockian, rational calculators?
BOYDEN: It also might be that we have to think of empathy in a new way. As we talked about earlier, suppose that what we are consciously aware of is being generated by some unconscious processes that happen right beforehand. Maybe when we are trying to experience empathy at a certain point in time, there are other processes in the brain that occurred beforehand that we don’t have access to. But if we could access those processes, we could have a greater kind of empathy.
Some of this language is used in meditative and consciousness-oriented and mindfulness practices that try to understand compassion and empathy in a greater way. But I wonder if there’s a precise neuroscientific way to tackle such things.
- More Here
BOYDEN: This is a question that I think is going to become more and more urgent as neurotechnology advances. Already there are questions about attention-focusing drugs like Ritalin or Adderall. Maybe they make people more focused, but are you sacrificing some of the wandering and creativity that might exist in the brain and be very important for not only personal productivity but the future of humanity?
I think what we’re realizing is that when you intervene with the brain, even with brain stimulation, you can cause unpredictable side effects. For example, there’s a part of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. That’s actually an FDA-approved site for stimulation with noninvasive magnetic pulses to treat depression. But patients, when they’re stimulated here . . . People have done studies. It can also change things like trust. It can change things like driving ability.
There’s only so many brain regions, but there’s millions of things we do. Of course, intervening with one region might change many things.
[---]
COWEN: Ultimately, do you believe in reductionism — that what is the brain can be understood by physical science, and by materials, and by cause and effect the way we would understand, say, a computer?
BOYDEN: If you say, can we understand the brain in terms of chemical underpinnings, I would say yes.
COWEN: And consciousness?
BOYDEN: Again, I think we don’t have a good definition of consciousness in the sense that we cannot detect it through a consciousness meter, and we don’t have a creation method of consciousness engine. So the jury’s still out on that front, but I hope to study it.
Science can fail. There are certain things that science can’t yet answer, like what happened before the Big Bang and so forth. But I think we have to give it our best shot.
[---]
COWEN: I worry sometimes that would make things worse. I think of people on Twitter: they see what each other have to say; they like each other less. There’s some partial evidence that, if you try to mentally put yourself in someone else’s shoes, you realize that what they think conflicts with your values, and you may be less inclined to agree with them. Is it possible we have too much empathy, and we should just be more objective, more Spockian, rational calculators?
BOYDEN: It also might be that we have to think of empathy in a new way. As we talked about earlier, suppose that what we are consciously aware of is being generated by some unconscious processes that happen right beforehand. Maybe when we are trying to experience empathy at a certain point in time, there are other processes in the brain that occurred beforehand that we don’t have access to. But if we could access those processes, we could have a greater kind of empathy.
Some of this language is used in meditative and consciousness-oriented and mindfulness practices that try to understand compassion and empathy in a greater way. But I wonder if there’s a precise neuroscientific way to tackle such things.
- More Here
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