Putting cognitive neuroscience to work

neurobiology and components of mind

David Brooks, a political columnist for the New York Times, wrote an Op Ed on October 13, 2009 entitled ‘The young and the neuro’. He had come away from a social cognitive neuroscience meeting both impressed and excited. In his Times article he summaries some of what he heard about topics that included how individuals from different cultures respond to menacing faces, painful situations, disgust, dehumanization.  The different responses of these groups were documented not just by careful behavioral measurement but also via associated brain imaging data highlighting activated areas of the brain associated with their behavior.

The article made me think back to an old New Yorker I found it under a pile of other papers. Jonah Lehrer wrote about the ‘Eureka Hunt’ …’Why do good ideas come to us when they do?’ The article describes some of what we know about two contrasting types of thinking in the service of solving problems, insight vs. analytic analysis. We all do some of both and experience them differently (the steady working through internal talking approach vs. the pop, or pow, or the leap to another place kind of thinking). Lehrer describes the research that has investigated insight vs. analytic thinking and how one kind of thinking can be blocked by the activity of the other but also all of the neuroscience that has put detailed flesh on the bones of these contrasting cognitive behaviors. In his article he documents how different types of brain mapping techniques, when used together can begin to provide us with insights about the neural underpinnings of these rather complex cognitive behaviors. For example, traditional functional magnetic imaging techniques can provide us with pictures of small regions of the brain, a valuable feature of functional magnetic resonance imaging, but the method is slow (captures the average level of activation in a brain region over a period of many seconds). It cannot capture a behavior that happens very rapidly such as a sudden insight. Modern EEG methods can index activity that takes place in well under a second but is a poor tool for detailed localization of the source of the brain action. However when you put the two methods to work together you can begin to form a picture of our brains in action during insight in contrast to more methodical problem solving.

This type of research along with the science presentations that impressed David Brooks, represent a preview of coming attractions of what is possible as we explore the neural basis of who we are and how we function in all kinds of situations are starting to happen.