Yesterday saw the opening of Neuroscience 2011, the hottest event in the neuroscience calendar. As promised, our team (me) was on the scene to bring you all of the highlights live, direct and in technicolor. Well, not exactly ‘live’, as I have only just got round to writing about them. Jet-lag and wine hit me like Pauline Fowler’s frying pan last night and so I felt I was unable to do the article any justice. Instead, I have woken up at 5:30 am in the morning in order to relay all of the best bits of yesterday before trundling in to the Walter E. Washington Convention Center to be bamboozled by yet more revelations in brain science.
Day 1 highlights:
Robert J. Shiller
Bob Shiller is an eminent economist, graduate from MIT and author of the recent book ‘Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism’. Given the title of his book, one might have assumed that his presentation, the inaugural address of the meeting, would be about how human behavioural psychology - or perhaps even neuroscience - affects the financial markets. Those (such as myself) who assumed this were left disappointed, as the link between psychology and the economy was never really established. This should not have been surprising given the paucity of knowledge regarding the human brain and the woeful lack of understanding for the capricious nature of the global financial system; but it was disappointing nonetheless.
However, the talk was still fascinating and stimulating, and provided neuroscientists with a glimpse of the challenges that face economists on a daily basis. Shiller consistently drew comparisons between the brain and the economy throughout, illustrating clearly that both systems consist of interconnected units that are subject to spontaneous activity that can not always be predicted. The difference, he argued, is that whilst neuroscientists have the luxury of being able to perform controlled scientific experiments to test hypotheses, economists must produce treatises based on observations alone. This problem is further complicated by the fact that the financial markets are continuously in flux and so the thing that they are trying to study doesn’t even have the decency to remain constant, not even for a minute.
I left Shiller’s talk feeling that I understood the financial markets even less than when I walked in, but was reassured (although concerned) by the revelation that economists understood it far less than I had previously assumed. The analogy between brains and markets may prove to be a fruitful one, and could possibly assist with the development of novel techniques to facilitate economic research. Ultimately though, the underlying take-home message of this talk was that nobody can predict the vicissitudes of the economy because, ultimately, they are governed by the actions of imperfect, irrational, animal spirits.
Craig Stark
The first talk of the symposium ‘Neuroscience and the Law’ was presented by Craig Stark. In it, he demonstrated his research on ‘false’ memories and how they can be as real to the person who perceives them as normal memories and how dangerous this can be. For instance, his first example consisted of a case in Australia of a man who was arrested on suspicion of rape. The victim had provided police with a description that fit the appearance of the arrested man perfectly. Furthermore, when presented with photos of the man in question, the victim affirmed that he was indeed the attacker. The man denied this, and claimed that at the time the attack took place he had an alibi: he was on live TV. In fact, this transpired to be the case; the man was on a live discussion panel with the chief of police and the local bishop. Alibis don’t get much better than that! However, even in the face of this damning evidence to the contrary, the victim still maintained that he was indeed the attacker, proclaiming in court, clearly in some distress, ‘don’t you think I would know who attacked me?’
Throughout his talk, Stark outlined some of the work he and others have been doing to establish how we obtain false memories. It is important to note that this does not simply refer to misremembering information flippantly or being unsure of certain facts. These false memories seem very real to those that have them (presumably all of us to some degree) and their validity will be vehemently defended until they can be proved false. For instance many of us have memories of where we were when certain things happened (Kennedy getting shot, September the 11th, etc.), but Stark argues that, over time, false memories based on our expectations can easily replace reality, such that much of the time these believes are in fact false, but we have no way of knowing.
The results produced in Stark’s laboratory have important implications for the judicial system. Should we trust eye-witness accounts at all? If so, when should they be trusted and how can we know? An important thing to note is that, in this instance, lie-detector tests are completely useless, as subjects with false memories believe that they are telling the truth and so any indicator of their honesty will not help. However, Stark believes that different (however marginally different) neurological pathways are activated when retrieving false and genuine memories, and so there is potential for the development of brain scans that measure truth in the future. This would be a fundamental leap in the justice system and, as he conceded, would be pretty scary!
Other bits...
The aforementioned talks were definitely my favourites of the day, but there were several other good talks. For instance, Abigail Baird gave a wonderfully lively (and humorous) talk outlining the difference between the way the adolescent and adult brains process information and work out how to behave. Teenagers are slower than adults at assessing what to do in a given situation (such as whether or not to swim with sharks; ostensibly quite a simple question) and use fundamentally different areas of the brain, presumably because they have to ‘think about it’ naively, rather than base decision-making on prior experience. Furthermore, adolescents are heavily influenced by peers during moments of decision-making (no surprise there), and use completely different brain regions to solve problems when in the presence or absence of people their own age.
As usual, the first day of Neuroscience was as tiring as it was stimulating and today promises to be no different. Possible highlights include Andreas Luthi’s talk on the neurobiology of fear, a symposium on the neurological basis of the placebo effect and a talk by Theodore Mcdonald entitled ‘The Self and Neuroscience From an Indian Philosopher's Perspective’. Who knows though, you can’t predict what’s going to happen at a neuroscience conference. I guess they are like financial markets in that respect...
Dr Paul
