50 Psychology Classics (47 page)

However, this acceptance also brought with it the view that the forces of biology play no role in accounting for how people are. In a famous passage from
Behaviorism
(1924), John B. Watson boasted that if he was given a dozen healthy infants he could shape them into anything he wanted as adults, whether doctor, artist, beggar, or thief.

Even though behaviorism is no longer psychological orthodoxy, its idea of a perfectly blank mental slate has stubbornly remained. It has become “the secular religion of modern intellectual life,” Pinker says. Quite understandably,
we don't want to go back to a time in which biological differences between people are highlighted, because this seemingly allows for racial, gender, or class discrimination and prejudice. However, the irony is that the vacuum the blank slate idea creates has allowed it to be used and abused by totalitarian regimes, which believe they can fashion the masses into anything they want. Pinker asks: How many more “human reengineering” projects do we need to go through before the blank slate idea is finally laid to rest?

Pinker points out that the human mind could never have been blank because it was forged through Darwinian competition over thousands of years. People whose brains made them cunning problem solvers with acute senses naturally triumphed over others and their genes lived on. Minds that were too malleable were “selected out” of existence.

Evolutionary biologists and some enlightened anthropologists have shown that a range of “socially constructed” factors such as emotions, kinship, and differences between the sexes are in fact to a large extent biologically programmed. Donald Brown mapped out what he calls “human universals,” traits or behaviors found in societies around the globe, regardless of level of development. These include conflict, rape, jealousy, and dominance, but also, as we would expect, conflict resolution, a sense of morality, kindness, and love. Human beings can be brutish
and
smart
and
loving because we have inherited the neurological makeup of people who engaged in skirmishes and battles and survived, yet who were also able to live in close community and be peacemakers. “Love, will and conscience,” Pinker concludes, “are ‘biological' too—that is, evolutionary adaptations implemented in the circuitry of the brain.”

A variety of research by neuroscientists has found just how minutely set our brains are when we are born. For example:

Gay men usually have a part of the brain (the third interstitial nucleus in the anterior hypothalamus) that is smaller than normal. This part of the brain is recognized as playing a role in sex differences.

Einstein's brain had large and unusually shaped inferior parietal lobules, which are important in spatial and numbering intelligence. In contrast, studies on the brains of convicted murderers found their brains to have a smaller than average prefrontal cortex, which governs decision making and inhibits our impulses.

Identical twins separated at birth have been found to have very similar levels of general intelligence, verbal and mathematical skills, plus personality traits such as introversion or extroversion, agreeableness, and general life satisfaction. They even have the same personality quirks and behaviors such as gambling and television watching. This can be attributed not only to having exactly the
same genetic material, but to the fact that the actual physiology of their brains (the valleys and folds and size of certain parts) is almost exactly the same.

Many conditions once thought caused by a person's environment alone have now been found to have genetic roots. These include schizophrenia, depression, autism, dyslexia, bipolar illness, and language impairment. Such conditions run in families and cannot be predicted easily from environmental factors.

Psychologists are able to divide personality into five main dimensions: introverted or extraverted; neurotic or stable; incurious or open to new things; agreeable or antagonistic; and conscientious or undirected. All five dimensions can be inherited, with 40–50 percent of our personality related to these genetic tendencies.

Pinker acknowledges our fear that if genes affects the mind, then we are completely controlled by genes in our thinking and behavior. However, genes only entail a certain
probability
—they determine nothing.

Pinker compares the belief in a blank slate to the cosmology of Galileo's time, when people believed that the physical universe rested on a moral framework. In the same way, today's moral and political sensitivities have meant that scientific fact—the biological basis of human nature—has been swept aside in favor of ideology. We are afraid that these facts will lead to a “meltdown of values” and a loss of control over the sort of society we want to live in.

In response, Pinker recalls a line from Chekhov: “Man will become better when you show him what he is like.” Only by sticking to the facts about who and what we are, supplied by biology, genetic science, and evolutionary psychology, can we move forward. There may be many aspects of human nature we don't like to admit, but denying them does not make them go away.

The Blank Slate
is a big, fat book that will take you a while to read and fully understand. It is an intellectual
tour de force
, and may well shatter some of your cherished opinions or shift them to firmer scientific ground. It is easy to see why Pinker is in the top echelon of popular science writers today—his work combines scientific gravitas with a highly enjoyable style.

Born in 1954 in Montreal, Canada, Steven Pinker has degrees from McGill University and Harvard, where he obtained his PhD in experimental psychology. He is best known for his research into language and cognition
.

Other books include
The Language Instinct
(1994),
How the Mind Works
(1997),
Visual Cognition
(1985),
Lexical and Conceptual Semantics
(1992), and
Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language
(1999). Until 2003 Pinker was a professor of psychology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of its Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. He is currently the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University
.

“There is something uniquely odd about a hairless neotenous primate that has evolved into a species that can look back over its own shoulder and ask questions about its origins. And odder still, the brain cannot only discover how other brains work but also ask questions about its own existence: Who am I? What happens after death? Does my mind arise exclusively from neurons in my brain? And if so, what scope is there for free will? It is the peculiar recursive quality of these questions—as the brain struggles to understand itself—that makes neurology fascinating.”

In a nutshell

Unraveling the weirder cases in neurology can provide insights into how we perceive ourselves.

In a similar vein
Viktor Frankl
The Will to Meaning
(p 100)
Anna Freud
The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence
(p 104)
William James
The Principles of Psychology
(p 162)
Oliver Sacks
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
(p 242)

What is consciousness? What is the “self”? Such big questions have been the preserve of philosophers for thousands of years. Now, with our increasingly advanced knowledge of the brain itself, science is entering the debate. V. S. Ramachandran, one of the world's top neuroscientists, says that the study of the brain is still too young to be knitted into some grand theory of consciousness in the way that Einstein came up with the theory of relativity, but that perhaps we are at the early stages of such an understanding.

Phantoms of the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind
(written with Sandra Blakeslee) is Ramachandran's bestselling foray into the “mysteries of the mind,” and it is a revelation. After reading this book you will never again be able to lift your arm or grab a cup and take it for granted. While scientists are apt to develop theories and then find the evidence to support them, Ramachandran does the opposite, purposely embracing the medical anomalies that current science cannot easily explain away. For readers with an interest in psychiatry, perhaps the standout message of the book is that many cases previously diagnosed as “madness” are now better understood as malfunctions in brain circuitry. Seemingly crazy behaviors may not mean that a person is insane.

As well getting us abreast of basic cranial anatomy, the book is also entertaining. Sherlock Holmes-loving Ramachandran admits he is not your average scientist, and includes quotations from Shakespeare and holistic healing guru Deepak Chopra, as well as references to Freud and Indian religion. Instead of counting off his academic accomplishments, he reveals his intellectual debt to popular science books. Such broad-mindedness makes
Phantoms of the Mind
a pleasure to read even if you have never heard of a thalamus or a frontal lobe. Though it can ramble a little, Ramachandran's informal style conveys his wonder and amazement at how a mass of wet gray cells can create self-awareness and consciousness.