That is, the brain is simply going about its business. Sometimes, it lights up like a Christmas tree on the fMRI screens when asked to perform some task, or doesn’t light up much at all, or lights up in surprising locales or surprises researchers by not lighting up where they had hoped or thought it would.

At that point, all interpreters can do is to argue their feelings and biases about what it all means. Of course, that’s what humans, including scientific researchers, have always done where the brain is concerned. And we don’t seem to be getting much closer to crossing the Rubicon—or maybe we should say past the Albatross—of how to explain what we see when we map what researchers call “the subject’s neural state.”

Take, for example, Stanford economist Douglas Bernheim’s point in a just published American Economic Journal article that is causing waves in the new field of “neuroeconomics.” Dr. Bernheim wants to be optimistic about neuroeconomics but isn’t yet. This is because of the circular nature of using brain data to measure something subjective. Happiness, for example.

Brain research still needs the tongue
Bernheim’s article and his point about circularity drew the attention of the two Northwestern University economists who write the “Cheap Talk” blog: “Since neural states don’t come ready-made with labels, we need some independent measurement of well-being to correlate with. That is, we have to ask the subject. Let’s assume we make sufficiently many observations coupled with “are you happy now?” questions to identify exactly the happy states. What will we have accomplished then? We will simply have catalogued and translated subjective welfare statements. And using this catalogue adds nothing new.” Which is the central problem of a lot of expensive brain research.

The researchers who were seeking a “God” spot in the brain encountered a similar obstacle. Well, actually, they encountered several. Their goal was to pinpoint what part of the brain “correlates” with a mystical experience. Or at least the most intense Christian-type mystical experience that could be remembered by the Carmelite nuns who participated in the experiment.

Did anything on the fMRI screen light up? Absolutely. There was significant brain activity observed in the nuns’ right medial orbitofrontal cortex, right middle temporal cortex, right inferior and superior parietal lobules, right caudate, left medial prefrontal cortex, left anterior cingulate cortex, left inferior parietal lobule, left insula, left caudate, left brainstem and the extra-striate visual cortex. So, forget “God” spot and think “God” network!

But once again, this wasn’t the primary issue stumping the band. Clever though the experiment was, it didn’t—and couldn’t—tell us anything about God, such as, whether there is One. Just as with the happiness question, the only way we can really learn “something about God” is to ask individuals who think they know something. And you really don’t need fMRI experiments to do that. As one poetic critic put it, those who use fMRI, or brain, imaging to study the God issue still can’t “bridge the gap between the spiritual and the mundane.”

This observer added, “Until they do, there is simply no way to know whether the brain’s response to a religious experience is quantitatively different than its response to any of the deeply meaningful stimuli that surround our daily lives.”

Brain Magic for Investors Still Undiscovered?
Indeed, it is all too easy to get egg on one’s face by rushing in where old salts or your bitterest enemies know better than to tread. Alas, that appears to be what some of my favorite “neurosociety” advocates have done with some of their claims about the value of behavioral finance, neuroeconomics and the new “science of irrationality” in stock picking.

Russell Fuller and Richard Thaler are the brains behind Fuller & Thaler Asset Management, Inc., of San Mateo, CA, and a couple of investment portfolios set up to “exploit insights from behavioral finance.” The funds are called the Undiscovered Managers Behavioral Growth Fund and the Undiscovered Managers Behavioral Value Fund. The core idea is to avoid the consequences of this: “Under certain conditions behavioral biases cause market participants to misprocess information in the financial markets.”

So how are Dr. Fuller’s and Dr. Thaler’s funds doing in their quest to use behavioral finance discoveries to guide their trading decisions. Not well … and their enemies are gloating. One of the most outspoken is Paul B. Farrell, who writes the blog “MarketWatch.” He had named Fuller’s and Thaler’s funds “the Obama Nudgers Funds.” This is because Thaler co-authored the best-selling book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness with Cass Sunstein, who is now high up in the Obama White House.

Farrell’s glee is at observing that the Obama Nudgers Funds have been outperformed in by 1-year returns, 3-year annualized returns and 5-year annualized returns by what Farrell calls “the Lazy Portfolios.” These are eight well-diversified portfolios of no-load index funds that strive to cut operating cost, trading action and taxes to a bare minimum (near zero). For the uninitiated, this means the “behavioral finance” guys are doing worse—sometimes much worse—than funds that do next to nothing investment-management-wise, behavioral or otherwise. It’s a quite normal outcome for investment managers, but an embarrassing one for brain studies iconoclasts who were hoping to do better.

That’s also what the “neurosociety” crowd (and you can include the Thinkologist in the group) are seeking to avoid: making unwitting or unnecessary mistakes by correcting blind behaviors caused by the workings of a brain we’ve misjudged, ignored or known far too little about before. But we’re just getting started at this, something we need to be reminded of often.

A lot going on—with the best yet to come
Even as passionate an advocate as Zack Lynch (no relation to this blogger), author of The Neuro Revolution: How Brain Science is Changing Our World, admits that we are only in the beginning stages of the revolution he thinks is coming. He doesn’t believe it will reach critical mass in the public’s opinion (creating a perceptual shift toward a neurocosmos viewpoint) until the 2030s. Another neuroevangelist thinks we are 50 years away from a time when our new knowledge of things neuro will have thoroughly permeated and penetrated our lives and technologies.

But I’m personally encouraged at growing discoveries and inquiries of the new approaches to neuroscience.

For example, there is growing evidence that, as one CalTech researcher put it,
“We are biologically primed to be moral.” To be altruistic, to enforce fairness norms even when we have to pay a price ourselves.

I’m excited by the new brain studies on willpower and self-control. For example, we’re learning, or so the experts say, that if you overload certain areas of the brain, you weaken people’s abilities to resist temptation, such as eating foods that aren’t good for them. The challenge, obviously, is to avoid the overload. Our new pictures of the brain “pigging out” will help us figure out how best to model, and then to thwart, this self-destructive brain behavior.

Needed: cheaper toys and a comprehensive theory
The question of how to respond to the needs of the world’s have-nots in a neuro revolution is increasingly on our minds, and for all our self-protection, it needs to be. In one breath, one neuroethics expert noted that Olympic training programs are now using fMRI scans to correlate areas of depression and negativity in their athletes’ brains. In the next, she told about learning on a recent trip to Africa that the entire country of Uganda only has one fMRI machine.

I like the neurological nudgers’ idea of building in little pushes to get people’s brains to do the right thing or avoid the wrong thing—like getting hospital workers to wash their hands more often or putting warning bulbs in view in our homes to signal when we are using too much energy. The nudge factor is looking to be more and more important as we learn how quickly our mind quits thinking strategically, if it thinks strategically at all. And how little it really knows about what it really wants.

One thing is clear. The rush is on by “neuro” researchers to find tie-ins to the larger picture of what humans do—often together—with their brains.

That was made clear by this year’s Society for Neuroeconomics conference, which has just ended in Evanston, IL. One observer called this year’s program remarkably different from last year’s. “Much less rat studies and a lot of papers and posters on social interactions in humans,” he noted.

Now if fMRI manufacturers can just get the prices on their machines low enough to where everyone—including Olympics coaches in Uganda—can afford them. And if we can learn enough from reading our new brain pictures to move toward producing a dependable “unified theory” about what it all means where the grey matter meets the road.

But does it matter whether the newly proliferating “neuro lab rats” study Chinese brains, American brains, Luxembourgian brains or Sri Lankan brains? Isn’t a healthy human brain a healthy human brain wherever it is found? And isn’t the whole idea of focusing on brains in one country versus brains in another country a slippery ethical slope that could easily dump the whole scientific neuroenterprise in the lap of—yes—racism or worse … gasp! … a kind of eugenics profiling?

Well, first off, it is already clear that studying one country’s brains doesn’t count for studying them all. That idea flies straight into the headwinds of some of the latest neuroscience. One of the very first faceoffs between brains made in America and brains made in “East Asia” revealed that, in terms of similarities, something was rotten in Denmark.

Moreover, what Professor John Gabrieli at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT discovered speaks directly to my primary thesis: the Chinese brain is like none other. And in a century that is merely a decade or two away from China inexorably beginning to rule the world, the rest of us should hasten to understand the differences.

Surprised by the role that culture plays
You can get more details on Professor Gabrieli’s experiment here. Suffice it to say, it was the findings that should raise eyebrows. Brains made in America must work harder to make judgments for which society’s answers aren’t that clear. Brains made in East Asian must work harder to make judgments where society’s stance is not in doubt.

That outcome surprised the researchers. “Everyone uses the same attention machinery for more difficult cognitive tasks, but they are trained to use it in different ways, and it’s the culture that does the training,” Dr. Gabrieli said.

In other words, it is often the culture that shapes the brain, and differing cultures shape differing brains. The reason why the Chinese brain is like none other is in sizable measure because the Chinese culture is like none other. Again, you may beg to differ. And, again, I ask that you accompany me to an expert.

Meet Martin Jacques. He’s the author of When China Rules the World. I spotted him again the other day in Macleans, the Canadian news weekly. He was explaining why China is soon going to be the world’s pre-eminent economic, political and cultural superpower. I can remember only one other newsmagazine analysis that riveted me as much as this one (that was a Newsweek piece in the summer of ’74 showing how Watergate’s corruption reached the very top of American politics).

Jacques says the Chinese don’t represent a country, or nation-state, so much as a civilization, and he marvels at its “powerful centripetal quality.” He notes—and worries about—the centrality of race in the thinking of the Chinese people and their assumption of cultural superiority. He comments:

“I mean, 92 per cent of them think of themselves as of the same race. While this is clearly not true—the Han Chinese are in fact descended from many different races—it gives a kind of biological reason for Chinese unity. And you can see it in their attitude toward those within China’s borders who have not been integrated in this way. The Tibetans or the Uighurs in Xinjiang province, for example, are regarded as needing to be helped up to the level of the Han Chinese. It’s a patronizing and very assimilationist attitude.”

More than just a country called China
Part of it is the Chinese language, Jacques believes. And the Confuscian values as applied to society and governance. And above all, the notion of the state as family—as the guardian of civilization. Not even the “Century of Humiliation” dating from the Opium Wars, not even Mao, with all his ruthlessness, could dislodge the Chinese from these beliefs. “It is a very remarkable characteristic,” says Jacques.

It is very much a postmodern biological “Great Wall of China,” a neurological Maginot Line in the brains of 1.4 billion people. It is one that is ordained to shape the brains of nearly every yet unborn child of China because of a culture that has been increasingly fabulously successful at seeing itself as a civilization, not just a country.

Do I skate here on thin ice? Not if you are willing to be informed by the work of Bruce E. Wexler at Yale University. He published Brain and Culture a couple of years ago.

B&C is, in my judgment, an exemplary piece of research and argumentation that, at its simplest, says this: Up to young adulthood, the brain puts its neurons together based in no small part on what its environment is telling it. After that, the brain works mightily to shape its environment based in no small part on the way its neurons suggest it ought to be.

Each generation thus acts to shape the brains of the next generation of its offspring, and this is where the Chinese civilization excels. Nor does the adult brain stop there, Professor Wexler says. Going forward, it hungers to lay the reality it constructed in those formative, neuron-linking years on all kinds of individuals, kin or not. And this is a quality that concerns a lot of people, including Martin Jacques. And I might add people like Australian Brian Hennessy, who has taught the past three years at the Chongqing Medical University and is currently providing psychological assistance to survivors of the Sichuan earthquake.

Segueing from a crime to cultural imperatives
The other day Hennessy says he had his wallet pick-pocketed near his home in Chongqing. When he reported the incident to police, he says he and his wife became the targets of the police investigation. He says they were hassled for hours. At first Hennessy says he didn’t understand. Then he realized it was as simple as realizing that the neighborhood police officers interrogating him and his Chinese-born and Chinese-speaking wife had lost face.

You’ll need to read this with a grain of salt because these are the words of an angry man and words that I can’t check for accuracy. But in the context of what veteran China observers like Martin Jacques believe and brain researchers like Bruce Wexler have reported on, it has the ring of reality.

Hennessy says the moment of truth for him arrived when he pointed out that the theft occurred in the police precinct’s “own backyard.” The policemen’s faces froze, he says.

“Suddenly, everything that I had read about and experienced in China gelled into a one brief moment of enlightenment: I understood clearly what was really going on around me. Thank you, Buddha,” he writes. “A foreigner had been robbed in their area of responsibility, and embarrassing questions would be asked by their superiors. Institutional cultural imperatives as well as traditional cultural imperatives were guiding the behaviour of these investigators.”

Yes, Mr. Hennessy, that is also my point. Neuroscience has already shown us that the brain and its culture are inextricably linked. In some cultures more than others. In terms of internal coherence, the culture of China is perhaps the most powerful extant on Earth today. It believes itself to be superior to all other cultures. There is no reason not to believe that it believes the brains it produces are superior to all other brains.

A source of home-grown brain tissue only
Five years ago, first brain bank specializing in the study of Chinese brains was established at the Xiangya Medical School of the Central South University of China. One of the reasons given by the project’s sponsors was that “the western based brain banks do not have an adequate supply of brain tissue from Chinese subjects.”

This time, the Chinese can be forgiven some of their self-preoccupation. Their brain is different. In ways that already matter and are about to matter more, the Chinese brain has done extraordinary things over the centuries. It is doing things today that are without peer (its brilliant economic strategy of the past few decades, for example). For all its challenges, it shows every promise of having its best days ahead.

But it is a brain formulated by five hundred centuries of a civilization unique unto itself. Where the rest of us stand in the estimate of that civilization we have yet to have clarified. To say it one more time, it is absolutely critical that we know as much as we can about how the neurons work in a brain that may be about to rule the world.

In general terms, this kid’s brain cycles between chaos and stability again and again, moment by moment, hour by hour, day after day, moving first one direction and back again. He’s predictably unpredictable on the outside and we can suspect on the inside, too, and it really takes a toll at times on the people around him, particularly those who love him most.

It is increasingly clear to his mother and father that something different is going on in their child’s head compared to many other children’s heads. And that this is surely going to be a continuing challenge to the adults in his life if they are not (1) agile enough in their own thinking to appreciate just how different his thinking is and (2) if they are not willing to work with the extra demands and needs this difference brings. Because we aren’t talking about a youngster whose behavior has him lagging behind. This kid is a kindergartner who already reads at a second grade level.

Noticing the things that don’t fit
Early on in my conversation with this often-exasperated mom, a snippet of dialogue from Sherlock Holmes’ famous story, “Silver Blaze,” popped into my mind. It goes like this:

Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?

Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”

Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”

This child seems to be just the type of thinker who, like the ever-curious, ever-observant master sleuth from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, would notice that the dog did nothing in the night and wonder why not.

Then a few days later, while reading one of my favorite blogs, one that tracks children’s brain and learning research, I spotted a quote from another famous figure, the late, great scientist Richard Feynman. Feynman once said, “The thing that doesn’t fit is the interesting thing.”

And I knew instantly that Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide, the two gifted Edmonds, WA, physicians who write this blog, were onto something that the frustrated mother and father were going to find intensely interesting. (And, believe me, they have!)

Little people locked in a big-picture mind
It was yet another blog item that had triggered the Eides’ blog item. They had been reading management consultant Andrew Sobel’s thoughts on big-picture thinking. It’s the kind of thinking that CEOs will practically kill for. Henry Kissinger has been brilliant at it, for example. In 1968 he realized that the Soviet Union and China could both be encouraged to seek a common bond with America; this triangulation dominated superpower relations for 20 years, thanks to Kissinger’s big picture thinking skills.

Sobel’s revisitation of Kissinger’s and other leaders’ big picture thinking skills prompted the Eides to wonder if big-picture skills are showing up far earlier and more often in our children than parents, teachers and other gatekeepers for the young are realizing and responding to. And immediately they concluded, “Pint-sized big picture thinkers really do exist and they seem to be over-represented among gifted children who underperform or cause behavioral disruptions in their early elementary school years.”

Moreover, the Eides suggest that the issue is not that pint-sized big picture thinkers can think this way but rather that they really can’t think any other way. And that the implications of this are manifold:

• Count on it, these children are going to have time management problems. For them, their learning environment is upside down and can be a real impediment.

• Writing assignments are hard not because they know too little but because they know too much.

• They feel like if they are going to understand anything at all, they have to understand a lot of things better. They are driven to know the overarching framework into which new bits of knowledge fit.

• They need to know why something is true, not just that it is true.

• They like discovering novel things, and they use novelties to generate new hypotheses or rules; they are inductive, not deductive, learners.

• For them, complexity often brings simplicity because with enough
examples, a pint-sized big picture thinker can often spot a new pattern of meaning.

By now, I was hooked. I immediately forwarded the Eides’ blog item to the parents of what I’m just sure is another pint-sized big picture thinker in the making.

Meanwhile, I was off to surf the Internet for new findings on what’s happening inside such a child’s brain.

Butterflies are out, sand piles are in
One of the most intriguing discoveries of late was made just down Interstate 75 from me—at the University of South Florida, in Tampa. It involves self-organizing criticality, the behavioral pattern I mentioned at the first above.

Self-organizing criticality is a kind of chaos. When brain scientists first began trying to apply chaos theory in the late 1980s, they were all a’flutter over the so-called “butterfly effect” (so named because thanks to deterministic chaos, if a butterfly in China flaps its wings the small perturbation may eventually cascade into a blizzard over New York City). But they could find little in the brain’s electricity resembling the butterfly effect.

However, in the 1990s, a growing sand pile effect was quickly evident. If you keep piling on sand grains, eventually you are going to get an avalanche. This is self-organized criticality. For a while, the pile grows predictably, and then suddenly and without notice, it “goes a grain too far” and collapses. We now know that the brain makes frequent and apparently fundamental use of self-organized criticality.

Which brings us to what USF researcher Robert Thacker found. If you can keep the collapse of certain of the sand-pile-like electrical patterns in the brain moving for as little as a single additional millisecond (out of a typical 55 milliseconds), you can add as many as 20 points to a child’s IQ.

And how do you do that?

Well, how do create a suitable classroom and home environment for a pint-sized big picture thinker?

Big-picture brain research needs a kick in the pants
The Drs. Eides have suggested that you make such a child’s environment as rich and varied sensorially as you can. They think you should throw “chronologically advanced experiences” at the youngster out the kazoo (second grade literature for the kindergarten big picture thinker is just great!). Patiently answer their questions and feed them more. And especially feed their hunger for subjects, phenomena and ideas that can be compared and contrasted.

And probably—and this is my observation, not the Eides—this is going to help extend the duration of the sand pile collapses in a big-picture child’s brain, too.

If there is a fertile field in dire need of big-picture thinkers, it is brain research. As veteran split brain researcher Michael Gazzaniga says, “neuro” research badly needs a unifying theory. Currently, it is vastly fragmented and having to resort more often than not to borrowed story lines from fields like motivational thinkers and management theorists (thank you, Andrew Sobel!) to bring some coherence to all the insights and observations tumbling out of things like fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) laboratories.

Maybe that patience-testing, ever-questioning six-year-old kindergartner who is already reading at a second grade level will turn out to be the one who provides the new theory that Dr. Gazzaniga yearns for. Gazzaniga says it will come from giving neuro-research a good kick in the pants. And our friends’ son seems to be in training for participating in just such an act of levitation.