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.

Basically, I’m a skeptic on most matters in the so-called “woo-woo” department of human inquiry, ranging from religion to UFOs to telekinesis to, yes, even the chiropractic theory. But I’m not a ragin’ Cajun on such topics. It’s true that I once refused to permit a renter of our conference center to do a firewalk because I feared liability for injury to her participants. But I also defied advice from friends in the medical community for years and chose as my personal physician a Doctor of Osteopathy over an M.D. because (1) I thought him to be a better healer than any M.D. I’d ever sought out and (2) he was a whiz at “popping” the pain out of my back with his hands-on manipulative techniques.

Thus when a dear friend insisted the other day that the wife and I just had to watch a movie called What tнe⃗ #$*! D⃗ө ωΣ (k)πow!? (also variously known as What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?, What the Bleep Do We Know! or WTFDWK?) with her because the flick had literally reordered her personal reality, my reaction was, “What the heck—why not?”

My viewing of WTFDWK? lasted approximately four minutes, and then I had to bail before I barfed. This is definitely woo-woo stuff, and in my opinion, nowhere near very good woo-woo stuff. I apologized to our friend and mumbled something about a long-standing pathological need for structure, especially in the story lines of films I’m viewing.

But then no sooner was WTFDWK? receding in my memory than another of my favorite people urged a new book on me called Evolve Your Brain: The Science of Changing Your Mind by Joe Dispenza. A quick check of Dr. Dispenza’s credentials (he’s a chiropractor) indicated that he was one of the interviewees in WTFDWK?. With that discovery, I surrendered. It appeared that God was sending me a sign that I ought to take a closer look at this, and I have.

Now, the idea that we each create our own reality is at least as old as the first onlooker to report a miracle, but it is an idea that seems to wax and wane, cycle-like, in human affairs.

If we were doing an documentary called What tнe⃗ #$*! D⃗ө ωΣ (k)πow!? and not the psycho-spiritual propaganda piece that WTFDWK? is, the story line for this latest recycling could very well begin with an invitation made by the Dalai Lama in 1992 to a Harvard-trained neuroscientist named Richard Davidson. When Davidson got a close look at the renowned Buddhist spiritual leader’s monks at the Dalai Lama’s home in Dharamsala, India, he quickly invited them to his own digs—the W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior in Madison, WI.

Davidson was soon reporting that the Dalai’s monks, each of whom had meditated on compassion and love for more than 10,000 hours, were demonstrably and permanently altering their brain when given meditative assignments. (A control group also altered their brains—or at least their brain waves—while meditating but only temporarily.)

Davidson published his research findings in 1994 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and by 2006, TIME was naming him one of the ten most influential people of the year because of his research.

But research into what?

Neuroplasticity!!! That’s really what all this is about. Finally, after nearly a century, we have Santiago Ramón y Cajal on the run, Nobel Prize or no Nobel Prize. This Spanish neuroanatomist froze reality in brain research labs for much of a century with this sentence: “In the adult centers the nerve paths are something fixed, ended and immutable.” Translation: the adult brain is hardwired and not susceptible to change. Ever.

Now, we know that’s nonsense. New discoveries are being made every day of just how neuronally plastic the brain really can be. The Dalai Lama is so excited by evidence that the mind can change the brain to some extent that he’s now apparently sponsoring yearly meetings of Buddhist monks and leading neuroscientists to discuss the latest changes in neuroplasticity. The Dharamsala conferences so excited Wall Street Journal science columnist Sharon Begley that she’s now written two books on how the mind and the brain interact. Her latest—Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves—barely made it out before an even better book by New York research psychiatrist Dr. Norman Doidge called The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science.”

So can the mind actually do things like “will” the brain to grow new nerve cells when old ones get damaged? The sources we consulted say the current evidence for neurogenesis is restricted to the olfactory bulb and the hippocampus. While I’m not a brain scientist or even a science writer who follows this field closely, I suspect that the field of neuroplasticity is just now taking baby steps. There are some wonderful anecdotal triumphs, as book writers like Begley and Doidge recount, often inspiringly. People with damaged inner ear nerves getting relief from dizziness. A stroke victim again able to walk. People rechanneling serious compulsive urges by actually altering their brains’ neuronal circuitry.

Throw them a little evidence, and you just had to know that the people featured in WTFDWK? would not be able to resist mixing in quantum mechanics, transcendental meditation, alternative realities, water crystals and channeling with the 35,000-year-old warrior spirit Ramtha. (Dr. Dispenza, the chiropractor, incidentally, is a teacher at Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment.)

Baby-step times are nearly always heady times. (In our Brain Technologies seminars, we usually call this the “naïve enthusiasm” stage of the discovery process.) There is absolutely nowhere near enough evidence to suggest, as a New York Times’ book reviewer (an M.D., no less!) put it, “the electronic circuits in a small lump of grayish tissue are perfectly accessible, it turns out, to any passing handyman with the right tools.” That’s simply far too great a leap to be made at this point.

And the claims made in WTFDWK?—judging from numerous reports by film watchers with less sensitive barf calibrations than mine—are even more outlandish. But this much is believable: one more time, the brain, and nature, and the reality of all realities has proven much more interesting and much less limited than we have imagined for most of history, modern scientific history included.

Go here to check out various titles on brain neuroplasticity and related topics:

By Norman Doidge The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

By Jeffrey M. Schwartz and Sharon Begley The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

By Sharon Begley Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves

By B. Alan Wallace Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge

By Joe Dispenza. Evolve Your Brain: The Science of Changing Your Mind

Wikipedia has a lengthy entry on the WTFDWK? movie: What the Bleep Do We Know!?

Here is Wikipedia’s entry on the new science of “brain malleability”: Neuroplasticity

If you know where to look and what to look for, the blogosphere has been ablaze with this discussion for some time. What’s new is that support for view No. 2 is now coming from some of the strangest places. Like, for example, The University of Chicago’s business and law schools.

For decades, The U. of Chicago has been a stronghold for academics defending laizze-faire capitalism. Until his death last year, it was the hangout for the world’s most influential modern spokesperson for marketplace-dominated economics, Nobel-Prize-winner Milton Friedman. Dr. Friedman was a forceful believer in viewpoint No. 1. He had an unshakable faith in the marketplace’s ability to decide what people want and how best to give it to them.

Here’s a sample of Friedman’s bias on the subject: “What most people really object to when they object to a free market is that it is so hard for them to shape it to their own will. The market gives people what the people want instead of what other people think they ought to want. At the bottom of many criticisms of the market economy is really lack of belief in freedom itself.”

Bingo! The battle is joined! Do guns kill people or do people kill people?

Now come two U. of Chicago faculty members—one from the B-school and the other from law—who are insistent that policymakers, both public and private, acknowledge that humans are imperfect decision-makers. And that in many instances and in large numbers, humans need a little nudge, without coercion, to make decisions that will leave them or people they are charged with helping better off.

“Nudge” is really the operative word here. Cass Sunstein (the law professor) and Richard Thaler (the business professor) are now writing a book with the title of Nudge, which will be about their idea of “libertarian paternalism” and the economics of nudging.

On his blog, Sunstein has explained “libertarian paternalism” this way: “The basic idea is that private and public institutions might nudge people in directions that will make their lives go better, without eliminating freedom of choice. The paternalism consists in the nudge; the libertarianism consists in the insistence on freedom, and on imposing little or no cost on those who seek to go their own way.”

Two examples often cited by Sunstein and and Thaler involve ways to help people increase savings. As Thaler wrote on a Wall Street Journal blog recently, “The first [approach] is to enroll people, automatically, into savings plans—while allowing them to opt out. The second is the Save More Tomorrow plan, which allows employees to commit themselves now to increasing their savings rates later, when they get raises. Both approaches have been remarkably successful.”

In his column, “Economix,” New York Times writer David Leonhardt has said he sees two big ways that “libertarian paternalism” can work its nudging magic on human brains.

One is to help the brain cut through the confusion of complexity and information overload. He cites an experiment in North Carolina’s largest school district. Parents in the district were confused by all the information available in a school choice program as they sought to decide where they wanted their children to be enrolled. Aided by three Yale University researchers, the district offered parents a little nudge. Thousands of parents were given a sheet listing a single test score—the average of the math and reading scores—for each available school. Immediately, parents began enrolling their school in the schools with the highest scores, which is the whole point of school choice.

Leonhardt’s other expectation is that libertarian paternalism will help the brain remember to do what’s best. He tells about Dr. Michael Gropper’s nudging rule at UCSF Medical Center in San Francisco.

It’s common knowledge that patients on ventilators need to spend most of their time sitting up. Otherwise, it’s much too easy for germs to migrate from their stomachs up to their mouths and breathing tubes and into their lungs. But because so many activities involving critical ill patients require that they be lying down, nurses and aides often forget to elevate a patient when they are finished. So Dr. Gropper made a new nudging rule: unless there is a doctor’s order to the contrary, every patient on a ventilator must be sitting up.

The result: the incidence of ventilator-associated pneumonia at the hospital has fallen more than 40 percent since 2005.

In a perfect decision-making world, say Sustein and Thaler, the brain would have complete information, unlimited cognitive abilities and no lack of willpower. In the real world, people must use brains that have limited information-processing abilities, willpower, memory and attention spans. Therefore, a little non-coercive nudge at the right time can make a huge difference, sometimes immediately, sometimes a long ways down the road.

Sustein writes, “Libertarian paternalism is hardly a panacea, and a lot of work remains to be done. But it might be worth thinking about how the basic approach can be applied to such diverse problems as savings, prescription drug plans, social security reform, obesity, school choice, preparation for natural disasters, and safety on the highways.”

I’d have to say that the proof is in the results, and the early returns for nudging look good. Anyone who wants to argue otherwise would appear, or so it seems to me, to have a rampant case of ideology.

Carl Sustein and Richard Thaler first published their ideas on libertarian paternalism in a working paper in April, 2003: Libertarian Paternalism Is Not An Oxymoron

Go here for David Leonhardt’s article: Sometimes, What’s Needed Is a Nudge

Dr. Sustein writes about his nudging ideas on the University of Chicago Law School’s faculty blog: Libertarian Paternalism

Dr. Thaler debates libertarian paternalism with Mario Rizzo, professor of economics at New York University, on the Online Wall Street Journal: Should Politics Nudge People To Make Certain Choices?

A writer for The Economist and its readers discuss libertarian paternalism: I’m your new legislator, but you can call me “Daddy”

Jim Holt writes about libertarian paternalism in The New York Times Magazine : The New, Soft Paternalism”