The brain, we are told, acts first, thinks later–literally, by a factor of milliseconds.  That is, according to the kind of research David Eagleman summarizes in his Incognito: The secret lives of the brain (Pantheon, 2011), initial neural responses are faster than “conscious” ones.  This is the kind of research which, as I mused about earlier, confirms methodological individualists’ understandings.

That the brain should be so swift to act is actually essential to our surviving such tasks as, to pick up a recently evolved challenge to human survival, driving a car down a highway.  It is also problematic given that initial responses are easily correlated with various “biases.”  Brain researchers are getting quite good at devising subtle experiments to show how these biases might operate, at the millisecond level, even when the finalized act is non-biased (or biased in the correct direction).  I particularly “liked” (because of its extra-vagance) the experiment that depended on the trajectories of mouse movements towards “White people liking ‘Black People’” (Wojnowicz, Ferguson, Dale, and Spivey 2009).

All this could be used to confirm perennial working hypotheses about the relationship between strongly “learned” responses (probably because they happened repeatedly in early life) and later pre-judicial acts.  Such hypotheses have made sense to many Boasian “culture and personality” anthropologists, to sociologists and others following Bourdieu, and to a host of others over the past century.  In this perspective, the “judicial” brain literally does not, and indeed cannot, know what the larger brain gets the body to do.

For the critics among us, there is work to do here to challenge the neuroscientists on the implication of their altogether wild experiments.  At the simplest level, the point of having a “judicial” brain is precisely to control and repair what the pre-judicial brain may attempt to do, or has done.  The judicial brain might say “drive home” and then leave the pre-judicial one to do the driving.  At night, in Riverside Park, a white man’s pre-judicial brain may tighten muscles at the sight of young black man walking towards him, and it is probable that the black man will notice this tightening and this may produce a pre-judicial triggering of “racism.”  As they move away, each man may feel stressed and unhappy and actually review the encounter with their judicial brain—and then even perhaps blog about it.

But this last classic example raises an issue that neuro-scientific work appears very specifically to ignore: what are the implications of pre-judicial brain activity for routine social interaction?  Take driving down a highway.  Neuro-science tells us that we cannot describe in detail the sequence of muscular acts necessary to change lanes.  What it does not consider is that the first act when changing lane is figuring out whether there is another car in that lane and, if there is, whether one should accelerate or break before starting the change, and whether one should change an initial decision given what the other car is now doing as it noticed what we are doing.  Garfinkel (2002: 92-93) has made much of such joint activities across many bodies assembled on the highway that are required for the necessarily always emergent and yet “immortal” ordering of “driving down the highway.”

All sociologists working at the level of the “adjacency pairs” (and I include here interactional and conversational analysts, ethnomethodologists, etc.) should be the first to confront the neuroscientists since they work at very similar time scales but with radically different understandings of the units needed to analyze the same overall act at the next time scale when the act is concluded.  Other sociologists and anthropologists will have an easier time since we are almost always working with “consciousness.”   After all, our task is not to explain the tightening of muscles or the flashes of stress and anger black and white men passing each other may experience, but rather the evolution of the machineries (vocabularies, discourses, practices, laws, etc.) which make identify human beings as different from each other (from 19th century slavery, to early 20th segregation , to late 20th century civil rights and various kinds of resistances to it to any of these classificatory assemblages.

How the these assemblages influence the struggles within brains as persons ad-judicate each others pre-judicial movements, and change this adjudication as they find out what others have done, or what consequences they are drawing, should remain an open question that will not be answered by experiments that segregate human beings from human beings, and their pre-judicial movements from the delayed judicial ones.

References:

Garfinkel, H. (2002).  Ethnomethodology’s program: Working out Durkheim’s aphorism .  Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Wojnowicz, M. T., Ferguson, M. J., Dale, R., & Spivey, M. J. (2009). The self-organization of explicit attitudes. Psychological Science, 20, 1428-1435. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02448.x

As cohorts of doctoral students in anthropology at Teachers College know well, the second Thursday of the first year colloquium is dedicated to pondering “social facts” and rules for studying them.  What those students do not know at this point, and will struggle against throughout the session, is that they were set up to reveal a social fact: that the major points to be made are about the same points that were made the year before, and the year before that, going back to my first participation in the colloquium in a time that now appears to me “immemorial” (actually probably in the Fall 1991).  Specifically, the students will resist separating the social from the individual in the name of the individual (with due apologies to individual differences in the manner of this resistance).

They are of course in very good company.

Ah! The individual! The mind! The brain!

The same week, I read a somewhat popularized book by David Eagleman, a “neuroscientist.”  In his Incognito: The secret lives of the brain (Pantheon, 2011), he summarizes what excites people in his discipline.  I picked up the book after reading a summary of its argument: much that happens in the brain far below “consciousness.”  As Eagleman notes in his appreciative comments on Freud, this is not an original statement as such.  His point is that there is now a large body of experimental evidence that this is so.  Eagleman reviews evidence mostly from the fields of motion, perception, moral judgement, etc.  He does not review evidence from his colleagues concerned with language processing but this work would point in the same direction.  Driving a car, recognizing a face, making a value judgment, in the real time of everyday life (as it can be modeled in experiments) depends on processes that can be measured to happen on a scale much shorter than is required when any one of these matters are brought to consciousness.  This is also true of both the syntagmatic and paradigmatic processes we use when speaking.

And then he starts a major chapter by discussing Mel Gibson.

In an infamous incident in 2006, the actor is arrested for drunken driving.  As he is, he makes a violently antisemitic rant against the arresting officer.  In the following days he issues two apologies stating (through his publicist) “Please know from my hear that I am not an anti-Semite.  I am not a bigot” (Aug 12, 2006 – CBS News video).  Which is the “real” Gibson?  Elsewhere in the book, Eagleman reports on a study (Wojnowicz, Ferguson, Dale & Spivey 2009) involving moving a computer cursor:

Imagine that you start with your cursor positioned at the bottom of the screen, and in the upper corners of the screen you have buttons labeled “like” and “dislike”. Then a word appears in the middle (say, the name of a religion), and you are instructed to move the mouse as quickly as you can to your answer about whether you like or dislike people of that creed. What you don’t realize is that the exact trajectory of your mouse movement is being recorded-every position at every moment. By analyzing the path your mouse I raveled, researchers can detect whether your motor system started moving toward one button before other cognitive systems kicked into gear and drove it toward the other response. So, for example, even if you answered “like” for a particular religion, it may be that your trajectory drifted slightly toward the “dislike” button before it got back on track for the more socially appropriate response. (Eagleman 2011: 60-61)

What Eagleman never considers (and neither did the authors of the research) is the question of what makes a response more appropriate than another.  This also characterizes all his discussions of morality.  Actually it also characterizes his discussions of apparently purely cognitive tasks.  Early in the book he discusses plane spotters during the Battle of England of the Second World War.  But he does not ask: What led to this war? Why should spotting planes be important (and why might it not have been important during the First World War?

Now, of course, asking such questions led Durkheim to consider the possibility of “social facts.”  Asking similar questions leads recent sociologists and anthropologists claiming Durkheim as an ancestor to ponder the mechanisms for establishing that this is disapproved, or for enforcing the disapproval (policemen, anti-defamation leagues, etc.).  In Gibson’s case one might also ponder where the alcohol comes from (when, how, through whom did Tequila enter Hollywood?).  And, of course, how did antisemitism become something to sanction when the reverse had been true for so many centuries?

But, a keen doctoral student might ask, is it not the case that neuroscience confirms Bourdieu (and Parsons, etc.) on the foundations of sociability and the reproduction of social patterns?

More on that another day…

Wojnowicz, M. T., Ferguson, M. J., Dale, R., & Spivey, M. J. (2009). The self-organization of explicit attitudes. Psychological Science, 20, 1428-1435. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02448.x