final_thp_5thedition

make broad, sensational headlines like “How Poverty
Affects Your Brain,” the public naturally believes individuals
exposed to poverty will somehow have affected
brains, brains perhaps incapable of thought as intelligent
or meaningful as brains unexposed to poverty. In
subscribing to such thoughts and beliefs about the
brain and its plasticity, society develops a new form of
discrimination—neural discrimination. Some people
may recognize systems of oppression such as housing
discrimination, inadequate nutrition, implicit biases in
the education and legal systems, etc. as the source of
potential difference in hardwiring of neural circuits.
However, other people who may already be more likely
to discriminate based on race, neighborhood, or
income level may now also have fuel for discrimination
at the level of the brain, a discussion science has now
substantiated with its presentation of this up-and-coming
body of work.
The question remains: what are the implications of this
sort of unyielding belief in Brainism? Are we moving in
a healthy direction by paying attention to that enigmatic
mass of tissue housed in our head and paying due
respects to its awesome powers? Or are we burdening
guiltless, comparatively disadvantaged youth with
another nearly insurmountable barrier to educational
and social equality?
co•ex•ist
The treatment of social and affective neuroscience in
popular culture and media is a very delicate matter and
should be treated as such. Correlational research is
released as it is because why would people publish
correlational research if there were no implication of
one variable with the other? On the other hand, by continually
supporting implications of causality, especially
in the realm of social or cultural neuroscience, we may
witness a social rewinding, allowing relatively well-educated
and informed people to revert back to archaic
ideas of centuries past—a neurologically based Aryanism
or melanin theory, skin color replaced with adolescents’
exposure to violence, a variable regrettably
related to income, education, and race.
Perhaps a better approach is to emphasize that brains
being different between two groups of people may not
mean better or worse, but that different may just mean
different. And coping with these differences is what
generates unique, human experiences for each of us,
down to the level of our cellular biology. The dictation
of social standing is a realm of society that should
remain separated from the realm of neural connectivity,
as the former deals with relatives whereas the latter
deals with absolutes. Such definitions cannot possibly
accommodate each other, at least, not as they stand.
What they require is a new understanding, one where
society recognizes the limits and extents of what good
scientific research explains about the intricate workings
of our world. This was rather well-embodied in one
of the final Facebook comments from the original post
by the University of Southern California sharing the
Newsweek article.
Dr. Daphna Oyserman, one of the researchers and partners
at the Brain and Creativity Institute, stepped into
the virtual conversation for a didactic moment, commenting,
“This is correlational data, showing average
associations. Nothing is presented as causal and
nowhere does it state what all infer, that [more] means
better.”
Science and society should coexist and inform one
another. In this modern world, there are no shortage of
platforms and mediums on which to conduct such an
exchange. Not only does such an association produce a
more educated and informed populace, but also a better
understood and shared human experience.
Who knows? Maybe that undertaking begins with a
well-placed Facebook comment.
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