Robert H. Blank, Intervention in the Brain: Politics, Policy, and Ethics, MIT Press, 2013 

Bryce Huebner
Department of Philosophy
Georgetown University
Washington, DC, USA

Robert H. Blank has set his sights high in Intervention in the Brain.He presents a carefully researched and readable account of the ethical and political issues that arise as a result of our increased ability to intervene on the brain; and with this, he hopes to provide a foundation for future debates about a wide variety of important issues. I applaud his project, and agree wholeheartedly that we should be thinking more carefully about the political implications of research in neuroscience and neuropsychology. But I am skeptical of Blank’s approach, and believe he has bitten off more than he can effectively chew in this book.

The first three chapters are designed to get non-experts up to speed on current issues in neuroscience and neuroethics. Chapter 1 briefly summarizes debates about the structure and function of the human brain. The discussion is relatively well balanced and fairly up to date. But there are two points where Blank tips his cards, revealing the proclivity toward Evolutionary Psychology that structures later arguments in the book: he notes that there are important differences between the brains of females and males; and he calls attention to work in neurogenetics, which plays a critical role in his positive story. Chapter 2 provides an overview of the technologies we possess for intervening on the brain, addressing everything from electroconvulsive therapy, psychosurgery, and neural stimulation, to psychotropic drugs and virtual reality. Toward the end of this chapter, Blank offers an optimistic, though mildly skeptical account of neuroimaging techniques. Finally, in Chapter 3 he lays out some of the core issues in neuroethics, including questions about autonomy and informed consent, the distinction between therapy and experimentation, and widespread worries about things like mind-control, stigmatization, and distributive justice. With this background in hand, he sets off to address a number of ethically and politically rich issues.

Over the course of six additional chapters, and 189 pages, Blank covers an incredibly diverse range of issues, including addiction, aggression, psychopathy, trust, morality, prejudice, racism, ethnic conflict, empathy, fear conditioning, social and cultural neuroscience, sex differences in the brain, the use of neuroscientific evidence in criminal trials, neuromarketing, neuropolitics, the presentation of neuroscientific data in the media, attempts to use neural interventions for the purposes of lie-detection, military and national security uses of neuro-technology, neuro-enhancement, and for good measure a few philosophical issues like free will, moral responsibility, and the definition of death. Given this vast array of issues, it is perhaps unsurprising—though nonetheless disappointing—that Blank doesn’t address the complex and interesting positions that have been advanced by neuroethicists, psychologists, and philosophers on each of these issues. Indeed, many of his arguments seem to proceed exclusively by way of citation. But upon closer inspection they reveal a unified story about the human brain, grounded in speculations about adaptations to a Pleistocene environment, a weak form of genetic determinism, and at points, a partial recognition that environmental factors sometimes affect human development. There are places where Blank gets things right, though even here his arguments move too quickly; and there are places where he gets things wrong. But I cannot hope to do justice to the entire book, so I will focus on one issue that reveals the promises and limitations of Blank’s approach.

In discussing sex differences, Blank aims to shift discussion away from sociocultural nurturing, and toward genetically and evolutionarily based claims about human nature. He appeals to neuroimaging data that “provide dramatic evidence that male and female brains process information differently” (102); he canvasses differences in spatial reasoning and empathy, and notes that these emerge within the first few hours of life (109); and he argues that “the effects of sex hormones on brain organization occur so early in life that, from birth, the environment acts on differently wired brains in males and females” (103). Blank notes, almost in passing, that “sex differences in cognitive patterns arose because they proved advantageous” and that “our brains have remained essentially unchanged over the last 100,000 years or so and reflect a division of labor in hunter-gatherer societies that put different selection pressures on males and females” (108). And at a number of different points, he downplays the possibility of environmental effects on gender identity and sexual orientation (103, 107, 108, 112). While he has little to say about the possibility of environmental effects on cognition, his silence on the issue speaks louder than words. All told, Blank seems to hold that men evolved as hunters and women evolved to raise babies, that these adaptations have been solidified in genetic difference between males and females, and that nothing much has changed for the past 100,000 years.

There are a number of problems with this perspective on sex differences. Let’s begin with claim that the neuroimaging data suggest that males and females process information differently. One of the most significant insights from recent neuroscience has been the acknowledgment that the human brain is an expectation-driven learning system, which attunes to commonly experienced patterns in the world (see Clark 2013 for a review). While there is still dispute about how flexible these systems are, it is now clear that differences in adult brains can be the result of ecological and environmental differences. Consequently, appeals to such differences generate an explanatory burden, which cannot be discharged by appeal to abstract suppositions about life in the Pleistocene. Perhaps more importantly, there is evidence that the differences between male and female brains have been greatly exaggerated, as a result of publication biases that privilege positive results (even when they are small), incredibly small sample sizes, and a willingness to downplay the possibility of neural-plasticity (Fine 2012). Strangely, Blank acknowledges the importance of neural plasticity at other points. For example, in discussing cultural neuroscience, he notes that cultural differences are “reflected either in different arrangements of neural circuits or in different levels of activation,” and that “cultural experiences not only modulate but also govern preexisting patterns of neural activity and are thus constitutive of that experience” (167). To maintain parity between these arguments, Blank would have to abandon his claim that sex differences are fixed and not molded by experience, or accept the more troubling hypothesis that cultural differences reflect cognitive variations that have become sedimented in the genome of different groups. I hope he would choose the former option.

As for differences in spatial reasoning and empathy, Cordelia Fine (2010) has repeatedly shown that the data are inconclusive, at best. Many experiments depend on self-report, and thus fail to distinguish those who fit the stereotype from those who want to look like they fit it. Many experiments cause people to focus on gender expectations, leading participants to behave in line with their assumption about experimenter expectations. And the data suggesting that female infants prefer faces while male infants prefer objects founder on the fact that precautions were not taken to ensure that experimenters were unaware of the sex of the infant being tested—thus opening the door to significant experimenter effects. Blank is right to note that there are sex differences in spatial attention and mental rotation skills, but these differences can be decreased or eliminated by just ten hours of playing a first-person shooter videogame (Feng, Spence, and Pratt 2007). Put simply, sex differences, where they emerge, are fragile and strongly affected by recent experience.

Last, but certainly not least, differences in sex hormones, and the effects of these differences on human cognition, are a complicated matter. But it is clear that they do not track the evolutionary story that Blank tells. In some modern hunter-gatherer societies, men and women share childcare and share hunting duties; in others men are more likely to hunt, but bring in significantly less food than women who gather and forage (Hrdy 2009). Even more, holding an infant for just 15 minutes can have massive effects on circultating hormone levels in men (including levels of prolactin, cortisol, and testosterone). So even if Blank is right that sex hormones affect brain organization early in life, and modulate cognition, there is no reason to deny that changes in these hormones continue to play an important role throughout the course of a person’s life. Indeed, this seems to be the perspective that the evolutionary and brain sciences are converging upon!

At this point, I think the evidence is quite clear that sex differences in cognition, like most forms of individual difference, emerge later in development, are inherently plastic, and are modulated by environmental and hormonal variations, as well as self-construal, throughout our lives. The current data strongly suggest that we are constantly learning, adapting, and developing. And this should be the recognition upon which debate proceeds. (A similar case could be made with regard to aggression and pro-sociality, where the current data suggest that the interaction between genes and environment, not the genes alone, explain many genetic effects. See, for example, Knafo, Israel, and Ebstein 2011 on pro-sociality, and for a more philosophical review of the literature on aggression, see Longino 2013. I have also argued that racial cognition is inherently plastic and driven by learning systems; see Huebner, forthcoming.)

In closing, I would like to note two points where Blank gets things exactly right. The first comes on the opening page of the book, where he notes that discussions of neuro-technology often rely on oversimplifications and exaggerations, and as such do little more than trigger fears about the erosion of agency or create unfounded hopes about the promise of treatment and human enhancement. The second point is a bit of a curve ball, which comes five pages before the end of the book. Here Blank notes that he has focused exclusively on neural interventions, even though there is “convincing evidence that the brain is constantly influenced by the outside world” (272). He even goes so far as to note that parental care, socio-economic status, and other facts about the social environment can have an important effect on neural structures as well as the ways in which they function. Had Blank kept these thoughts in mind, he would have written a very different book. But he gets caught up in the sort of neuro-bunk that dominates discussions in neuroscience and neurogenetics (Crockett 2012); this, in turn, leads him to oversimplify and exaggerate our current knowledge of the relationship between genes, brains, and behavior. As a result, Blank pays insufficient attention to the role of the social and material environment in producing and modulating various neural structures, and he ends up advancing a view that is deeply ideological, and detached from much of the best research in the cognitive and social neurosciences.

Bryce Huebner
Department of Philosophy
Georgetown University
Washington, DC, USA

REFERENCES

Clark, Andy. 2013. “Whatever Next? Predictive Brains, Situated Agents, and the Future of Cognitive Science.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (3): 181–204.

Crockett, Molly. 2012. “Beware Neuro-bunk.” TEDSalon London, November. Accessed June 2, 2014. http://www.ted.com/talks/molly_crockett_beware_neuro_bunk .

Feng, Jing, Ian Spence, and Jay Pratt. 2007. “Playing an Action Video Game Reduces Gender Differences in Spatial Cognition.” Psychological Science 18 (10): 850–55.

Fine, Cordelia. 2010. Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference. New York: W. W. Norton and Co.

———. 2013. “Is There Neurosexism in Functional Neuroimaging Investigations of Sex Differences?” Neuroethics 6 (2): 369–409.

Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. 2009. Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Huebner, Bryce. Forthcoming. “Implicit Bias, Reinforcement Learning, and Scaffolded Moral Cognition.” In Implicit Bias and Philosophy, edited by Michael Brownstein and Jennifer Saul. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Knafo, Ariel, Salomon Israel, and Richard P. Ebstein. 2011. “Heritability of Children’s Prosocial Behavior and Differential Susceptibility to Parenting by Variation in the Dopamine Receptor D4 Gene.” Development and Psychopathology 23 (1): 53–67.

Longino, Helen E. 2013. Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.