For those who don’t want to read the articles: There appear to be different circuits in the brain, one for empathy and one for logic. Brain scans show that when one circuit is active, the other is not. Therefore, one cannot think logically and empathetically at the same time.
This is pretty interesting, imho. It seems like this may explain quite a bit about politics, religion and a bunch of other issues where people end up talking past each other all the time. Assuming it holds up.
I don’t know if the thread title is accurate. Is there evidence that using logic too often results in atrophy of the empathy region, or vice versa? It makes sense that you can do either one or the other at a time. But if we can switch between logic and empathy at-will, it doesn’t follow that one kills the other.
It has been the common currency of science journalists (and some ambitious scientists) for several years now to wildly exaggerate the significance of results from “brain scanning” (usually fMRI) experiments.
Even if the studies are sound (and there are LOTS of ways that fMRI studies can be, and have been, screwed up so as to produce false results) drawing implications from them as to what people are are actually capable of, or likely to do, inevitably depends upon complex and shaky chains of inference.
A psychological experiment that induced empathetic feelings in people and then tested their logical reasoning ability to see if it was affected would tell you far more about the matter, far more reliably, than any brain scan ever could, but as it would not involve expensive, high-tech equipment and pictures of brains with pretty colored splodges, the public (as opposed to other scientists) would not care or be convinced. [Also…(PDF).)
I think the point is that we aren’t necessarily GOOD at switching on a dime, and considering a single issue using both neural systems. We tend to lock into one when considering an issue/task, and don’t use the other.
It continues to surprise me how much stock is put into the pretty colours of brain scans. First you hear how little we know about the brain, how regions don’t necessarily clearly correspond to particular functions, how one region might take over from another etc etc, then you read “conclusive evidence” that in 45 people this little bit lights up green therefore people are such-and-such. (And they aren’t even really in colour.)
Cordelia Fine (PhD UCL) describes it as “blobology”: the science of creating images in brain scans and then correlating them to human behavior, when those images are ambiguous to begin with.
For this particular research they only used 45 subjects, which doesn’t seem like very many to draw such grand conclusions. I suppose you have to start somewhere, and it’s certainly interesting, so they might take it further. I hope they do, and I hope they manage to get some broader evidence.
Logic is the truth, but people don’t make decisions based on logic, at least not entirely. That’s because our brains aren’t logic-based. They aren’t computers, in other words.
I agree, until more information is available, logic tells me that the NIH and the UCL have more insight on this than the one article from a new open source publication. As it is always the case with research like this it will be very interesting if confirmation and how to better quantify and/or identify the causes that give those results are made.
The publication (at the OP’s second link) is neither new nor open source. If you wanted to view the full article it would cost you $31.50. The OP’s fist link is a press release, which, typically for the genre, wildly oversells the oversells the possible practical and (especially in this case) philosophical implications of the actual empirical findings. (Long experience with such stuff gives me great confidence that, if I could access the actual peer reviewed paper at the second link, I would find either that there were no such claims therein, or that they are expressed only very briefly, and in much more modest and tentative terms.)
However, the complaint that I and, I think, gracer were voicing above was not so much that this is a single isolated study whose significance is being extrapolated too far (though it is), but that it is a neuroimaging, fMRI study whose significance is being extrapolated too far. On the one hand, this methodology is probably not the most appropriate or reliable (it really ain’t all that reliable) for investigating the issues in question (at least, those that are played up in the press release). On the other hand, there is a strong tendency for people (especially, but not only, lay people) to give undue weight to claims made on the basis of neuroimaging studies as compared to those made on the basis of more solid arguments and stronger evidence of other types. (See the links in my earlier post for direct evidence that people do in fact commonly make this mistake.) Loose and sometimes ill informed speculations about the mind made by people with MRI machines in their lab often get a lot more play than the speculations, and sometimes even the well founded claims, of people who are, in the relevant respects, better informed, but do not have such fancy, expensive machines behind them.
The suggestion that feeling empathy tends to interfere with logical thinking, and vice versa, would be more directly and appropriately (and more cheaply) investigated by the methods of experimental cognitive psychology. The claims in the press release about consciousness and the epistemological concept of the “explanatory gap” would, frankly, be more appropriately investigated via the methodology of philosophical analysis. I am not saying that neuroimaging has nothing useful to contribute on these issues, far from it, but the logic of the problem situation dictates that its proper role here is secondary and suggestive rather than dispositive. Because of its pretty pictures, however, and because the arguments of cognitive psychologists and (a fortiori) philosophers can be complex, and often take hard work to follow, far too many people tend to put far, far more weight on neuroimaging evidence than it deserves, and treat it as dispositive when it is not.
Pretty pictures, and the spurious authority deriving from having expensive, high-tech machinery, kill logic.
Oh yes, I was trying to say that. Only you are much more eloquent, I only get as far as “blobology”.
I read somewhere* that if you put the same person in the fMRI scanner twice, doing the same task, you’ll only get a 50% correlation between the areas that light up. (Sorry, I’m probably saying this “blobology”-way again.)
This sentence should be copied out every time someone brings up “conclusive evidence” based purely on brain scans.
*When come back bring cite and cake
Agreed. After reading the abstract I’m far less convinced what they’ve found is what is generally understood when people say “empathy” or “logic”. I think the reporter overreached, and the error has been compounded by the OP.
There is ample evidence of people being able to perform tasks that combine mechanical and emotional aspects, playing instruments, acting, dancing, etc. The little thought experiments they design to give someone when they’re in an FMRI machine are hardly accurate representations of the human experience. They’re our first peek into our brains, but they’re not as accurate as science journalists, or even some scientists, would like them to be.
It’s a lot like evolutionary psychology, where someone notices a behavior and then literally makes up a scenario where this behavior may have been adaptive in primitive times. These assertions for the “why” of a behavior are notoriously difficult to either prove or disprove, although they appeal to the “common sense” of the public.
that the NIH and the UCL have more insight on this than the one article from a new open source publication. As it is always the case with research like this it will be very interesting if confirmation and how to better quantify and/or identify the causes that give those results are made.