A few weeks ago, Ed Yong posted an analysis of the current state of research in the study of the human brain: Neuroscience Cannae Do It Cap’n, It Doesn’t Have the Power. It is statistical power that is missing. For reasons discussed clearly by Mr. Yong, results in neuroscience are often false or exaggerated. A study indicating that an anti-psychotic drug has a strong and good effect on schizophrenic patients might produce strong signals that it does have such an effect; follow-up studies might show only a weak effect or none at all. Think of it in terms of the underlying genes. If there is a gene which has a significant but small effect on the development of schizophrenia, then it might well be the case that ten research projects can look at that gene, eight failing to find an effect and disappearing without a ripple, one finding a weak effect and getting only modest attention, and one finding a strong effect and generating headlines. Overall, the statistics are true to the underlying significant but weak effect but the one research project which receives a lot of attention is the one which exaggerates the effect.
We should be careful when we read of results in the biological sciences in general and Mr. Yong tells us that this problem of statistical lack of power, playing hide-and-seek with an effect, occurs in medical studies in general, including “basic studies in cancer, heart disease and other conditions” and also psychology in general. He also states that geneticists are developing methods using large amount of data (more possible in that field than in some others) which avoid low-powered statistics.
Another major reason, in my opinion, to be careful about many studies of the brain, to be very careful in designing new studies, is that a properly developed human brain is integrated with a human mind itself shaped by responses to other parts of that human body, to other individual and communal human beings, and to physical reality in general; maybe even to God. To indicate what I’m getting at, a human being who has developed schizophrenia or bipolar disease will have a brain which is malfunctioning in some ways and also relationships which are askew. Even in cases of extreme damage to the brain, cases where serious problems will develop even in a human being maturing in very good circumstances, what lies outside will have an effect on the details of the mental disturbances because that brain-mind complex which is disturbed has been shaped largely by responses to what lies outside. In fact, emotional or cognitive trauma can result in personality disorders in otherwise healthy human beings and those disorders might partially mimic a `true’ psychiatric disorder such as schizophrenia.
Our minds are encapsulations of our total context and our minds in this sense are shaped from our natural brain activities and also feed back to our brains. In their fundamental physical manifestations, our minds, including our sense of self—our stories, are representational maps within the brain rather than simple actions of brain-cells pre-programmed to form a human mind, and certainly are not brain-cells pre-programmed to cooperate with an immaterial soul or mind. A sound-byte: our minds are more outside of us than inside. Our minds are more than could be strictly predicted from a full knowledge of our brains but are such that, after formation, those minds can be understood so that we see they are shaped from relationships and narratives made possible by the evolution of the human brain at a species level over all the years of life on earth and by the development of communal human being over the thousands of years of human cultural development.
The human mind isn’t the same thing it once was. A mind shaped in response to computers and electronic communications isn’t the same as one shaped to letters written by quill pens and carried by couriers on horseback. A mind shaped to the theory of evolution and quantum theory, to Broadway musicals and personal libraries of recordings of all of Beethoven’s known compositions, isn’t the same as a mind shaped to Aristotelian or Christian-animistic understandings of Creation, to Sunday hymn-sings and performances by occasional traveling minstrels.
An understanding the human mind is something which itself moves with the effort to understand all that exists and is within the attention of our personal or communal selves, where communal selves in the modern world have elements from the entire world and many past ages of human life. There is much about the mind which can be understood at various levels of detail and specificity, but any true understanding has to be expanded to include the mind in context and mind as a story.
One of my books which is available for download deals with human being, individual and communal: A More Exact Understanding of Human Being. The five parts of the book, intended to give an framework for understanding human being from a viewpoint which is respectful of both Christian teachings and empirical knowledge, are:
- Making Peace with Empirical Reality
- The Human Mind as a Re-creation of God’s Creation
- The Mystery of Human Feeling
- Human Acts as Participating in the Story Which is Our World
- Communal Men and the Body of Christ