Daniel’s Comments (group member since Mar 22, 2014)

Daniel’s comments from the Q&A with Daniel R. Thorne - Neuroeconomics group.

Hi everyone!

Just a note to say I’ve thrown together a little YouTube playlist (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...) of talks, lectures, and other videos that are helpful for getting some perspective and background on my Neuroeconomics book. There’s great stuff in there from Robert Sapolsky, Stephen Pinker, V.S. Ramachandran, Oliver Sacks, and several others. Most of this was source material that was very helpful to me in writing the book (as were the books listed here), so I thought I would pass it along.

I’ll be adding to the list as I dig out or come across other videos that I forgot to include, and I’ve also put these links on my website. Be sure to let me know in comments if there's a video or five that you want to suggest.

Enjoy!

The following excerpt contains the afterword from Neuroeconomics: an Applied Information Theory

Not Enough an Art, Not Enough a Science

The state of psychology today is, if I may put it lightly, an embarrassment and a disgrace to everything that we in the 21st century know to be true about the way that people work, and is, or rather I suppose should be, a further embarrassment to the standards and values of our academic and educational endeavors as a civilization.

I must concede from the start that there is a great deal of truly marvelous work being done by research psychologists at various institutions, and that the pursuit of therapeutic psychologists and social workers to mitigate the problems of their fellow human beings and to assist in their amelioration is indeed a noble one, but the state of the psychological understanding from which they operate and the methodology available to them is one of truly grave misapprehension of fact and circumstance.

Dated and vexed theories such as behaviorism and Freudian psychoanalysis, which could not possibly be taken seriously in the context the known facts of today, are widely taught in the university level psychology curriculum, not as History of Psychology or as background for the currently held scientific consensus, but are offered up choisissez-vous as the best that modern academia has to offer on the subject.

And the unfortunate fact is that that is exactly what it is. In modern undergraduate psychology, the modus operandi tends to be that one is shown various phenomena and studies, some of which genuinely remarkable and revealing, whereupon one is usually given around four separate and incompatible explanations, some of which manage to glance at the truth of the matter, and some of which miss it so blatantly as to obfuscate the very pursuit of understanding.

I cannot tell the reader how many times I was presented confounds such as these in lessons, and after pressing with too many questions and witnessing an extremely brief moment of professorial panic, I was asked, as something of a statement, “Well, what do you think?”

Now I am sorry, but that is not the way that things should go in a scientific classroom. The question is, “has modern science investigated these things or has it not?” “Is there a scientific consensus on the subject or isn't there?” “What, with the information available to us, can we discern to be going on here?”

And, at least according to my experience, these are neither questions which modern psychological understanding is capable of answering, nor is their thrust one which is representative of modern psychological thinking.

If I were asking similar questions of a biology professor, I could presumably be answered either one way or another, or a different way entirely, or I could be told that either the professor themselves or the world at large simply doesn't know, and I would come away with some form of a concrete, bankable piece of information.

Of course, already I can hear critics of this critique diagnosing me with so-called “physics envy”, asserting that I am jealous of the “harder” science's clear-cut results, models, and experiments, and I concede that there must be at least a small latent element of this in anyone who deals in the messy and complicated business of the other sciences. And it's true that psychology is quite often referred to, somewhat defeatedly, as a “soft” science.

But I contend that psychology is soft not because of its subject matter but because of its methods, and particularly its methods of analysis and reasoning.

At the classroom level we have refused to decide what constitutes an explanation and which of our predecessors have contributed such a thing as it concerns the topic at hand. We treat Freud and Jung and Eriksson and Maslow as lawgivers who have unraveled the mysteries of the universe, and yet they have knitted these back into incomprehensible messes of their own, and I for one think that a smug little pyramid of needs, or a trifecta of id, ego, and superego, are useless if they cannot be interrogated to the full satisfaction of the facts which they seek to explain.

I do not envy the elegance and simplicity of the prism and the rainbow, or that distance = rate x time, so much as I envy the Krebs' cycle, or the process of ontogenesis, for example. Yes, the explanation may be complicated, with lots of different parts each of which may take a long while to explain, and there may be parts of it which are wrong (or, as it is said in science, “subject to revision”), but we must raise the bar for what it is that we consider an explanation at all, if only for our own self respect.

The four answers that we have for any given analysis, apart from four answers to one problem being absurd, barely make one answer between them, and this is representative of the void that exists at the heart of our study-- the lack of a single, unifying means of understanding the mechanics of human thought and experience, and to me this omission is nothing short of glaring.

The state of the pubic understanding is even worse. One can scarcely read an article or turn on the radio without being invited to entertain the most pedantic, ham-fisted, pseudopsychological nonsense, confidently propped up as enlightened and educated perspectives, which basically consist of “getting inside [someone's] head”, finding shadows of something vaguely nasty and creepy, or vaguely tortured, or perhaps even vaguely warm and fuzzy depending on the program, and then calling it a day.

Now, of course, I might never have a moment's peace if I used a survey of the national media as the barometer of human knowledge and understanding, after all there are some publications which will never stop printing horoscopes, but the simple fact is that even at the highest levels of our endeavor there is no clear alternative to these ideas.

It saddens me to think that even if there was undertaken the most wonderful campaign for the public understanding of psychological science this public would be no better off at the end of it, unless some friends were invited along to speak from the human biology department.

Many of my psychology classes have threatened, and not emptily, to go the entire semester without even mentioning the brain or how it arose, except of course for the token nods it demands when development comes up or for the attribution some complex function to a particular region, and so on.

This magnificent organ, far from being seen as the fabric of and basis for our entire lives and experience, is employed only as the deus ex machina which fills the gaps left in psychological theory. In fact, with one small and nearly dispensed with exception, every single thing that I have laid out as the foundation for the theory I have put forward in this book is material that was covered in exactly none of my psychology classes.

Psychology contends itself instead with philosophical life events and with their patently assumed consequences. These are loosely and vaguely defined, they are informed by the sociocultural milieu of the day, and they bring with them a scientifically unpardonable amount of bias, confusion, platitude, and truism.

It often seems that the goal of most psychological discussion is to reduce a situation of infinite complexity to a handful of tired clichés, or to use some opportunistic experimental data to prop up some inadequate existing concept, or at least to confirm the folk wisdom and biases with which everyone already views the situation.

This, put simply, is not the way that science works. The problems in our ideas that this way of thinking has bred could fill a book on their own, and before I decided that that on its own wasn't good enough, that was the book I was originally going to write.

There are so many things which people tacitly acknowledge as true without evidence, so many holes in the plot that so few seem to notice, so many nods to social convention and inherited ideas, and there are far too many easy answers.

Even if I'm ultimately wrong about what I have put forward here, that even if this work won't be seen in a hundred years' time as a major step forward in the history of psychology, then I hope at the very least to have gotten people looking in the right direction.

Thank you.

The following is an excerpt of the introduction to Neuroeconomics: an Applied Information Theory:

The continual revolution of the scientific age has revealed time and time again that our intuitions regarding the natural world are too often too simple, and as one marvels at the wondrous complexity that is revealed by the avenues of discovery which have sprung up to replace them, these ultimately betray the utter failures of the primal, intuitive imagination.

At the dawn of the 21st century the products of the last several hundred years' studies in nearly every subject constitute the surest known ways to boggle the mind and to embarrass its previous misapprehensions of fact. The orientation and span of the cosmos, the origins of life, the causes of disease, the fundamental forces at work in the universe, these are all things about which the primitive peoples of the world can now be seen to have been quite wrong at a very fundamental level.

I invite the reader to consider the possibility that while the mind certainly does fall in that category, we cannot yet count it among the things which we do truly understand today, and that while the other sciences have gone from basic atomism to quantum mechanics, from 4 elements to 118 and counting, psychology remains perched on the brink of its own marvelous flight into the future.

It is my belief and conviction that today's psychologists, as well as those who deal with psychological matters and issues such as psychiatrists and social workers, are currently operating with a significantly limited set of tools for contending with the problems of the mind and its functions, and while its true that some are able to achieve a notable level of success in the amelioration of these they do so with limited precision and with limited means of understanding the underlying dynamics.

Our study of the brain, meanwhile, has certainly risen to marvelous heights, and new methods and research have uncovered wonder after wonder as we have looked deeper into our inner workings. And yet the weight of these discoveries has not thus far matriculated appropriately into the basic psychological understanding nor, surely, into the curriculum from which we instruct the next generation.

Still, it is inevitable now, as that weight continues to accumulate, that this discrepancy will eventually have to be resolved to conform to the facts as we now know them.

In this book I will attempt to aid that transition by submitting a new account of the mind's mechanics, drawing from several components and theories based in other disciplines, primarily neuroscience and general human biology, after which I will contribute a series of conclusions which I think are logically necessitated by the facts of the matter as they currently appear.

With this work I hope to resolve a number of the popular confounds by which modern psychology is confronted, and to impart both a means for the summary and clarification of subconscious operations, as well as a new conceptual view of the mind and its behaviors.

Reposted from thread in Science and Inquiry group.
Kenny wrote: "I'm confused about the 'economics' aspect. Care to explain that? Also being somewhat interested/familiar with the fields it is my impression that neurology, cognitive science, psychology and psychiatry were moving ever closer as we learn more about the brain."

I agree that the fields are moving together, and my hope is that this work will accelerate that process and bring them even closer. :)

As for the "economics" part, the idea is essentially that the chemical resources upon which the brain relies are a kind of currency and the book investigates this and deals with some claims about how that currency is used and about the system in which it is involved.


Reposted from thread in Brain Science Podcast group.
Ginger wrote: "I am curious why you called your book Neuroeconomicss when there an entire field with that name and quite a few books that have already used that title."

Hi Ginger,

Thank you for your question. The idea is essentially that the chemical resources upon which the brain relies are a kind of currency, of which there is a finite supply and a number of competing demands. The book investigates this and deals with some claims about how that currency is used and about the system in which it is involved.

I have read Ariely's book, and in fact I list it in the reference section of my bibliography. So far as I have seen, the field as it exists today, including the contributions of Predictably Irrational, is almost entirely concerned with the neuroeconomics of decision making.

I have taken this further and I demonstrate how this principle accounts for a great deal more than that. I discuss the neuroeconomic influence on the entire mind, from perception through to behavior, and I have also paid some attention to conceptual neuroeconomics, to cooperative neuroeconomics and to the neuroeconomics of trauma and recovery.

Most importantly however, in the book I put forward a model which depicts what I believe to be an accurate depiction of that principle's underlying mechanics. I define a criteria for the categorization of neural machinery and place specific pieces (such as I have been able to while working in isolation) within those categories and show the relationship between them.

In short, while there have been others who have correctly discerned the nature of the principle at work and and have demonstrated its existence by experiment, my book concerned with, and makes claims about, how that process is carried out.

Ultimately the portmanteau itself is not a difficult one to come up with and, while it is a term that I certainly can't claim to have coined, I hope I have gone farther in the pursuit of its definition.

I sure hope you'll read the book. :)

The eBook is available for free download (.pdf) at www.dthornebooks.com.

Hi everyone,

Thanks so much for stopping by the discussion group. I'm happy to answer any questions, simple or complex as you like, whether about the book itself or the process of writing it or about my own background and experience, so fire away!

:)