Exploring the brain's role in experiencing

Our perceptions of “reality” are ostensibly shaped by both internal and external stimuli thus creating subjective realities. At the same time, however, societies have created and mandated certain guidelines that establish perceived truths. While these societal truths may not be truths at all but rather objectivistic ideals in a subjectivistic culture, does this mean that they are any less relevant? Instead of arguing about why objectivity does not exist in our world, I agree with many of you and think that it might be more helpful to investigate how perceived objectivity affects scientific investigations and social exploration.     

I found myself oddly comfortable with the idea that objectivity does not exist and the closest approximation to it is the shared subjectivity of a community or culture. I believe this idea allows for more perspectives to be considered. Instead of a dichotomous right or wrong answer, scientists (and the general population) should be looking to further shared understandings. I don't believe that scientists will ever run out of things to study and I also disagree with the mindset that "if there is no objectivity, there is no point to science". Science is still just as important to the world even when conceding that it might not be objective. What's so important about objectivity, anyway? We can still progress and further widely-held understandings without objectivity. Different perceptions and beliefs are the reasons people set out to explore the world in the first place.

In middle school, I had a science teacher who did not believe that men had walked on the moon. As a 14-year-old, I had serious misgivings about this woman's ability to teach in a modern world. I mean, really?! How the hell can you teach SCIENCE if you don't believe men made it to the moon? Didn't science put those men on the moon? Luckily, she was an Earth Science teacher. We didn't delve into deep discussions about our diametrically-opposed ideas concerning extra-terrestrial explorations. She taught me how many bones there were in the body. I don't know if other cultures/religions believe there are more or less than 206 bones in the adult human body, perhaps that is one piece of cross-cultural objective information. I do know that babies are born with way more bones than adults because they're mushy little things and they need to be pretty flexible before all those bones can fuse together. So if something as endogenous and beyond our control as the number of bones in one's body can change over the course of a lifetime, why can't science? Science is continually evolving. That's the point of science. I think science can only continue to do that with input from people with differing perspectives. Hundreds of years ago, if no one had disagreed with the common belief that the world was flat, we would still be worried about falling off the edge. Science needs subjectivity, it thrives on disagreements. Without subjectivity, there would be nothing left to "discover" or test out.

It seems only natural that, when presented with a concept like constructed reality, people are going to have varied reactions.  I mean for example, if I was to tell my grandma that reality does not exist and there is no real way to determine “what is out there” since everything is constructed by our brain, she would probably cry!  If anything, training in neuroscience should ease the transition into accepting the concept of shared subjectivity.  As reflected in the forum postings and discussion, it isn’t an easy thing to just accept and move on from.  The most significant way that I think we were affected by this discussion was in its question of practical implications and usefulness both for us as scientists and as human begins.  It’s an interesting and intriguing discussion, but like Sasha said, when it comes right down to it, does it really matter that we cannot objectively see and objectively interpret our world?  And like Sara said, how do we negotiate our role as scientists?

I don’t know the full answer to those questions and I think it would probably be useful to continue that discussion.  However, the discussion did get me thinking and today when I was thinking about what I wanted to say in the forum, I decided that I wanted to talk about Avatar.  I am guessing most of us have seen the movie, but if you haven’t, well, you should probably just go ahead and do that.  When David posted, “should we accept the validity of the healing properties of dances and rituals?” I immediately thought about the rituals that happened at the Tree of Souls.  No matter how powerful the tree, if we placed someone who was dying beneath it, we would not expect the tree to give off healing powers.  We don’t believe in magic. But I think that IS where the idea of shared subjectivity comes into play because if we had a set of observations that demonstrated it was possible, we would begin to believe.  Further along in the movie we learn that the “tree” does not fit our definition for your average Willow.  The Tree of Souls is connected to the neural network for all living things on Pandora.  The interesting part is, although that concept is outside our shared subjectivity, it isn’t actually that far outside our understanding of a tree with its connection to the earth, soil, animals, air, etc.  I think this relates to bkim’s comment about how culture affects not what we see, but how we see it.    

And I think all I am trying to say with this is just that yes, as humans, the concept of shared subjectivity is useful because it widens our narrow understanding of right versus wrong.  If reality isn’t stagnant it can be changed, it can be altered, and it can be improved. Just because we don’t have a certain set of observations now doesn’t mean it could never be gathered.  Still, I agree with Sasha and others who acknowledged that the reality we have created, especially for us as scientists, has been extremely beneficial in allowing us to learn and expand our understanding.  So how does it all connect?  

Monday’s class discussion brought up some interesting points.  One word that really stuck out for me was the description of the brain as a constructor.  The use of the word constructor, as opposed to inventor or creator, seems especially significant.  Our discussion centered mostly on the question of reality.  What is real?  How do we know what we perceive is what actually exists?  We saw, using the chessboard and other optical illusions that our brain constructs a large portion of our reality.  However, most of the class, including myself, seemed fundamentally opposed to the idea that what we perceive as reality is not “real.”  However, after further reflection, it seems as though our knowledge of the brain and our instincts are not necessarily contradictory.

The brain may construct our reality, but does it really create our reality?  When the brain constructs a reality, it uses inputs from the “real world.”  Reality is the interpreted electrical impulses that reach our brain from our sensory organs, and our sensory organs get their input directly from reality.  These signals are certainly modified in the brain (like in the chessboard optical illusion), but they are nevertheless a representation of reality.  Our success as a species and as individuals depends on a correct interpretation of reality: if we actually saw the light and dark pieces of the chessboard as the same color instead of interpreting them differently because of shadowing and line segments, we would not be perceiving reality in a way that is useful to us.  Our experience has taught us that chessboards have alternating squares of light and dark, and our brains are using that knowledge to provide us with the most useful information possible.  Our brains may be constructing reality when we see that image, but we are also drawing upon our experience of reality.

Additionally, I’d like to add my thoughts on The Spirit Catches You When You Fall Down.  While I have never read the book, I feel that there is a distinction between differences in cultural perceptions and actual brain functioning.  While we started off in the differences our brain perceives “reality” from direct sensory inputs, this book seems to deal with the way different cultures perceive the same stimuli.  While this does apply to the idea of “shared subjectivity” that we discussed, I feel that the idea of interpreting events in different ways is separate from the way our brains construct realities from given stimuli.

 My immediate reaction to the in-class discussion about the fundamental subjectivity of perception and of the standards that we apply to everything from manners to the laws of the universe was to think back to past discussions I’ve been involved with about the subjectivity of the standards applied to behavior, and in the definition of abnormal behavior.  The entire field of mental health revolves around the notion that there are certain standards of normal behavior and that behavior that falls outside of the boundaries of these standards is abnormal, and depending upon the nature of that abnormality and its effects, it may require treatment to achieve a more normal behavioral pattern.  Some attempt has been made to recognize that the standards with which behavior is evaluated are not absolute or objective, the most significant of these (I think) within the field of mental health is the requirement that for any diagnosis of a mental disorder to be made that an individual not only display a pattern of abnormal behavior, but that that behavior negatively impact their ability to function.  This isn’t a complete solution to the problem of the subjectivity of mental health standards in general and to any number of criteria for diagnoses in particular, but it is a clear acknowledgement that the most important component of a mental disorder isn’t that it produces behavior that might be considered unusual but that it negatively impact the standard of living of its owner.

            This is probably venturing into territory that will be covered in next week’s discussion of depression but our standards of normalcy are often not even in line with what might be most “healthy” and certainly not shared across cultures.  Studies have shown that depressed individuals are often more accurate in their evaluations of their abilities and appearance than non-depressed individuals (who have a tendency towards a positive evaluative bias) and there is a fair amount of contention whether the often disproportionate self-esteem and self-confidence that is encouraged in western culture is actually a positive influence.  So the treatment of mental disorders is often something of a gray area conceptually, when you’re not dealing with a very serious disruption in behavior it may be difficult to concretely identify a whether a particular person really is disordered, and the collection of symptoms that define various disorders not only tend to overlap extensively, but may or may not constitute discrete and specific states of disorder.  At the same time, particularly when dealing with Mental Health theoretically, it’s important to keep in mind how much good treatment can do for a person, how disruptive mental health problems can be, and now badly many want help, though that need cannot always be easily expressed.   

    Although in class yesterday we seem to have come to the conclusion that there is no objective reality, we also agreed that there is a construct that our culture and community works within.  As we said in class, when we say numbers to each other in almost any American school, we are using the base 10 Arabic numeral system.  There are also more specialized terms that are agreed upon that vary within a larger community- "DC" at Haverford means the dining center, Washington DC in the DC Metro area and Davenport College at Yale.  And while I don't think that any construct is "more right" than another, when a person is functioning within a community, they have to adhere to the standards.  We have chosen how we label different deviations, for example "epileptic" or "schizophrenic."

      I have read the book "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down," which Sara referenced in class and David in his post, and I think one key practical element that we hadn't considered is the extent to which the family is a part of American society.  While the Hmong viewed Lia's seizures as messages from God, they lived in the United States and took her to the emergency room where all of our Western technology was used to stop her seizures and treat her medically as our culture would.  If she had these seizures at home, the extent to which we could use our constructs concerning medicine to judge her parents' treatment becomes murky.  But she was brought to an American hospital and an American doctor did what he thought was best for his patient, spending thousands of dollars every time she had an episode.   And I know that this book is read by many medical students in this country but I think they do so more to increase awareness of how other cultures treat diseases and not to teach new doctors that they should allow an individual with epilepsy to go untreated because an equally legitimate perspective on the disease is that it is a form of communication with Gods.  Within each community or construct, we have decided what's real and how we will behave.  This extends to symptoms of schizophrenia that are described as simply having abnormal emotional responses and not knowing the difference between real and unreal stimuli.  As a society, we have decided normal emotional responses and investigate any deviations.  In our culture, people who experience hallucinations, as we define them, are sent to visit a psychiatrist.  Within our community, while we can learn about how other cultures respond to what we view as mental illnesses, we will (and I believe should) respond to them according to our constructs.

Throughout our class last night, I felt an internal struggle between the class conclusion that there is a lack of absolute/true objectivity, and my goal as a scientist of determining and subsequently reporting understandable, experimentally proven facts. The closest we came (in my opinion) to an agreement of objectivity was a "shared subjectivity;" we supposedly can agree what something is or isn't only in a highly defined and agreed upon construct. One of us then questioned, "Whose shared subjectivity constitutes objectivity?"

Given that we are all scientists and conducting research, I feel it is important for us to think about what the lack of ultimate objectivity means in terms of how we plan/perform scientific experiments and then communicate the results of these experiments. Whenever we communicate what we have found, the "shared subjectivity"/objectivity parameters must be taken into account. But are these parameters, and consequently, the objectivity construct, something that is understood or even mostly understood? Or should we as scientists be more explicit about the desired "shared subjectivity," so that are results will be less likely to be misinterpreted? In terms of the epilepsy case that I brought up (the book is entitled "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down" and is by Anne Fadiman, for any of you who are interested), it seems that the "shared subjectivity," which is in this case the society in which epilepsy is being analyzed, obviously must be explicitly stated. But is this the norm or exception? 

This discussion has led me to the personal conclusions that even if I view something as completely objective (numbers, for example), I must consider other viewpoints, because nothing is absolutely objective. I also feel, however, that without a constructed reality in which we have at least partially/mostly agreed upon objectivities, it would be difficult for society as a whole to function.

Lastly, I'd like to partially respond to David's post discussion thought and the issue of scientific funding as a determinant of what we as scientists should study. If we are basing what we study on what receives scientific funding, then maybe we should research based on achieving a desired function, not just learning/communicating facts/theories/phenomenons. For example, we would want to learn not why cancer cells divide so rapidly, but how to stop this division. But then, probably the best way to do this would be to learn why the cells divide so quickly in the first place. We're then right back where we started--even trying to determine what we study based on function, we have to go back to "objective" facts- and what are these objective facts? I guess scientific funding isn't all that helpful in telling us what science we should and should not study.