Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Paul Bloom. (48 minutes, 23 mb mp3)
Paul Bloom lures you to the frontier in human psychology with ancient moral questions and the evidence of full-bodied human behavior. In the next-door labs of neuroscience, his colleagues may be well on their way to mapping every link in the spaghetti of our brains — to naming every neuron and synapse, to driving the “ghost” of consciousness out of the “machine” of the mind. And still, as Jonah Lehrer writes, we will “feel like the ghost, not like the machine.” So it is a relief to find, in Yale’s star lecturer and the author of How Pleasure Works, a complete humanist in a daunting field of mostly microscopic research.
“It turns out,” he says, “that the best way to learn about the brain isn’t to put people in a brain scanner… to put electrodes on them. The best way to learn about the brain is to sit in front of somebody and talk to them… The best way to learn about the developing brain of a baby is to show babies different situations and see how they respond. The best way to look at the brain structures relevant to food isn’t to do an autopsy or brain scan. It’s to see how people eat, and to see what people like to eat.” Paul Bloom is walking us around his baby lab at Yale, and around the teeming map of the brain sciences at large. I asked him to point to three mountaintops in cognitive science that he would love to climb. He gave us two.
PB: First mountain: Religion. I think that there’s a lot of people out there exploring why people believe in god, the nature of religious belief, about atheistic people who are themselves deeply religious. And this is an area I think of huge excitement, but I think now the field is too immature.
William James was wonderful on religious experience. He was not so good on the “Why?” question. Why does everybody, or most everybody, believe in some sort of god? Why does everybody believe in an afterlife? The questions we raise with regard to music apply here. To what extent is this a biological adaptation? Smart people believe it is. Or, to what extent is it an accident?
CL: Do believers have more babies?
PB: That would be the claim. Because they’re happier, because they’re more socially connected, because their belief in god makes them more moral and their morality makes them more attractive. Then there are other smart people, including many people I work with, who would argue that religious belief is an accident, that we’ve never evolved to be religious. Rather, it’s a byproduct of capacities that we’ve evolved for other purposes.
CL: I love the psalm that says, “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so my soul thirsteth for the living God.” Pretty deep and old and basic.
PB: Pretty deep, and it also captures the fact that religion is not merely an intellectual stance. I end How Pleasure Works by talking about religious ritual and belief, and I point out, and I’m an atheist, myself‚ but I point out that I’d have to be blind and deaf not to realize the pleasure it causes many people, the satisfaction it gives them. And I think this is an important part of why we have it.
And then the second mountain, if you’ll settle for two. The second mountain is a particular sort of pleasure: stories, fiction. Your average person spends much of his or her day engaged in worlds that are not real. We read books, we watch TV, we go to movies, we daydream. The number one pleasure of your life is engaging in your imagination. It’s not sex, it’s not food, it’s not drugs, it’s not sports, it’s not hanging around with those you love, it is living in imaginary worlds. And what we don’t know is why this is so appealing. Why is it so appealing to for a moment find yourself in a world that you know is not real? Why is it so appealing, and what are the constraints on this? What kind of stories do people like? To what extent are there universals in these sort of stories? What’s the relationship between the sort of stories that a two-year-old would enjoy and that you and I would enjoy? Or that you and I would enjoy, and a hunter-gatherer would enjoy? What are the universals, what are the particulars? And given the importance of this to our day-to-day lives, it’s unfortunate and surprising but exciting that we don’t know the answers to this.
Paul Bloom in conversation with Chris Lydon at Yale University, June 10, 2010.
How exciting! How intimidating! So many of these shows treat questions similar to the ones I am working on answering myself, and it forces me to recognize the limited scope of my questions, the limited scope of the answers I have felt satisfied with.
I haven’t yet read “Proust was a Neuroscientist,” so I apologize if I am clumsily restating his argument. But my reaction to hearing “we don’t know the answers to” why religion exists, why stories exist, is to think it would be more appropriate to say “we don’t have all the insight that this perspective can offer.” Philosophy, anthropology and fiction (among other fields I know less of, I’m sure!) all offer partial answers to these questions, and I think for these questions, that is all we can expect from any one perspective, one discipline. I am very, very excited to see how cognitive psychology can challenge or affirm these ideas, and what unexpected insight it can offer (the example questions given are really fascinating), but I worry it might be to easy for some to see the insight cognitive psychology offers as “the” answer. We should utilize as many perspectives as we can! (I sound like I am accusing Dr. Bloom of not understanding this when it seems clear from the interview that he does. I found myself misunderstanding for a moment, though.)
The nightly lightning storm has begun! I will be back, I have a lot to say and for once I feel I know how to say it!
interesting int’vw. The question about ‘Man’ as good OR evil should have been parsed into whether more good or evil, and when. [On the humanism of capitalism:] The month following the 2001 terrorism in the US was marked by a public willingness to cooperation and responsibility. Now, in our present Crisis of Everything, the publics’ survival instinct has triggered the self/family imperative. Our ‘natural’ proclivity seems to be heavily tempered by expediency of the immediate, which throws things back into the old Behaviourism wild card. . . .Dave/Cambridge (US)
This was a great discussion. Bloom is an excellent spokesperson for psychology and neuroscience. With regard to his interest in stories and why it is so pleasurable to live in imaginary worlds, I am reminded of the elegant book THE DENIAL OF DEATH by Ernest Becker. Becker’s work was deeply interdisciplinary. He draws on anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, history and philosophy to address the sort of question that Bloom is approaching from another angle. Partly we live in our imaginations to escape anxiety, and, partly, because we as symbol making creatures can reshape our actual social environment through the realization of the products of imagination. This takes us directly into the values and ethics that Bloom seeks to investigate. So, here, we can appreciate how important it is to study the brain, development, the social context of experience, and, also remember that the mind cannot be reduced to the brain.
Yes, totally, Jeff! I was going to mention Becker! The Denial of Death is somewhat dated, but I do think while what Becker argued was the whole picture isn’t the whole picture, it still has a limited truth to it that is of real value. His treatment of dualism is very interesting, how man struggles with the perceived divide of bodily values and cultural values, and while it can not account for why something we can call morality exists in infants, and why fear of the other occurs to early, I do think it can explain part of why it exists at a later age. Becker also treats the origin of religion, although he never treats the God question further than, what I understand to be, “God is a very good transference object for the neurotic” or “belief in God is a relatively efficient way of avoiding a lot of existential terror.” He does treat the cultural belief systems and the belief in the afterlife in a— while not entirely satisfying, certainly more satisfying than other perspectives, understanding people to have immortality projects does help one understand oneself and others.
I’ve written before about how as a child, I was unsatisfied with the notion of heaven as I was told it, heaven preserved a sense of self that I, as a child could not identify with. Grown-ups were different from kids, what I was as a kid was going to face annihilation were I not to die as a kid, or if the idea of heaven was wrong. If heaven was a personality archive, it had to preserve who I was in this instant, and the next, and the next, and the next! I was trying to preserve the self— not just my body, but what I had come to mean to myself. Becker certainly had an explanation (an, one, of potentially many) as to why this would be.
I wrote in a comment the other day (but on a show that is many months old) about Becker, and I realize that it— Chris, you said something about how these questions are important because the stakes are getting so high, with our economic problems, with our resource problems, with global warming. Becker addressed, in some way, why it is we have difficulty perceiving real threats, why we make up scapegoats. I love this passage I found in the second edition of “The Birth and Death of Meaning,” although it was written in the early 1970′s, I felt it was about the year I read it (2008).
“Whole societies which fail to act on real priorities for their own survival can be said to be psychotic. Take, for example, a society which puts on one side of the decision-sheet the following priorities: potential environmental collapse, possibilities of atomic and germ war on a global scale, possible economic collapse, rumbling social revolutions by dispossessed minorities, actual collapse of the traditional hero-system; and on the other side of the sheet, escalation of a life-sapping and losing war costing billions of dollars per year, in a small, unimportant country of no real strategic value. The psychotic choice in this matter would be on the second side of the sheet and for the past half-dozen years we have seen one of the greatest world powers annually make a choice which completely fouls reality and puts into jeopardy its own survival and well-being.”
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Also, I read Proust was a Neuroscientist, and I am completely devastated— most of the ideas I’ve been working on are either explicitly mentioned or are very implicit in so much of what is said. Like I said, very exciting, very intimidating! I want to say though, maybe it isn’t that artists get there first, but there are just fewer obstacles. We are all looking for answers, and the artist has the most freedom to tell what it is they’ve found, where a scientist has to explain things in very specific terms, using evidence that may take years and years to be seen as valid. I was right in prefacing my last comment with an apology, Lehrer did make the argument I expected— let’s learn to live with, and use, multiple perspectives.
I will read “How Pleasure Works” either today or tomorrow. And comment again!
Re: Ants and other social insects: their perceived “altruism” makes sense when you consider that individual ants are sterile and perfect genetic clones. The species’ gene pool is pushed forward and recombined (hence allowing for natural selection) through the only reproductive individuals in the colony – the queen and reproductive males. In terms of “kinship” – what Bloom was talking about as the source of altruism in humans, any worker ant is as good as the next one, and the only evolutionarily viable instinct that could have evolved is protecting the queen and the colony even if self-sacrifice was needed. Ants in a colony work as individual cells in a body, where only reproductive cells are to pass on the body’s genes to the next generation. Ants in a colony are as cooperative to each other as cells in your body are cooperative to each other. This all fits quite nicely in the kinship theory actually. You might have guessed it already but I have to refer back to The Selfish Gene. Not the first exposition on the subject but it does a great job laying out the basics of modern evolutionary theory and evolutionary psychology.
Re: art and dualism: I can’t help to see it as romanticism, and a slightly cliche view that reductionist science “takes the poetry away” from the world, as if somehow, when explained, the world is less awe inspiring and magical.
To that, I can only refer to Richard Feynman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbFM3rn4ldo
I think a great part of the pleasure of imagination is that it enlarges the world in which we live. For an artist it is a game where he or she can play with lives that they can never live, become someone else. That is what actors do for the few hours on stage or in front of a camera and perhaps why they were considered so dangerous in ancient times.
An author drags up from his sensory memory characters to give them lives they will never live but that he can live vicariously while writing, as they are brought to life. It is the desire to leave a mark, to endure, to capture a moment out of time, to escape the prison of time.
Play, there is that in music, one plays an instrument, artists speak of playing with light and darkness, when all the rest of the world must work an artist plays even if it is not always a pleasant game.
I had hoped to get this other person to comment, but I was talking to somebody else who listens to the show, and they said while there is fiction that has made people more tolerant, humanizing minorities and homosexuals to those who would have otherwise only seen them in those terms, it is also true that in the past decade in the United States fiction, the show “24″ being the most obvious, has served the end of making torture acceptable.
Dr. Bloom’s book is very interesting, again, I find myself realizing that some of my projects that I thought were unique to me are maybe not so unique, and people have gone much further with them than I have. Essentialism— there were things about it that I had seen in others before and incorporated into my ideas about looking at people in terms of their individual implicit metaphysical systems, but there was so much more that I didn’t know, and so much that could actually be demonstrated in ways I didn’t recognize.
I have wanted to say something about the near-universality in a belief in a god, but I need to do more research. What I can say though, is that in the United States, for a period of four months, I was involved with a television show about Buddhism intended for the Los Angeles market. (I was horribly under qualified to do anything that I did on that show.) The worst thing to happen when I worked on it was- when we interviewed a Hiroshima survivor, she talked about her religious experience, but she spoke of things that seemed very similar to a salvation deity and a kind of hell, very unorthodox. After we were done, I was told that they had not recognized how strong her belief in this folk version of Buddhism was, and that I would have to edit it all out because it was “embarrassing.” I may still have the original recording somewhere, it’s something I have wanted to look at again, and learn more about.
The need for religious belief is primarily emotional and psychological. If is more amusing to many people to consider the prospect of the miraculous such as UFOs, ghosts, goblins, gods, resurrections, virgin births, afterlifes and other obvious fantasies than hard core reality as it is. I highly recommend Dr Russell Barkley’s work at http://www.getrationalbook.org
Honorable Sir
With profound regards we humbly request you that We are a voluntary organization which sets up work in Indus Valley Sindh, the southern part of Pakistan our project is to help and facilitate a libraries program in Sindh, with the name of “Mother of Civilization Library” We therefore anxious in collecting resource materials including any books of Professor Dr. Paul Bloom an internationally well-known Psychologist, Cognitive Scientist, author and familiar TED Speaker.
Here is a large part of College and University aged population in Sindh towns and countryside, who love to read and know more about his notable works How Pleasure Works, Descartes’ baby, How children learn the meanings of words, Language, logic, and concepts, Language and space and Language acquisition but unfortunately due to unavailability these books our people are underprivileged from these fundamental facilities, and became very much in troubled after big catastrophe of supper flood which hit the large part of population of this province in which all educational institutions and libraries infrastructure has been destroyed.
Your donations of books can do much to stimulate and encourage the growth of learning, especially among the young generation of Sindh about it. Therefore we appeal your great institution to make a little contribution of above books on compassionate and humanitarian ground; the result would be the placement of new or used books (or equivalent educational materials) into the library for needy and destitute pupils who have thirst of knowledge.
Hope you will consider our humble supplication with the glance of appreciation and make small numbers of books donation for this libraries program. You will truly make a difference in the lives of the Indus Valley people who will receive your gift of books In case, you wish to know more about our libraries program and various facets associated with it. Please free to contact our office on all the days.
Thanking you
Yours Sincerely
Rashid Anees
Project Manager
Library mailing address.
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