Scientists at the University of California at Berkeley announced recently that they were able to capture a phrase from a Pink Floyd song from signals picked up by electrodes attached to the brains of 29 patients at Albany Medical Center. Think of it like this: The patients’ brain waves became a cover band for Pink Floyd, recreating the music they were hearing, and the electrodes beamed it out.
You may consider this a remarkable advance in neurotechnology, but I’d say it’s life imitating art, sort of: I recall a comic book story from the 1960s about a malevolent mindreader who could detect what people were thinking by touching an electrode to the wrist of an unsuspecting mark. The story so haunted me that as an adolescent I would try to clear my mind when a nurse was taking my pulse, just in case she really could tell what I was thinking – which, at that age, was probably about sex.
Anyway, you can’t literally create a blank mind. But the human brain is quite happy to reject new information. In fact, we are hard-wired to what the American neuroscientist Paul MacLean labeled the reptilian brain — that is, the basal ganglia and brainstem. That part of our anatomy enables us to function almost automatically on matters we know well or that we’ve come to accept as true. Professor MacLean argued this this was an evolutionary advantage for homo sapiens: Learning activity requires the brain to use more energy, and our ancestors needed that energy instead to outrun predators on the savannah. So in prehistoric times, the reptilian brain was quite useful.
In 2023, not so much. Today, our understanding of the brain has advanced since MacLean’s theories from the 1960s, but the outline remains helpful in understanding why it’s so hard to change a political allegiance, and why we’re resistant to new ideas: It’s because our reptilian brain defaults to what we think we know, rather than bothering to absorb new input.
Learning requires engagement of the higher-order parts of the brain — in the neocortex, which enables abstraction and reasoning. Who wants to work that hard?
Why this matters at this moment is because the world is changing quickly, and millions of lives are at risk if we can’t change with it. We need to rise above the reptilian brain, but too much of our political culture and our media diet instead reveals and rewards intellectual laziness.
There’s no greater example of the challenge than climate change. Scientists almost unanimously agree that, as a recent U.N. report put it, “there is a rapidly narrowing window” to avert disastrous consequences of climate change. It has been millions of years, literally, since there was so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And we have the technology to save the planet. But unless there’s a much more energetic response than world governments have offered so far, the earth’s blanket of pollution caused by burning fossil fuels will catastrophically change human life before this century ends: Tens of millions of people will die from respiratory disease, hunger, natural disasters and wars caused by competition for ever more scarce resources.
We’ve gotten hints of how bad things may get. And you’d think that after witnessing this year’s flooding in Hong Kong and Greece, and wildfires in Canada, Europe and Maui – and the earth’s hottest summer on record – that people might demand that politicians embrace a positive agenda to protect the earth. But that would require such a lot of effort by that higher-order part of the brain.
Plenty of politicians and their media sycophants in this country still insist that climate change is just a liberal fixation, a ploy to take away individual freedom. A Fox News commentator even claimed the Maui wildfires spread because the power utility there had been distracted by “the green agenda.” That is, Fox blamed the fight against climate change, not climate change itself, for the Maui disaster. There’s the reptilian brain at work, folks.
Climate is an issue that perfectly illuminates how we cling to what we think we know: Pew research reported recently that eight in 10 Democrats consider climate change a major threat to the country’s well-being, but only 23 percent of Republicans agree.
So the task at hand is fundamentally an exercise in human reason and will — that is, in using our well-developed brains to marshal the efforts of all the world’s nations toward fixing our most pressing shared problem. Yes, it requires laying aside our reptilian brains and accepting new learning on many levels: political, technological and financial. But if scientists can turn a brain into a rock band, just imagine what we can do by applying the higher functions of our brains to the greatest crisis we face.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.