The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

  This dynamic allocation of tissue can also be seen as the brain puts itself together in the womb. Unlike a computer that gets assembled in a factory and is turned on for the first time when complete, the brain is active while it is being assembled, and that activity may take part in the assembly process. Experiments on cats and other mammals have shown that if a brain is chemically silenced during fetal development it may end up with significant abnormalities.29 And patches of cortex develop differently depending on the kind of input they receive. In an experimental tour de force, the neuroscientist Mriganka Sur literally rewired the brains of ferrets so that signals from their eyes fed into the primary auditory cortex, the part of the brain that ordinarily receives signals from the ears.30 When he then probed the auditory cortex with electrodes, he found that it acted in many ways like the visual cortex. Locations in the visual field were laid out like a map, and individual neurons responded to lines and stripes at a particular orientation and direction of movement, similar to the neurons in an ordinary visual cortex. The ferrets could even use their rewired brains to move toward objects that were detectable by sight alone. The input to the sensory cortex must help to organize it: visual input makes the auditory cortex work something like the visual cortex.

  What do these discoveries mean? Do they show that the brain is “able to be shaped, molded, modeled, or sculpted,” as the dictionary definition of plastic would suggest? In the rest of this chapter I will show you that the answer is no.31 Discoveries of how the brain changes with experience do not show that learning is more powerful than we thought, that the brain can be dramatically reshaped by its input, or that the genes do not shape the brain. Indeed, demonstrations of the plasticity of the brain are less radical than they first appear: the supposedly plastic regions of cortex are doing pretty much the same thing they would have been doing if they had never been altered. And the most recent discoveries on brain development have refuted the idea that the brain is largely plastic. Let me go over these points in turn.

  THE FACT THAT the brain changes when we learn is not, as some have claimed, a radical discovery with profound implications for nature and nurture or human potential. Dmitri Karamazov could have deduced it in his nineteenth-century prison cell as he mulled over the fact that thinking comes from quivering nerve tails rather than an immaterial soul. If thought and action are products of the physical activity of the brain, and if thought and action can be affected by experience, then experience has to leave a trace in the physical structure of the brain.

  So there is no scientific question as to whether experience, learning, and practice affect the brain; they surely do if we are even vaguely on the right track. It is not surprising that people who can play the violin have different brains from those who cannot, or that masters of sign language or of Braille have different brains from people who speak and read. Your brain changes when you are introduced to a new person, when you hear a bit of gossip, when you watch the Oscars, when you polish your golf stroke—in short, whenever an experience leaves a trace in the mind. The only question is how learning affects the brain. Are memories stored in protein sequences, in new neurons or synapses, or in changes in the strength of existing synapses? When someone learns a new skill, is it stored only in organs dedicated to learning skills (like the cerebellum and the basal ganglia), or does it also adjust the cortex? Does an increase in dexterity depend on using more square centimeters of cortex or on using a greater concentration of synapses in the same number of square centimeters? These are important scientific problems, but they say nothing about whether people can learn, or how much. We already knew trained violinists play better than beginners or we would never have put their heads in the scanner to begin with. Neural plasticity is just another name for learning and development, described at a different level of analysis.

  All this should be obvious, but nowadays any banality about learning can be dressed up in neurospeak and treated like a great revelation of science. According to a New York Times headline, “Talk therapy, a psychiatrist maintains, can alter the structure of the patient’s brain.”32 I should hope so, or else the psychiatrist would be defrauding her clients. “Environmental manipulation can change the way [a child’s] brain develops,” the pediatric neurologist Harry Chugani told the Boston Globe. “ A child surrounded by aggression, violence, or inadequate stimulation will reflect these connections in the brain and behavior.”33 Well, yes; if the environment affects the child at all, it would do so by changing connections in the brain. A special issue of the journal Educational Technology and Society was intended “to examine the position that learning takes place in the brain of the learner, and that pedagogies and technologies should be designed and evaluated on the basis of the effect they have on student brains.” The guest editor (a biologist) did not say whether the alternative was that learning takes place in some other organ of the body like the pancreas or that it takes place in an immaterial soul. Even professors of neuroscience sometimes proclaim “discoveries” that would be news only to believers in a ghost in the machine: “Scientists have found that the brain is capable of altering its connections…. You have the ability to change the synaptic connections within the brain.”34 Good thing, because otherwise we would be permanent amnesiacs.

  This neuroscientist is an executive at a company that “uses brain research and technology to develop products intended to enhance human learning and performance,” one of many new companies with that aspiration. “The human being has unlimited creativity if focused and nurtured properly,” says a consultant who teaches clients to draw diagrams that “map their neural patterns.” “The older you get, the more connections and associations your brain should be making,” said a satisfied customer; “Therefore you should have more information stored in your brain. You just need to tap into it.”35 Many people have been convinced by the public pronouncements of neuroscience advocates—on the basis of no evidence whatsoever—that varying the route you take when driving home can stave off the effects of aging.36 And then there is the marketing genius who realized that blocks, balls, and other toys “provide visual and tactile stimulation” and “encourage movement and tracking,” part of a larger movement of “brain-based” childrearing and education that we will meet again in the chapter on children.37

  These companies tap into people’s belief in a ghost in the machine by implying that any form of learning that affects the brain (as opposed, presumably, to the kinds of learning that don’t affect the brain) is unexpectedly real or deep or powerful. But this is mistaken. All learning affects the brain. It is undeniably exciting when scientists make a discovery about how learning affects the brain, but that does not make the learning itself any more pervasive or profound.

  A SECOND MISINTERPRETATION of neural plasticity can be traced to the belief that there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses. The most highly publicized discoveries about cortical plasticity concern primary sensory cortex, the patches of gray matter that first receive signals from the senses (via the thalamus and other subcortical organs). Writers who use plasticity to prop up the Blank Slate assume that if primary sensory cortex is plastic, the rest of the brain must be even more plastic, because the mind is built out of sensory experience. For example, one neuroscientist was quoted as saying that Sur’s rewiring experiments “challenge the recent emphasis on the power of the genes” and “will push people back toward more consideration of environmental factors in creating normal brain organization.”38

  But if the brain is a complex organ with many parts, the moral does not follow. Primary sensory cortex is not the bedrock of the mind but a gadget, one of many in the brain, that happens to be specialized for certain kinds of signal processing in the first stages of sensory analysis. Let’s suppose that primary sensory cortex really were formless, getting all its structure from the input. Would that mean that the entire brain is formless and gets all of its structure from the input? Not at all. For one thing, even primary sensory cortex is just one part of a hu
ge, intricate system. To put things in perspective, here is a recent diagram of the wiring of the primate visual system:39

  Primary visual cortex is the box near the bottom labeled “VI.” It is one of at least fifty distinct brain areas devoted to visual processing, and they are interconnected in precise ways. (Despite the spaghetti-like appearance, not everything is connected to everything else. Only about a third of the logically possible connections between components are actually present in the brain.) Primary visual cortex, by itself, is not enough to see with. Indeed, it is so deeply buried in the visual system that Francis Crick and the neuroscientist Christof Koch have argued that we are not conscious of anything that goes on in it.40 What we see—familiar colored objects arranged in a scene or moving in particular ways—is a product of the entire contraption. So even if the innards of the VI box were completely specified by its input, we would have to explain the architecture of the rest of the visual system—the fifty boxes and their connections. I don’t mean to imply that the entire block diagram is genetically specified, but much of it almost certainly is.41

  And of course the visual system itself must be put into perspective, because it is just one part of the brain. The visual system dominates some half-dozen of the more than fifty major areas of the cortex that can be distinguished by their anatomy and connections. Many of the others underlie other functions such as language, reasoning, planning, and social skills. Though no one knows to what extent they are genetically prepared for their computational roles, there are hints that the genetic influence is substantial.42 The divisions are established in the womb, even if the cortex is cut off from sensory input during development. As development proceeds, different sets of genes are activated in different regions. The brain has a well-stocked toolbox of mechanisms to interconnect neurons, including molecules that attract or repel axons (the output fibers of neurons) to guide them to their targets, and molecules that glue them in place or ward them away. The number, size, and connectivity of cortical areas differ among species of mammals, and they differ between humans and other primates. This diversity is caused by genetic changes in the course of evolution that are beginning to be understood.43 Geneticists recently discovered, for example, that different sets of genes are activated in the developing brain of humans and the developing brains of chimpanzees.44

  The possibility that cortical areas are specialized for different tasks has been obscured by the fact that different parts of the cortex look similar under a microscope. But because the brain is an information-processing system, that means little. The microscopic pits on a CD look the same regardless of what is recorded on it, and the strings of characters in different books look the same to someone who cannot read them. In an information-carrying medium, the content lies in combinatorial patterns among the elements—in the case of the brain, the details of the microcircuitry—and not in their physical appearance.

  And the cortex itself is not the entire brain. Tucked beneath the cortex are other brain organs that drive important parts of human nature. They include the hippocampus, which consolidates memory and supports mental maps, the amygdala, which colors experience with certain emotions, and the hypothalamus, which originates sexual desire and other appetites. Many neuroscientists, even when they are impressed by the plasticity of the cortex, acknowledge that subcortical structures are far less plastic.45 This is not a minor cavil about anatomy. Some commentators have singled out evolutionary psychology as a casualty of neural plasticity, saying that the changeability of the cortex proves that the brain cannot support evolutionary specializations.46 But most proposals in evolutionary psychology are about drives like fear, sex, love, and aggression, which reside largely in subcortical circuitry. More generally, on anyone’s theory an innately shaped human ability would have to be implemented in a network of cortical and subcortical areas, not in a single patch of sensory cortex.

  ANOTHER BASIC POINT about the brain has been lost in the recent enthusiasm for plasticity. A discovery that neural activity is crucial for brain development does not show either that learning is crucial in shaping the brain or that genes fail to shape the brain.

  The study of neural development is often framed in terms of nature and nurture, but it is more fruitful to think of it as a problem in developmental biology—how a ball of identical cells differentiates into a functioning organ. Doing so stands the conventional assumptions of associationism on their head. Primary sensory cortex, rather than being the firmest part of the brain on top of which successive stories can only be even more plastic, may be the part of the brain that is most dependent on the input for proper development.

  In assembling a brain, a complete genetic blueprint is out of the question for two reasons. One is that a gene cannot anticipate every detail of the environment, including the environment consisting of the other genes in the genome. It has to specify an adaptive developmental program that ensures that the organism as a whole functions properly across variations in nutrition, other genes, growth rates over the lifespan, random perturbations, and the physical and social environment. And that requires feedback from the way the rest of the organism is developing.

  Take the development of the body. The genes that build a femur cannot specify the exact shape of the ball on top, because the ball has to articulate with the socket in the pelvis, which is shaped by other genes, nutrition, age, and chance. So the ball and the socket adjust their shapes as they rotate against each other while the baby kicks in the womb. (We know this because experimental animals that are paralyzed while they develop end up with grossly deformed joints.) Similarly, the genes shaping the lens of the growing eye cannot know how far back the retina is going to be or vice versa. So the brain of the baby is equipped with a feedback loop that uses signals about the sharpness of the image on the retina to slow down or speed up the physical growth of the eyeball. These are good examples of “plasticity,” but the metaphor of plastic material is misleading. The mechanisms are not designed to allow variable environments to shape variable organs. They do the opposite: they ensure that despite variable environments, a constant organ develops, one that is capable of doing its job.

  Like the body, the brain must use feedback circuits to shape itself into a working system. This is especially true in the sensory areas, which have to cope with growing sense organs. For that reason alone we would expect the activity of the brain to play a role in its own development, even if its end state, like those of the femur and the eyeball, is in some sense genetically specified. How this happens is still largely a mystery, but we know that patterns of neural stimulation can trigger the expression of a gene and that one gene can trigger many others.47 Since every brain cell contains a complete genetic program, the machinery exists, in principle, for neural activity to trigger the development of an innately organized neural circuitry in any of several different regions. If so, brain activity would not be sculpting the brain; it would merely be telling the genome where in the brain a certain neural circuit should go.

  So even an extreme innatist need not believe that the brain differentiates itself by the equivalent of GPS coordinates in the skull, following rules like “If you are between the left temple and the left ear, become a language circuit” (or a fear circuit, or a circuit for recognizing faces). A developmental program may be triggered in a part of the developing brain by some combination of the source of the stimulation, the firing pattern, the chemical environment, and other signals. The end result may be a faculty that is seated in different parts of the brain in different people. After all, the brain is the organ of computation, and the same computation can happen in different places as long as the pattern of information flow is the same. In your computer, a file or program may sit in different parts of memory or be fragmented across different sectors of the disk and work the same way in every case. It would not be surprising if the growing brain were at least that dynamic in allocating neural resources to computational demands.

  The other reason that brains can’t rely on a comple
te genetic blueprint is that the genome is a limited resource. Genes are constantly mutating over evolutionary time, and natural selection can weed out the bad ones only slowly. Most evolutionary biologists believe that natural selection can support a genome that is only so big. That means that the genetic plans for a complex brain have to be compressed to the minimum size that is consistent with the brain’s developing and working properly. Though more than half the genome is put to work primarily or exclusively in the brain, that is not nearly enough to specify the brain’s connection diagram.

  The development program for the brain has to be resourceful. Take the problem of getting every axon (output fiber) from the eyes to connect to the brain in an orderly way. Neighboring points in the eye must connect to neighboring points in the brain (an arrangement called topographic mapping), and corresponding locations in the two eyes should end up near each other in the brain but not get mixed up with each other.

  Rather than give each axon a genetically specified address, the mammalian brain may organize the connections in a cleverer way. In her studies of brain development in cats, the neuroscientist Carla Shatz has discovered that waves of activity flow across each retina, first in one direction, then in some other direction.48 That means that neurons that are next to each other in a single eye will tend to fire at around the same time, because they are often hit by the same wavefront. But axons from different eyes, or from distant locations in the same eye, will be uncorrelated in their activity, because a wave passing over one will miss the other. Just as you could reconstruct the seating diagram of a stadium if the fans were doing “the wave” along various directions and you knew only who stood up at which time (since people who stood up at the same time had to be seated near each other), the brain could reconstruct the spatial layout of the two eyes by listening for which sets of input neurons were firing at the same time. One of the rules of learning in neural networks, first outlined by the psychologist D. O. Hebb, is that “neurons that fire together wire together; neurons out of synch fail to link.” As the waves crisscross the retina for days and weeks, the visual thalamus downstream could organize itself into layers, each from a single eye, with adjacent neurons responding to adjacent parts of the retina. The cortex, in theory, could organize its wiring in a similar way.49