IDEAS: Looking for That Brain Wave Called Love

A runaway train is about to hit five men, and the only way to save them is
by pushing the person next to you onto the tracks in front of it. Should
you do it?

Most people say no. To explain that response, philosophers have turned to
Aristotle and Kant. Joshua Greene, a graduate student in philosophy at
Princeton, turned to neuroscience instead: he took brain scans.

Looking for moral reasoning in an M.R.I. machine? It sounds unlikely, but
Mr. Greene isn't the only humanist in a brain lab these days.

Lured by such sophisticated new technologies as functional magnetic
resonance imaging, which essentially takes snapshots of the brain in
action, scholars in philosophy, music and even literature are devising
their own neuroscience experiments.

At Rutgers, an anthropologist is investigating the neural circuitry of
romantic love by putting besotted volunteers in a brain scanner and asking
them to stare at a photograph of their beloved.

At Harvard, a business professor is comparing brain responses to different
advertising images, while an English professor is preparing to look at what
happens in a reader's brain when she encounters a metaphor in Proust.

At Rice University in Houston, a music professor is planning to study the
cognitive basis for sight-reading.

Even perceptions of racial difference have been examined in an M.R.I. machine.

In academic disciplines where words have traditionally been the weapon of
choice, the hope is that brain-scan studies might do what written polemics
cannot: provide empirical support for pet theories and aesthetic judgments
or help put to rest much-debated questions.

"If there can be verification in the lab of what readers over generations
have reported to be true, we might be able to learn something about the
congitive basis for literary visualization techniques," said Elaine Scarry,
the Harvard professor who is planning to study imagery in Proust and other
writers. "Do novelists activate the same brain regions as daydreaming does?
We just don't know."

She and a psychology professor want to examine how novelists can create
vivid images of solid objects in the reader's mind. One way might be to
compare the brain activity that occurs when people are asked first simply
to imagine a solid wall and then to contemplate, say, Proust's description
of the cartoon figures from his magic lantern dancing over the wall of his
bedroom at Combray.

Using brain scans is so new to the humanities that many of the studies are
still in the drawing board stage. And for that reason, some experts worry
that the eight-year-old imaging technology, which generates detailed
pictures of blood flow in the brain, might not be ready to take on the sort
of complex problems that the humanities and social sciences study. While
few think that brain scans are just a gimmick — 21st-century science's
phrenology — some are urging greater caution in how the technology is used.

"There's been a real rush to ask big questions and get sexy results," said
Patricia Churchland, a philosopher of neuroscience at the University of
California at San Diego.

"When you're looking at a brain scan, you're really just looking at changes
in blood flow. The presumption is that changes in blood flow correlate with
higher neuronal activity. But how do we know what it means when the brain
lights up in one area? It doesn't mean the brain has a module dedicated to
that particular task."

That hasn't stopped people from trying to map the neural pathways of such
intangibles as ethics and love. Helen Fisher, the Rutgers anthropologist,
believes that romantic love has three phases, lust, attraction and
attachment, each one with a distinct pattern of brain activity.

Initially she had a difficult time finding a collaborator in neuroscience
to help her test her theory. "It's amazing how scientists don't regard
depression or anxiety as a mystery but want to relegate romantic love to
the realm of the supernatural," she said.

When she first approached Lucy Brown, a brain scientist at the Albert
Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University, Ms. Brown was skeptical
of the project. "It seemed rather frivolous," said Ms. Brown, whose own
research focuses on Huntington's disease and the basal ganglia. "I thought
it was too big a question to ask right now of neuroscience."

Ultimately, Ms. Brown agreed to join Ms. Fisher's team. They are now in the
process of investigating love's attraction phase by running infatuated
subjects through an M.R.I. machine.

While Ms. Brown "got a lot of flak" from her colleagues, neuroscientists at
University College in London have been more enthusiastic, recently
completing a study similar to Ms. Fisher's. They asked 17 subjects whom
they deemed "truly and madly" in love to stare at photographs of their
beloveds as well as photographs of three friends of a similar age and sex,
using an M.R.I. to record the subjects' brain activity.

When they stared at their beloveds, their brain activity was mostly
restricted to the medial insula, the anterior cingulate cortex and the
striatum — regions also associated with positive emotional states like
sexual arousal and the euphoria induced by cocaine.

"We have for the first time, localized the areas of the human brain
involved in evoking one of the most overwhelming of all affective states,
that of romantic love," the researchers wrote in a summary of their
findings. They plan to present their work next month at the Society for
Neuroscience's annual meeting in New Orleans.

Consciousness — philosophy's signature subject — has also become popular
among researchers trying to distinguish the way people say they experience
the world from the way their brains automatically process what's going on
around them.

"`Consciousness' used to be the bad `C' word," says Frank Tong, a Princeton
neuroscientist who studies the visual cortex. "It was too soft, not
scientific. Now you can write a grant application with the word
`consciousness' in it and actually get funding."

This is not the first time a new technology has captivated scholars. In the
late 1970's, points out Anne Harrington, a historian of science at Harvard
and co-director of the university's seven-year-old Mind, Brain, Behavior
Interfaculty Initiative, researchers were convinced that the computer would
revolutionize the conception of the human mind.

Descriptions of the brain as a data- processing center whose workings could
be depicted in flow charts filled scientific journals. "It took 15 years to
extricate ourselves from that model," she said. "The latest fascination is
with seeing things light up in the brain."

Still, Ms. Harrington is excited about the potential value of brain scan
research. "Neuroscience has fantastic tools and methodology; I'm not sure
we're using them to ask the most exciting questions. By asking appropriate
questions, humanists can help brain scientists take these tools out for a
real test drive."

Two years ago Princeton threw its institutional weight behind brain
research in the humanities by becoming the first nonmedical academic
institution to finance an M.R.I. facility. To get the $2 million, 10-ton
scanner into the basement of Green Hall, a 1927 neo- gothic pile that
houses the university's new Center for the Study of Brain, Mind and
Behavior, engineers had to lower it through a huge hole in the building's
courtyard.

"I wouldn't have come to Princeton if they hadn't promised me a scanner and
with it the opportunity to collaborate with people in the humanities and
social sciences in addition to neuroscientists," said Jonathan Cohen, who
left a post in psychology at Carnegie Mellon to direct the center.

When Mr. Greene, the philosophy graduate student, walked into his office
looking for help with his moral reasoning problem, Mr. Cohen was thrilled:
"I thought: `This is great. This project is why I came here.' "

Mr. Greene wondered whether an M.R.I. study might shed some light on a
conundrum known in philosophical circles as the Trolley Problem. In
essence, the Trolley Problem asks why most people find it morally
acceptable to flip a switch that would sacrifice one life in order to save
five others, but morally unacceptable to push a person to his death in
order to save those same five lives.

The challenge for philosophers has been to come up with a single moral
principle that justifies both responses. Perhaps one reason they have been
unsuccessful, Mr. Greene speculated, is that as far as the brain is
concerned, the two dilemmas are not that similar after all. In other words,
what is lumped together under the term "moral reasoning" might turn out to
be a set of distinct mental processes involving, in some cases, the brain
regions associated with abstract reasoning and, in others, those associated
with emotional responses. A brain scan study, he reasoned, might be a good
way to test this theory.

With the help of Mr. Cohen and another psychology professor, John Darley,
Mr. Greene administered brain scans to nine undergraduates. For two hours
each student lay on his or her back in the M.R.I. machine staring at a
small mirror. One by one, a series of 60 different moral dilemmas,
including some modeled on the Trolley Problem, were projected onto the
mirror. After reading each, the student responded by pressing either a
"yes" or "no" button on a handset attached to a wrist. The prediction was
that different areas of the students' brains would light up depending on
what kind of dilemma they were asked to solve.

Mr. Greene said he could not discuss the findings because the study was
under consideration for publication in a major scientific journal, but he
described them as promising.

"When a technology comes along that allows us not just to ask questions but
to answer them, it's crazy not to use it," Mr. Greene said. "If I'd known
more about brain imagining, I might have gone into neuroscience instead of
philosophy."


By EMILY EAKIN
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/28/arts/28BRAI.html

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