Daniel s levine where is utopia in the brain

Diverse groups within the science fiction community are represented, from novelists and film makers to comic book and television writers. Important and influential names discussed include:. This outstanding reference guide charts the rich and varied landscape of science fiction and includes helpful and up-to-date lists of further reading at the end of each entry. Environmental Utopian Architecture!

A publication of the Society for Utopian Studies, Author: Augustine Thompson, O. Publication Info: Penn State Press, Authors: M. Includes separate historical surveys of key subgenres including time-travel narratives, post-apocalyptic and post-disaster narratives and works of utopian and dystopian science fiction Each subgenre survey includes an extensive list of relevant critical readings, recommended novels in the subgenre, and recommended films relevant to the subgenre Features entries on a number of key science fiction authors and extensive discussion of major science fiction novels or sequences Writers and works include Isaac Asimov; Margaret Atwood; George Orwell; Ursula K.

Authors: Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts and Sherryl Vint. That result is unsettling for those interested in the biological roots of partnership interactions, but it is consistent with the selectivity of pair bonding and of friendship, where oxytocin may also be involved. Perhaps an ability to empathize with people who are very different from us requires not only oxytocin binding to emotional reward areas but also the cognitive element of seeing people of a different nationality or ethnicity as analogous to us.

This cognitive aspect of empathy is likely to require the activity of regions of the prefrontal cortex which process emotional and social information. For example, oxytocin administration is related to decreases in blood pressure and in levels of cortisol.

More generally, oxytocin administration reduces activity in the sympathetic part of the autonomic nervous system, the part that is activated in the fight-or-flight response. These researchers gave adult men stressful tasks public speaking and mental arithmetic ; before the test the participants were either given intranasal oxytocin, asked to bring their best friend for social support , both, or neither.

Both oxytocin and social support substantially reduced the amount of cortisol induced by the tasks, and oxytocin enhanced the anti-stress effect of social support. When people in universities and granting agencies speak about the social benefits of increasing our understanding of the brain, they speak primarily of the role of neuroscience in helping to treat neurological and mental disorders. All of these applications are vitally needed and welcome. Yet there has been less interest in the equally important issue of what neuroscience tells us about how to structure society, both at the formal level of social and economic policies and the informal level of social customs and mores.

Now we have enough emergent knowledge about the brain that we can make arguments based on neuroscience for the beneficial effects of partnership interactions and the harmful effects of dominator interactions on society as a whole, as well as on each of its members. Before the late s, the study of human decision making was dominated by a theory, derived from economics , which assumed people were rational, self-interested actors.

That outlook was challenged by the findings of several psychologists, most notably Daniel Kahneman who subsequently won the economics Nobel Prize in and Amos Tversky who probably would have shared that prize had he been alive then. Moreover, they found that both preferences and numerical judgments were often biased by rules of thumb heuristics that arose naturally from experience but lacked logical foundation e.

Indeed, the heuristics and framing effects they describe do sometimes lead to calculation errors as well as sub-optimal choices. Our heuristics and framing effects are behavioral outgrowths of the neural plasticity discussed in the previous section of this paper. Hence the results of decision psychology experiments suggest that if people are currently making choices that are harmful to society or to themselves, those choices do not necessarily represent their real or permanent preferences.

This means that a different set of events could lead the same person to make more constructive choices on another occasion. Cognitive psychologists Valerie Reyna and Charles Brainerd trace human reliance on heuristics to our capacity for mentally simplifying and selecting from the information we receive rather than processing every detail of the information. In a long series of articles e. Fuzzy trace theory posits the coexistence and interaction of two distinct systems for encoding information: literal or verbatim encoding, and intuitive or gist encoding.

The results of Reyna, Brainerd, and their colleagues suggest that as we grow into adulthood we gradually rely more on gist processing than we did as children, and less on verbatim processing.

This development is partly due to the accumulation of life experience and partly to an increase in time pressure. Reyna and Brainerd argue that gist processing, despite being less precise, is actually a more advanced form of thinking than verbatim processing. I agree partially, but also believe that it is important to consider what gists we encode — that is, which attributes of information we select for greater attention. Gist processing can lead us to focus on those aspects of the information we receive that are most relevant to our tasks.

But gist processing can also lead us to focus on aspects that are irrelevant but feed previously established emotional prejudices, such as dealing with people on the basis of superficial attributes like skin color or facial expression. At the same time, knowing that adults use gist encoding can help us understand each other better.

Applying this principle can help all of us to curb our initial reactions when they are likely to lead to prejudices or destructive confrontations.

For example, a poor person who chooses public assistance over a low-paying dead-end job may not be irresponsible or lazy, but may just be choosing the best alternative in a bad situation. While the rational self-interest model is still prevalent in economics, there is an increasingly influential school of behavioral economists who are recognizing that individual choices are not based on fixed preferences but are malleable by circumstances see, e. Consequently, it is incumbent on those who have the power to shape circumstances, whether in government, businesses, schools, or anywhere else, to try to make changes that can help people make decisions that are constructive both for themselves and for society.

Laissez-faire economists and other libertarians believe that a free market will automatically make people decide to do the things that most benefit themselves, including decisions that are beneficial to society such as conserving energy if those things are important to the deciders.

But Thaler and Sunstein argue that beneficial choices are not automatic, particularly choices that people make infrequently such as buying cars or houses or do not get immediate feedback about such as helping or harming the environment. The success of nudges gives support to arguments that people should not be blamed for their unfavorable circumstances, even if their own decisions sometimes perpetuate their conditions.

Under scarcity, their attention becomes more focused on immediate use of the scarce resource, to the neglect other factors that could be important in the long term. These researchers applied the same principle to other types of scarcity, such as scarcity of time for very busy people.

Bertrand, Mullainathan, and Shafir applied the theory of decision making under scarcity to explanations of other financial decisions by the poor, such as not setting up bank accounts therefore becoming more vulnerable to predatory lenders and underutilizing government assistance programs. Demonization of the more disadvantaged members of society, and of those who are conscientiously working to help the disadvantaged, is not confined to welfare programs.

It also occurs in the realm of public education. Some studies of standardized tests given over several years to New York City area grade school students with a range of family incomes, suggest that blaming public schools and teachers is wrong Gladwell, The results of these studies show that the gap in school performance between low- and high-income children does not widen, or even narrows, during the school year. But immediately after each summer the gap widens in favor of the high-income children.

In short, the portrait of human decision makers that has emerged from the cognitive psychology of the last fifty years is of complex individuals whose preferences violate any strict logical rules of consistency. This means that each of us can make either beneficial or harmful choices, and can be induced to make either by interpersonal and societal circumstances.

While this view of human nature is troubling at times, it is consistent with arguments for a partnership society because it suggests that societal incentives can shape individual behavior. Liberals, he suggests, can provide those nudges by avoiding labels for their political opponents and showing concern for the issue of meaning.

As the relationship between brain and behavior has become better understood, it is natural that this development has been accompanied by a growth in mathematical and computational models see Levine, , for review. Modeling has helped build unified theories out of heterogeneous experimental data from multiple sources. The sources of the data include electrical recordings from single neurons in the brains of behaving animals; functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI in humans that shows which brain areas are active while they are engaged in tasks; electroencephalographic EEG recording of large regions of the human brain; studies of animals with injury to particular brain regions; clinical studies of patients with specific brain damage or specific psychiatric disorders; and behavioral studies of cognitive functions such as perception, attention, memory encoding, language, decision making, and planning.

Often this means that the brain must resolve paradoxes between two or more complementary requirements that are in seeming opposition Grossberg, His examples of complementary brain processes included learning about new events while retaining old memories; processing both the cognitive and the motivational significance of incoming stimuli; and seeing both boundaries and surfaces of visual objects.

Levine a gave some other examples of complementary brain processes within the domain of emotions. Mathematics is a powerful tool for making sense of a confusing set of influences and for overcoming conventional wisdom to get to the truth.

As Loye and Eisler pointed out, dynamical system approaches to the social sciences help to illuminate how a complex social system can make radical changes in direction, such as between partnership and dominator tendencies, in response to relatively small outside perturbing forces. Because complex dynamical systems are nonlinear , that is, do not respond to outside influences in a strict proportional manner, they can have multiple equilibrium states, and pushing the system away from one of the equilibria can sometimes lead them toward a different equilibrium.

The study of dynamical systems in computational neural networks representing individual brains is well developed Levine, These networks have modeled processes such as conditioning, working memory, vision, motor control, and decision making.

One of the challenges for the future will be to fit models of the individual brain into larger models representing social systems, up to the social system of the entire world. A few computational models have emerged of interactions among multiple intelligent agents see, e. Extension of some current neural network models to multi-person interactions is likely to generate the type of breakthroughs in the social sciences that Loye and Eisler proposed. The consensus among both behavioral biologists and science writers is that virtually all human behavioral tendencies are influenced by both environment and genes Ridley, ; Shermer, On the other hand, ignoring nature led to a neglect of genuine individual differences.

Moreover, scientific results argue that even those individuals who are genetically most oriented toward a dominator outlook are subject to environmental influences in a partnership direction. Then at 45 days these researchers brought the high-aggression mice out of isolation and placed them in groups. In their groups, many of those mice became less aggressive and more cooperative.

The studies of stress hormones and oxytocin discussed in the previous section suggest that there should be profound differences between the brains of those living in a dominator-oriented and those living in a partnership-oriented society.

There have not been many studies that compared brain function and structure across different societies. Yet the results discussed in the previous section argue for the fruitfulness of studying differences in brain processes between people in societies identified as relatively nurturing and egalitarian and people of comparable age, gender, income, and occupational level in societies that are more authoritarian. Such studies will require a wide range of techniques including fMRI to measure activities of brain regions and other methods for measuring variable functional connectivities between brain regions.

The data on maternal nurturance and the brain Luby et al. Taylor concluded that one aspect of societal nurturing is the relative fluidity of social hierarchies, which includes relatively small income gaps. She cited statistics showing that life expectancies are longer in societies with smaller income gaps. For example, at the time she wrote, Cuba had a longer life expectancy than Iraq which had about the same per capita income but larger gaps, and Costa Rica which had narrow income gaps had a longer life expectancy than the United States despite a smaller per capita income.

Levine further explored the optimal organization of society by comparing three democratically organized utopian societies from s and s fiction Callenbach, Huxley, ; Piercy, with real modern societies. He argued that these fictional societies had several features in common that were different from most of the modern world, and that those features promoted optimal brain functioning.

Levine found that the features that supported those pillars included. As for independence-oriented child-rearing, Levine noted that the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most involved in planning and in the moral sense, is developing all through adolescence Thompson et al. The results on stress and early influences suggest that frontal development is likely to be best promoted by nurturance and encouragement rather than hierarchical control.

Fluid families mean that children are exposed to multiple adult influences. Moreover, honest assessment rather than concealment of the emotional impacts of decisions on people leads to more accurate assessment of the ultimate consequences of those decisions.

An emphasis on mediation rather than winning or losing in conflict resolution, Levine argued, is likely to reduce the negative effects of excessive cortisol and promote positive affect which is beneficial for creativity.

Strong female influences increase the likelihood of tend-and-befriend responses to conflicts. In general, tend-and-befriend is most beneficial for problem solving except in the most dangerous situations which may require fight-or-flight responses Taylor et al. The arguments for democracy of creativity are not yet as well supported as the others by neuroscience data, because they are on the social rather than the individual level.

These results suggests that society functions better if it promotes creativity on the part of all people involved in a process, from CEOs and presidents to clerks and waiters.

This article calls for more openness and more democracy in our social institutions, which sounds like a no-brainer no pun intended. But people in responsible leadership positions in any institution, no matter how well-intentioned they may be, often carry over unconscious habits of thinking from dominator interactions which have been prevalent for so long. Therefore it takes a conscious struggle to start new ways of thinking and acting in any aspect of life, whether religion , politics, psychotherapy, family life, education, or science, for example.

A few of these approaches are summarized next. A partnership approach to religion falls between, and bridges, the two traditional extremes of authoritarian theism and secular humanism. In most cultures there has been a profound difference between the inner experience of religion by mystics and the religious feeling of average people who observe the mysteries from a distance. That is, people in general would reach a direct appreciation of our place in the cosmos and its purpose.

It would involve a long-term view of things, a perspective that transcends current needs and stresses to see larger plans. This kind of religion encourages both people and institutions to be more patient and less hurried than they are in the present. Hence it values contemplation and visionary thinking as well as moral action. Most important, the higher power is not separate from us but rather includes and is larger than all of us.

The Protagonist in a DystopiaOften feels trapped and is struggling to escape;Questions the existing social and political systems;Believes or feels that something is terribly wrong with the society;Helps the audience recognize the negative aspects of the dystopian world. Log in Get Started. If you can't read please download the document. Download for free Report this document. Embed Size px x x x x An ideal society Based on notions of equality, social harmony, economic prosperity, and political stability.