A recent New York Times headline proclaimed that: “In Pain and Joy Of Envy, the Brain May Play a Role.”
May play a role?! Where else does The New York Times think envy resides? In our hateful hearts? Our covetous colons? Our jealous jejunums?
That The New York Times could doubt the centrality of the brain in human emotions shows just how far we behavioral scientists need to come to get people to understand what we do. How can we expect funders like the NIH and the NSF to invest in behavioral science when even The New York Times is unclear about whether feelings like envy reside in the brain?
This is all Descartes’ fault, of course. He persuaded modern thinkers that the mind is separate from the brain. (Although he did think that the pineal gland could potentially be the seat of the soul, if I remember my college philosophy correctly.)
Fortunately, new technologies like fMRI are slowly overcoming Descartes’ outsized influence. Ask someone to think envious thoughts, and the scanner shows which part of the brain is working. (The feeling of envy, it turns out, resides within prominent pain centers.)
To behavioral scientists, the importance of fMRI research is to show where in the brain specific emotions, thoughts and behavioral pathways reside.
To lay people, the importance is to show that such things reside…anywhere in the brain.
A colleague of mine, a behavioral scientist at the University of Michigan, recently presented the results of our Center’s research to a bunch of NIH muckety-mucks, in hopes of persuading them to continue funding our kind of research. He concluded his talk with an fMRI study, and blew away the molecular biologists who made up the majority of the audience. One of these scientists eagerly sought him out after the talk to tell him that this was the first time he believed behavioral science research had any value.
To those of you who question the value of brain imaging research, I remind you-Descartes’ legacy has not been fully vanquished. For our research to influence policy and practice, we must build our “street cred” by reminding people that our thoughts and feelings really do reside in the brain.
To read more of my blogs, and to learn more about my new book, Free Market Madness, check out my personal website: https://www.peterubel.com
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Stimulating Physical Activity by Building Healthy Neighborhoods
Hiking in Switzerland several years ago, I came across a trail that seemed to dead-end at a farmer’s gate. I looked around for a way to avoid the property, but there was none. Instead, the trail continued through the middle of the farm. I walked through the gate, side-stepping some livestock in the way (and side-stepping even more livestock manure!), until I exited the farm through another gate, back out to public property.
What a wonderfully un-American attitude towards property rights. And towards walking. The Swiss have created a culture of walking. I wonder if we can use some of the Obama stimulus money to begin transforming our culture in similar ways.
Compare my experience in Switzerland to the typical visit to the suburbs. No sidewalks on the street. No grocery stores or shops within walking distance. That doesn’t promote a culture of physical activity.
The desire to walk, or to exercise in any manner, is not just a function of individual choice. It is also a desire that is strongly influenced by one’s surroundings. A study in Salt Lake City recently showed that people who live in older neighborhoods are thinner than those who live in newer neighborhoods, a thinness partly attributable to their greater tendency to walk.
We Americans are unlikely to cede property rights to local fitness enthusiasts any time soon. We won’t be opening up our gates to walkers and bikers either.
But because of the Obama stimulus bill, many local governments are looking for shovel-ready construction projects. I hope that in doing so, they look for ways to design neighborhoods that promote physical activity.
The free market, left to its own devices, doesn’t necessarily consider what kind of neighborhoods promote our best interests. We are our neighborhoods. Our culture begins at home.
With intelligent regulations, such as thoughtful neighborhood zoning, we can influence our ability and willingness to engage in healthy activities like biking and walking. We owe it to ourselves to create healthy neighborhoods.
To read more of my blogs, and to learn more about my new book, Free Market Madness, check out my personal website: https://www.peterubel.com
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Heroin and Happiness
Quick: What do you get when you mix a Nobel Prize winner with a MacArthur genius?
You get this: “The claims of some heavy drinkers and smokers that they want to but cannot end their addictions seem to us no different from the claims of single persons that they want to but are unable to marry or from the claims of disorganized persons that they want to become better organized.”
Yes, Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy, in the rich tradition of University of Chicago Economics, believe that much-if not most-of human behavior can best be understood by assuming that people are behaving rationally, to maximize their best interests.
Unemployment? A rational choice according to another Chicagoan, Nobel winner Robert Lucas: “To explain why people allocate to unemployment, we need to [know] why they prefer it to all other activities.”
Addiction? Also a rational choice. Thus, even though many addicts are miserable, this misery doesn’t mean that their use of heroin or crack is irrational. As Becker and Murphy put it: “People often become addicted precisely because they are unhappy. However, they would be even more unhappy if they were prevented from consuming the addictive goods.”
Why should any of us care that a particular school of economic thought considers human beings to be largely rational? Because this same school of thought has, by no coincidence, been home to some of the most prominent libertarian thinkers of the last century-people like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, men whose ideas have influenced politicians around the world. Convinced that people are largely rational, these influential thinkers have argues that we should severely limit the scope of government and rely on the power of free markets to maximize people’s best interests. After all, if people are largely rational-if they know what’s in their best interests and possess the willpower to act upon this knowledge-then the best any government can do is to step aside, and let them pursue the good life.
As a physician trained in behavioral economics, I cannot reconcile either my clinical experience or my research findings with a view of addiction as being completely rational. True: if the price of heroin rises dramatically, people will use less heroin. Some people won’t take up the habit. Some hard core addicts will try to cut down their use, or will switch to other drugs. In other words, there is some rationality to the behavior of drug addicts. But as readers of this website no doubt recognize, there is also some desperately irrational behavior contributing to the actions of drug addicts.
Why does this matter? Simple. The more convinced we are that human beings behave in ways that promote their own best interests, the less we should look to the government to protect our interests. If crack makes people happy, we should allow people to use it. No rules, no regulations.
If people want to take out mortgages that are beyond their means, and if lenders want to give them such mortgages, the government should step out of the way and let the market place punish anyone that makes bad decisions.
If a twenty-year-old doesn’t want to buy health or disability insurance, and experiences a crippling automobile accident, we should step aside and let her experience the consequences of her decision.
But if you, like me, believe that human nature is a mixture of rational and irrational forces-if you recognize that we consumers are often prey to manipulation by people who know our weaknesses-then you will be open to exploring ways the government can help us make wiser decisions.
Trust me; I’m not talking about big brother. I’m ecstatic to have grown up in the USA rather than the USSR (okay, my wife disputes that “grown up” part!).
But cigarette taxes? Free market enthusiasts think they are a bad idea. Tax dollars to help drug addicts go through rehab? Market evangelists don’t to approve of that either, especially if, as Becker and Murphy say, crack is making these people happier. Government dollars spent on anti-obesity programs? Why do that when, according to some Chicago-based scholars, the term “overweight” is a misnomer, since people have rationally decided how much they want to eat and exercise. In this world of perfect rationality, no one is overweight, because everybody has achieved their ideal body mass.
We need to be very careful about adding any layer of government bureaucracy to our lives. But we should be equally careful about stripping away government regulations, when such regulations promote our best interests. Our policies need to recognize that we humans aren’t always as rational and strong willed as we’d like to be.
To learn more about my new book, Free Market Madness, check out my website: https://www.peterubel.com/.
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