Mental Penguins by Ivelin Sardamov

Author:Ivelin Sardamov [Sardamov, Ivelin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78535-343-7
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2017-05-26T04:00:00+00:00

12

…and Existential Disconnect

As I was fleshing out this dispiriting diagnosis, I was beginning to worry that I had dug myself into a conceptual hole from which I could hardly climb out. To cheer myself up, I kept thinking about the minority of students in my classes who were still performing at a seemingly high cognitive level. How could their mental sharpness be explained? Were their peculiar aptitudes the result merely of superior natural ability which no amount of overstimulation could short-circuit? But what would then account for some anomalies in their thinking, particularly the more pragmatic and utilitarian focus they often displayed—to the point of expressing incredulity that an intelligent person could still opt for a non-utilitarian decision in moral dilemmas like the famous “trolley problem”? Or for the grammatical and syntactic problems still marking much of their writing? Moreover, there was also the famous “Flynn effect” to contend with—the alleged gains in “intelligence” of each successive generation (as indicated by standard IQ tests, if by little else).1

A plausible answer to all these questions came in the form of another epiphany. It was triggered by a brief report introducing yet another neuroimaging study which arrived in my inbox in October 2012.2 I could have glossed over it and tried to file it away mentally or electronically. But as I was reading the summary of the experiments directed by neuroscientist Anthony Jack and some of his subsequent comments, the pieces of my mental puzzle started to rearrange into a new “neuroepistemo-logical” framework. The latter could hopefully explain the cognitive divergence I observed as well as the ever increasing predominance of “positivism” (or “scientism”) in the social sciences and policy research.3

Jack’s experiments fell within a line of research that had shifted focus from the activation of different brain centers to that of widely distributed networks and their interactions. He focused on the interactions between two major networks. One was the “default mode network” which had already attracted growing attention. It had received its name from studies in the 1990s which indicated that it was activated “by default”—during periods of rest, when experimental “subjects” were lying in the gut of the scanning machine with no cognitive tasks to perform. On the basis of such observations, the initial consensus among researchers was that this was a “task-negative” network involved mostly in internal neural processing. Its spontaneous, rather high activation level seemed to underlie the generation of overall self-awareness as it integrated signals coming from subcortical emotional centers, internal organs (“interoception”) or parts of the body (somatosensory and sensorimotor representations). At the conscious level, the default mode network thus appeared to be involved primarily in self-referential thinking and biographical recollections or projections.

The other network in the focus of Jack’s study is commonly designated by an even more technical term—the “task-positive network.” In previous experiments, it had been consistently activated when participants were asked to perform demanding mental tasks. It was therefore thought to be involved mostly in cognitive control, the logical processing of information, planning, and decision-making.

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