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September 5, 2000 By DAVID BERREBY
After a decade of mapping brains in tasks like recalling numbers,
perceiving facial expressions and using verbs, neuroscientists have recently
homed in on a much more controversial subject: the act of categorizing other
human beings.
In recently published papers, two separate teams of brain scanners joined
by social psychologists describe how one particular part of the brain becomes
more active when people look at members of a different race.
Scientists involved in both studies emphasize that the work does not mean
racial differences are more scientifically real than, say, ghosts or
leprechauns -- both of which would also produce measurable effects in the
brains of people who were scared of them.
Nor are they surprised that looking at people from a different race causes
changes in the brain.
"Everything causes changes in the brain," said Prof. Elizabeth A. Phelps, a
neuroscientist at New York University.
But the two papers are the first published efforts to map exactly what
happens in the brain when it perceives a racial difference. It is the first
time neuroscientists have published papers on the kinds of messy questions
many prefer to leave to social psychologists and sociologists.
"What really stands out in this work is the union of social psychology,
neuroimaging and psychiatry," said Allen J. Hart, a social psychologist at
Amherst College who worked on one of the studies, which appeared in the Aug.3
edition of the journal NeuroReport. "Social psychologists have been heading
toward the study of emotions and group perception, and the imagers have been
heading towards mapping emotion. And now we've met."
Both teams -- Professor Hart and his colleagues, who used a magnetic
resonance imaging scanner at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and a
Yale-N.Y.U. collaboration that used Yale's M.R.I. scanner -- focused on the
amygdala, a well-studied cluster of nerves that lies deep inside each brain
hemisphere. Because of its involvement in strong emotions, memory and learning
rules, the amygdala is a promising target for research on how perceptions of
race could affect the brain, the researchers said.
Work on animals and people suggests the amygdala behaves like a spotlight,
calling attention to matters that are new, exciting and important to know more
about.
"It's a learning area," said Paul Whalen, a neurobiologist at the
University of Wisconsin who was the amygdala expert on the Massachusetts
General study.
"It really seems to be about noticing," said Professor Phelps, a co-author
of the Yale-N.Y.U. paper. "It's involved in grasping that something is
emotionally significant."
In the Mass General experiment, scientists placed four men (two who
described themselves as black and two who said they were white) and four women
(divided the same way by race) in an M.R.I. scanner. As they lay in the
tunnel, with the machine banging and clanging as its powerful magnets shifted
alignment, the volunteers saw photographs of black and white faces flash by.
An M.R.I. device feeds magnetic signals into a computer, which turns them
into an image in which the parts of the brain with concentrations of glucose
and oxygen -- the fuel of brain-cell activity -- are "lit up." The earliest
scans in the Mass General experiment showed the volunteers had nearly equal
amounts of amygdala activity no matter whose pictures were flashed.
That's not surprising, Professor Whalen said, because in a novel setting
"the amygdala fires to everything at first." But after a short time had
passed, one set of pictures elicited more firing up than the other. White
subjects showed lower amounts of amygdala activity when they looked at white
faces; blacks showed less amygdala activity when they looked at blacks.
The study, the authors noted, did not look at other areas of the brain
(the amygdala is branched into many other regions). Nor did it link amygdala
activity to any particular behavior or prejudice. Indeed, after the tests, the
volunteers said they felt no strong emotions about the photographs, one way or
the other.
The other study, being published today in The Journal of Cognitive
Neuroscience, tried to address this by relating amygdala activity to
particular states of mind.
Conceived by Professor Phelps and Mahzarin R. Banaji, a social psychologist
at Yale, this experiment used only white volunteers. They found that those
whose amygdalas fired up most at the sight of blacks were those who scored
higher on two other measures of unconscious feelings about blacks.
The 14 volunteers in the Yale scanner saw pictures of young men of both
races.
Days later, the researchers gave the volunteers two other tests to measure
their unconscious responses to blacks.
In one, the volunteers sat at computers and classified the photographs by
race at the same time as they classified words flashing on the screen as
either "good" or "bad."
When they take this "implicit association test," Professor Banaji said,
many Americans (most whites and half of blacks) are measurably quicker to
associate positive words like joy, love and peace with whites and negative
words like cancer, bomb and devil with blacks.
The responses are outside conscious control, Professor Banaji said.
People whose conscious political positions are egalitarian and antiracist
are often upset to find that they, too, were quicker to be positive about
whites and negative about blacks.
True to Professor Banaji's expectations, she said, most volunteers in this
study showed a preference for white faces over black. And those who showed the
most unconscious preference were those whose amygdalas showed the most
activity when they looked at black faces.
The Yale-N.Y.U. team also showed the photographs again to the volunteers
while electrodes measured how strongly the muscles around their eyes were
preparing to blink.
Unconsciously preparing to blink is a response to something alarming, and
the amygdala is clearly on the circuit of brain areas that creates the
response, Professor Phelps explained.
Knowing a volunteer's level of amygdala activity at the sight of black
faces, the team's paper says, also allowed them to predict how he would score
on the startle measure. "We didn't see the amygdala effect in everybody, but
when we did see it we found we could make the prediction," Professor Phelps
said.
In a second experiment, the N.Y.U.-Yale group showed a new batch of
volunteers a set of famous faces -- including Joe Namath, Tom Cruise, Denzel
Washington and Michael Jordan. "We thought perhaps familiarity with a person
would remove the effect," Professor Phelps said. And, in fact, with famous
faces, the racial difference in amygdala reactions disappeared.
"Of course, it could also be an effect of fame, rather than just that
these faces were familiar," Professor Phelps said.
"We don't know."
In fact, authors of both papers emphasize that there is a lot they do not
know.
Neuroimagers do not map the whole brain any more than tourists on a tight
schedule would visit every block in Manhattan. The scientists concentrate on
one landmark at a time, which leaves open many questions about what is
happening in the other parts of the brain to which the amygdala has connecting
fibers.
Beyond the uncertainty, neuroscientists interviewed about the two papers
were uncomfortable with issues like stereotype, prejudice and identity.
But they believed that those issues were relevant to their field. The
reason, several said, is that there is no such thing as "the brain." Each
brain is different, having been shaped by its environment.
A large part of a person's environment is other people. So one of the most
important ways that a brain is shaped is by experiencing how other brains
judge its owner. That deserves more attention than it has gotten, several
researchers said.
For example, the NeuroReport paper notes that brain scanners have generally
used photos of white faces when they studied how "the brain" reacts to "the
face." If blacks respond differently to white faces than do whites, that fact
will have to be taken into account, the authors write.
Until the recent work, "we in neuroimaging have attempted to minimize the
differences among people," said John Gabrieli, a brain researcher at Stanford.
"We have people do things like memorize nonsense words, as if we could
somehow get at pure thought, unmediated by the environment.
It's not clear to me why we've had many studies of things like short-term
memory for numbers before we had even one on the social influence of brain
function."
With so many questions, the scientists hesitate to speculate about what
the amygdala work means. Among the theories, there is "bottom up" -- the
amygdala, always seeking important information, notices a racial difference
and that perception then goes into the conscious thoughts. But there is also
"top down" -- racial thinking, picked up from other people, teaches the
amygdala that race is important to notice.
Very likely, Professor Whalen says, the best explanation will have a bit
of both top and bottom in it. It could be that the mind is tuned to racial
difference in a way it is not to others, he speculated. At the same time, he
said, "learning trumps everything else" in the life of the brain. For example,
he expects that the amygdala of a black person raised among whites would
"scan" like that of a white person. "It's not the color of the skin of the
person in the magnet," he said. "It's what color the eyes are used to seeing."
Despite their unease about venturing into what one journal recently dubbed
"social neuroscience," none of the researchers doubts that the work will
continue.
"Everyone knows it's preliminary and impossible to interpret at this
point," Professor Whalen said of the studies.
"But that doesn't make the answers any less interesting."
The New York Times on the
Web
Webmaster's comments:
While it is certainly true that this study does not prove the validity
of the biological concept of race, it does support the "innate
ethnocentrism"/"kin recognition" theory - the sociobiological(?) idea that the
"drive" for ethnic identity has some biological basis, and remains in the
unconscious even when one is not concious of any racial prejudice or identity.
It supports the theory of group conflict and of racial prejudice as an
evolutionary mechanism.
But at this stage I suppose it is also true that nothing conclusive can
be deduced from this research, and that some elements may suggest that the
observed phenomenon may have a partial or virtually complete environmental
source. For example: "When they take this "implicit association test,"
Professor Banaji said, many Americans (most whites and half of blacks)
are measurably quicker to associate positive words like joy, love and peace
with whites and negative words like cancer, bomb and devil with blacks."(my
emphasis)
It suggests that the observed reactions are perhaps the result of some
adaptive psychological mechanism of kin recognition based on parental
phenotype(and/or genetic similarity, maybe), for example. Another possibility
is that the unconscious identification is with the kind of phenotype most
present in one's surroundings. However, other elements suggest that this
unconcious racio-ethnic identity is not easy to modify or suppress: "People
whose conscious political positions are egalitarian and antiracist are often
upset to find that they, too, were quicker to be positive about whites and
negative about blacks."
In any case, this is nothing but speculation, even though the results
certainly do not run counter to evolutionist expectations. I would definitely
agree with professor Whalen that the results are quite interesting.
Simon Ouellette
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