Neuroscience and the Kyoto Protocol Pt2
I believe a method that approaches the Kyoto Protocol (and other international agreements) as an ‘object of research’(.doc) (Fairclough, 2000) through the application of neuroscientific understanding would show that such documents of law, the environment, politics and of the international, can be read as indicators of the individual and collective human executive functions of the brains of the people involved in agreeing the documents.
This would encompass the negotiators but most explicitly the politicians, but would not exlcude the other influencers, including the electorate, NGO, business and media. Documents such as the Kyoto Protocol are then moments of illumination of the collective workings of the higher cognitive functions of those involved in their decisions and agreements; and because the extent that these decisions reach as far as the electorate, their collective higher cognition should be taken into account in the analysis.
Well, so that’s the hypothesis. And it turns around the crux of reciprocity as I suggested in an earlier post. The point is that reciprocity in human congitive behaviour and its influence on decision-making is a function of the higher cognitive executive system in the human brain, parts such as the human striatum, as reported by Alan Sanfey, and which have a significant role in social decisions whether or not to reciprocate (Science, 2007). From where I turn to read this:
Nations and individuals typically are unwilling to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions unilaterally, because in doing so they would pay the full price of abatement but gain only a fraction of the benefits. Indeed their sacrifice may be futile if other actors do not exhibit a similar constraint.
Harrison and Sundstrom (2007)
Here, for self-interest, the authors could be seen to say Read more
The Kyoto Protocol / human striatum enigma
Here’s an interesting one: quoting from an article in Science from October 2007 that I just got round to reading:
neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that the striatum tracks a social partner’s decision to reciprocate or not reciprocate cooperation, appearing to encode abstract rewards such as the positive feeling garnered by mutual cooperation. (600)
The striatum provides a common-reward metric for decisions that offer rewards/outcomes in different modalities. That is, it offers a base equivalent, a converter, to measure the different, abstract, rewards. Particularly for social reciprocity.
Now, from the Kyoto Protocol:
The Parties included in Annex I shall, individually or jointly, ensure that their aggregate anthropogenic carbon dioxide equivalent emissions of the greenhouse gases listed in Annex A do not exceed their assigned amounts… [etc.]
Now I know this is back of the beer mat theorizing, but all ideas start somewhere. So. The Kyoto Protocol is, if anything, a contract for reciprocity - we will cut emissions if you will. And not only are the different greenhouse gases made into carbon dioxide ‘equivalents’ (e.g. methane, nitrous oxide, all measured up against the CO2 factor), what is fascinating is that the rewards for reciprocity have also been, at some level, turned into their financial equivalent: hence, carbon trading.
I believe that what we do at the global, international, mass multitude level, can be thought through not just the metaphors that neuroscience brings us, but the actual science: that what happens when countries come together to agree the equivalents and reciprocation of an international agreement is no different, or an amplified record, of what is going on in the human brain for the same factors.
There is a way that neuroscience can illiuminate the abstract social processes of not only people but the structures of people: countries, governments, international agreements. It is this which fascinates me so much about the study of neuroscience and its application to the meta-narratives of our society. More on this as I develop the thoughts and do my research.
Neuroscience and subliminal advertising
I’ve seen stories on neuromarketing, and it makes sense that the advertisers would cotton on to the impact of neuroscience on their ability to change people’s behaviour. Here’s a video of Richard Restak talking on the subject.
The Google generation?
Being born quite a way before 1993, I don’t qualify as part of the Google generation: made up of Western-born individuals who have grown up with the internet, ‘a cohort of young people with little or no recollection of life before the web’. I can remember life before the web. It wasn’t bad. Travelling in 1994, no-one knew where I was for months, and there was no way I could regularly communicate back home. As I said, not bad.
A recent story at Pandia.com looks at a new report released by the British Library and JISC conducted by the CIBER center at the University College of London. It contradicts or at least challenges the belief, first put forward by Mark Plansky (coiner of the term ‘digital natives’) that:
today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors.
Pandia.com notes that… Read more
