Can Brain Science Be Dangerous? - NYTimes.com - 2 views
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The idea that poverty can change the brain has gotten significant attention recently, and not just from those lay readers (a minority, according to recent research) who spend a lot of time thinking about neuroscience. Policy makers and others have begun to apply neuroscientific principles to their thinking about poverty — and some say this could end up harming poor people rather than helping. At The Conversation, the sociologist Susan Sered takes issue with “news reports with headlines like this one: ‘Can brain Science Help Lift People Out Of Poverty?’” She’s referring to a June story by Rachel Zimmerman at WBUR, about a nonprofit called Crittenton Women’s Union that aims to use neuroscience to help get people out of poverty. Elisabeth Babcock, Crittenton’s chief executive, tells Ms. Zimmerman: “What the new brain science says is that the stresses created by living in poverty often work against us, make it harder for our brains to find the best solutions to our problems. This is a part of the reason why poverty is so ‘sticky.’”
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“The new neuroscience offers wonderful possibilities regarding Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy, brain injuries and much more,” writes Dr. Sered. “But scientific knowledge always develops and is utilized within social contexts.” She and others fear that, used incorrectly, neuroscience might spread the view that poor people are lesser than others, that they are irrevocably debilitated by their experiences with poverty — or, conversely, that if they fail to respond to programs that science says will help them, it must be their own fault.
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Ms. Williams writes that many of today’s child-development ideas are very similar to those of the psychiatrist John Bowlby’s work on attachment theory. But, she notes, he developed his ideas through psychological observation, not brain scans. And she quotes Sebastian Kraemer, a psychiatrist: “If John Bowlby were alive today, he would say, this [neuroscience] does not add anything. People are just more persuaded by it, by the facts and the pictures.” People do seem to find neuroscience extremely persuasive, even when it’s wrong. And this may be part of what critics fear — that images and facts about the brain are so powerful, they can make us believe things we really shouldn’t.