Beware Science Of Mind Reading
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday October 4, 2008
LAST week a piece of research was released that had every father who has ever been chastised by his adolescent children for wearing a loud shirt, telling a bad joke or dancing to the Rolling Stones, heaving a sigh of relief.
The study, published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, says it has found scientific evidence for why teenagers cringe every time they go out in public with their parents. Apparently it's not because baby-boomer parents are plain embarrassing. It's the teenagers' fault; their brains work in such a way they are predisposed to being overly self-conscious. The study used the increasingly popular tool of functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan the brains of participants while they imagined a string of emotional experiences. According to the scans, teenagers used a different part of the brain, called the medial prefrontal cortex, when processing emotions like embarrassment or guilt."If teenagers have more activity in this part of the brain when they are thinking about being embarrassed, it might explain why they are more susceptible to embarrassment," one of the authors of the study, Sarah Jayne-Blakemore, told The Times. The research rapidly spread across the internet, no doubt by news editors who felt validated in their decision to wear a Grateful Dead shirt to their son's graduation.But while studies like this which use brains scans to "prove" aspects of human behaviour are good news fodder, they are controversial science. While the authors could confirm they had found different brain activity in teenagers exposed to embarrassing thoughts, they admitted they didn't know if "this was cause or an effect".Charles Barber, a lecturer in psychiatry at Yale University, has argued the technology is too blunt an instrument to form the basis of such simplistic conclusions. "We seem to forget that it is not as if a camera were entering the brain and taking pictures of what is going on."Simply put, he says, we may be able to "read brains - to some very crude extent - but we can't even begin to read minds". Besides, everyone under 20 knows they do not need science to tell them why watching your parents wriggle and flail to Brown Sugar is worthy of groans. It is embarrassing. Just like having a 17-year-old son, who doesn't know who Mick Jagger is.
© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald