Social Neuroscience: The Footprints of Phineas Gage

Abstract

Social neuroscience is the most important development in social psychology since the "cognitive revolution" of the 1960s and 1970s. Modeled after cognitive neuroscience, the social neuroscience approach appears to entail a rhetoric of constraint, in which biological facts are construed as constraining theory at the psychological level of analysis, and a doctrine of modularity, which maps particular mental and behavioral functions onto discrete brain locations or systems. The rhetoric of constraint appears to be mistaken: psychological theory informs the interpretation of biological data, but not the reverse. And the doctrine of modularity must be qualified by an acceptance of a domain-general capacity for learning and problemsolving. While offering tremendous promise, the social neuroscience approach also risks accepting a version of reductionism that dissolves social reality into biological processes, and thus threatens the future status of the social sciences themselves.Lives of great men all remind us / We can make our lives sublime And, departing, leave behind us / Footprints on the sands of time.Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "A Psalm of Life" (1838)

Old cortex, new contexts: re-purposing spatial perception for social cognition

“…First, compared to cognitive neuroscience, social cognitive neuroscience is a young field (Ochsner, 2007); many aspects of social cognition have simply been studied less extensively than other aspects of cognition. Second, early social cognitive neuroscience research often assumed a modular view of the brain (Bergeron, 2007), and involved searching for encapsulated brain areas devoted to processing particular contents (Kihlstrom, 2010). If one understands an aspect of cognition to be supported by a domain-specific module, attempting to relate that aspect of cognition to other mental phenomena may not be considered a particularly worthwhile endeavor.…”

Of BOLD Claims and Excessive Fears: A Call for Caution and Patience Regarding Political Neuroscience

“…Adding complexity is the fact that modern neuroimaging tends to depend upon an assumption of modularity, which holds that the brain is organized into regions in terms of both structure and function. If, for example, all of the brain is involved in a particular task or if a particular task is performed by a diffuse network of neurons or neuronal areas across the brain, hemodynamic flow and electrical activation measures with limited spatial resolution may not be useful in associating tasks causing brain activation with underlying neural mechanisms (Kihlstrom, 2010). There is evidence from studies using animals and from lesion studies among humans that modularity may make sense for certain tasks, such as vision and recognition of faces.…”

How can neuroscience contribute to moral philosophy, psychology and education based on Aristotelian virtue ethics?

“…The case study of Phineas Gage demonstrated that the lesion in the prefrontal cortex caused significant deficiency in socio-moral adjustment (Barker 1995). Although his intellectual ability to make judgments was intact for a while, his socio-moral character and behavioural tendency were severely regressed immediately after the accident (Kihlstrom 2010). Moreover, a recent experiment investigated more directly the association between the lesion in the medial prefrontal cortex, which deals with affection, and the integration of motivational force (Tranel 2002), moral reasoning, and moral motivation (Saver and Damasio 1991).…”