Brain Mania
The world is obsessed with brains.
People can’t seem to get enough breathless reports about advances in neuroscience, and news outlets are happy to supply them. Those same outlets, of course, rarely if ever mention advances in behavior science. Brains are fun but apparently whole organisms are boring. Worse, brain research is often treated as explaining the human condition that applied behavioral research was created to address, when in fact it’s usually basic research that’s many steps away from potential applications.
B.F. Skinner recognized this attentional imbalance and wrote often to combat the perception that anatomically-focused investigations could replace research on the functions of behavior. Skinner was sensitive to the problem in part because the “over-marketing” of the central nervous system long predated him. For example, Freud’s psychoanalysis was an attempt to creating a “talking cure” for psychological problems, but he portrayed it as applied neurology. And although Pavlov was a brilliant experimentalist, he thought of the behavioral phenomena were important primarily as clues to the operation of the physical body. Skinner pointed out that
He (Pavlov) turned too quickly to inferences about the nervous system…. Pavlov never [observed neural] activity; he was studying merely what he took to be its products. His facts were about behavior, and his efforts to represent them as facts about the nervous system interfered with his reports.
Behavior analysts may not like the world’s brain obsession, but it’s a reality that must be confronted. The world is full of people who think in physiological terms about behavioral problems. For example, medical folks are constantly seeking genetic or pharmacological solutions to autism that, if successful (so far no worries about that), presumably would supplant applied behavior analysis. And in the U.S., federal grant funding for neuroscience long ago surpassed that for behavior science. Obviously lots of people out there believe that neuroscience has superior potential, and if behavior analysts are ever going counter this bias, they need a good grasp of what neuroscience can and can’t do when it comes to explaining behavior.
Skinner’s views certainly provide a constructive start. While his evaluation of neuroscience is too nuanced to fully reproduce here (for a detailed account, see a lovely review article by Diego Zilio), for present purposes, I’ll oversimplify by emphasizing two of Skinner’s main arguments:
- The only way you can tell what nervous system phenomena are related to behavior is to study behavior. Thus, neuroscience needs behavior research, but once you’ve demonstrated order in behavior, you don’t need neuroscience data for that to make sense.
- In the future, neuroscience may become sophisticated enough to yield primary insights about behavior, but it’s currently in its infancy, so studying behavior directly makes more sense.
Re-Framing the Relationship Between Behavior Analysis and Neuroscience
With those two points in mind, check out a recent paper in Nature (“Semantic encoding during language comprehension at single-cell resolution“) — or at least read this summary of the article’s main findings. During surgery, patients were implanted with electrodes to record the activity of about 300 individual prefrontal cortex neurons.
As participants listened to multiple short sentences containing a total of around 450 words, the scientists recorded which neurons fired and when….The researchers then looked at the similarity between the words that activated the same neuronal activity…. The words that the same set of neurons responded to fell into similar categories, such as actions, or words associated with people. The team also found that words that the brain might associate with one another, such as ‘duck’ and ‘egg’, triggered some of the same neurons. Words with similar meanings, such as ‘mouse’ and ‘rat’, triggered patterns of neuronal activity that were more similar than the patterns triggered by ‘mouse’ and ‘carrot.’ Other groups of neurons responded to words associated with more-abstract concepts: relational words such as ‘above’ and ‘behind’, for instance.
The study included an important control to clarify the basis on which words that lit up the same neurons were related.
The prefrontal cortex neurons didn’t distinguish words by their sounds, only their meanings. When a person heard the word ‘son’ in a sentence, for instance, words associated with family members lit up. But those neurons didn’t respond to ‘Sun’ in a sentence, despite these words having an identical sound.
This study is, in my humble opinion, pretty darned cool. You can see two things operating that should not be overlooked. First, neuroscience methods are growing ever more advanced. In Skinner’s day, a lot of neuroscience focused on gross anatomy — we could, for instance, tell that the brain’s left hemisphere was implicated in language from what changed when that hemisphere was injured, or from what general brain region was found to activate in imaging studies. Researchers are now able to isolate the activity of specific neurons. Second, as measurement becomes more precise, so too do opportunities to link brain activity to behavioral functions. In this case, the findings sound a heck of a lot like relational framing!
Going Forward, Who Will Lead?
The really interesting question, and the one that should concern behavior analysts who rely solely on Skinner’s rebuttals of neuroscience, is when will brain research will move beyond the “behavior science first” status quo that Skinner described. That is, when will neuroscience research become sophisticated enough that, instead of describing the neural manifestation of known behavioral phenomena, it can actually advance our understanding of how behavior works? We’re already getting there. I’ve written elsewhere about how brain research provides potential insights about punishment that behavioral researchers seem not to have anticipated.
With regard to that Nature paper, certainly at this point it’s possible to devise neuroscience tests of phenomena that are the focus of derived stimulus relations research, as well as of theoretical propositions about those phenomena that are still being debated (for some examples, see Harte & Barnes-Holmes’ 2021 chapter, “A primer on Relational Frame Theory” [download preprint here]).
What I’m trying to emphasize that Skinner’s view of neuroscience, while perhaps accurate when it was formed, made it comfortable for behavior analysts to largely ignore that domain of research. Most of our training programs don’t give a lot of attention to brain-behavior relations, which may have been fine in the 1960s through 1980s, but now risks leaving our discipline desperately underinformed. Actually, a lot of smart people are already synthesizing questions and methods of behavior science and neuroscience. For example, check out some of the “hybrid” papers written by Georgia State’s Mike Schlund and Swansea University’s Simon Dymond (Postscript). Mike and Simon both have backgrounds in basic operant research but they self-taught about neuroscience and psychopathology (take that, graduate school!) in order to advance their research on avoidance and fear disorders. Their work is true to what we know about behavior but also respects expertise in other disciplines.
That makes it valuable to both behavior analysts and neuroscientists, which is the main point. The world loves brains. Neuroscientists give them brains. If we ignore brains, we’re at risk of being judged as out of touch, so being broadly educated is in part a public relations issue for our discipline. But that Nature article mentioned above also foreshadows a future in which being underinformed will limit our science. Skinner allowed that someday neuroscience may teach us about behavior. If that day isn’t here yet, it’s at least close enough that we’d better broaden our horizons ASAP.