Western philosophical accounts of morality are outdated in important respects, for example in ascribing too much volition and intentionality to moral behavior.
—MARC BEKOFF AND JESSICA PIERCE
Where there’s flexibility and plasticity in behavior . . . there’s agency. This is the very reason we do not include insects among our moral animals, because as far as we know their behavioral patterns are rigid. . . . And that is why we set threshold requirements for our moral animals: flexibility, plasticity, emotional complexity, and a particular set of cognitive skills.
—MARC BEKOFF AND JESSICA PIERCE
I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.
—BARUCH SPINOZA
It is worth reminding ourselves that the nature/nurture dichotomy is generally considered dead.
—MARC BEKOFF AND JESSICA PIERCE
Experiments on rats and rhesus monkeys show that, unlike human beings, they pass the Milgram test—they exhibit a fellow feeling for suffering members of their species that roughly two-thirds of human beings, cross-culturally, either lack or suppress. Scientists, if not the rest of us, have known this since the 1960s: the experiment on rats was published in 1959 and the one on rhesus monkeys in 1964. And the results have held up to the test of time. A recent controlled study with rats at the University of Chicago offers stronger evidence than has been available before that rats will act to aid another rat in distress and will do so even in preference to reward. The findings were reported in the journal Science.1 The experiment involved pairs of rats that normally share a cage. One of the rats was set free to roam, and the other was trapped in a closed see-through plastic tube that could be opened only from the outside. The free rat was able to see and hear its former cagemate. That rat attempted by trial and error to free its cagemate and, once it learned how, it did so right away. Experiments with placing a toy rat in the tube instead of a real rat or with an empty tube did not elicit the freeing behavior. Nor did separating the two rats change the saving behavior, so scientists concluded that an expected reward of social contact between the two could also be ruled out. In addition, putting chocolate in a second closed tube did not distract the rats: the tube of the trapped animal was just as likely to be opened first as was the one with the chocolate stash. Peggy Mason, one of the experimenters, remarked: “That was very compelling. It said to us that essentially helping their cagemate is on a par with chocolate. He can hog the entire chocolate stash if he wanted to, and he does not. We were shocked.” Jean Decety, the study leader, concluded, “This is the first [reliable] evidence of helping behaviour triggered by empathy in rats.”2
Affective neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp has identified seven basic homologous hardwired emotional systems that all mammals have, including human beings. Panksepp, in commenting on this study of empathy in rats in the same issue of Science, writes, “Although we currently look to mirror-neuron zones of the neocortex for evidence of the highest mind functions such as compassion, empathic tendencies are surely also promoted by the more ancient primary-process emotional networks that are essential foundations for mental life.”3
Human beings may be capable of a more finely tuned empathic understanding of others, and their suffering and their fates, yet when push comes to shove it’s monkeys and rats that are statistically far more likely to enact their emotional fellow feeling.4 What are we to make of these remarkable findings? Are they just weird and anomalous, and so we should simply shrug and carry on? I don’t think so. In fact, I think that both the discoveries themselves and our standard ways of ignoring them are both significant. For both the discoveries and their marginalization reveal that we have not yet fully become aware of how to interpret and understand the evolutionary continuity of ourselves within the mammal kingdom. Our long-standing beliefs and assumptions about our exalted and unique human moral capacity persist more or less unshaken despite at least some evidence to the contrary and despite well-established Darwinian theory that calls them into question. Our human self-congratulation that we are above and beyond all (other) animals as well as our human reluctance to relinquish beliefs in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary both tell us something about ourselves.
That nonhuman social mammals and primates may have a reliable prosocial and perhaps even moral sense and capacity is the contention of biologist Marc Bekoff and philosopher Jessica Pierce.5 Marc Bekoff has spent a lifetime as an animal ethologist, and both his observations and the research of others have led him and Pierce to the remarkable conclusion that the evolutionary record must be read not only up but also down—our capacities are also those of other social mammals, to a degree.6 Bekoff and Pierce put the evolutionary cut not between ourselves and other primates, ourselves and other mammals, but instead between the social mammals (including human beings, other primates, cetaceans such as whales and dolphins, rats and mice, elephants, and social predators such as wolves and dogs) and, on the other side, the social insects (ants and bees, for example). When it comes to the social insects, they say, we are indeed looking at hardwired prosocial instincts rather than at morality. For insect sociality surely lacks flexibility and thought; it is more programmed than interpretive. In social mammals, however, including human beings, the neural architecture that produces empathy (and the other prosocial capacities) is the same across species.7 Bekoff and Pierce take seriously Darwin’s insight that the relationship of human beings to other mammals, and even more so to other primates, is a matter of degree rather than of kind.
Bekoff and Pierce propose that there is even a moral continuity between the animal and the human resulting from a shared neuroflexibility, and not only shared hardwired prosocial behaviors, as most scientists have presumed. This means that social mammals (including humans) generally filter their more primitive prosocial capacities via some thought, learned experience, and somewhat complex emotions, so there is some flexibility and also variation in their behavior. This view is in sharp contrast to prevailing arguments, which have emphasized that human beings are genetically hardwired for automatic moral feelings or behavioral prompts that still drive their behavior either completely or to a large degree—such as an aversion to incest or a sexual attraction to do-gooders. If Bekoff and Pierce are right, then what human beings, our close primate kin, and the other social mammals share are basic prosocial capacities that are mediated by various degrees of flexible thought and emotions, resulting in various degrees of moral behavior, both prosocial and normative. Researchers have documented cooperation, empathy, and even justice (that is, normative rules that promote social harmony when maintained and elicit social punishment and ostracism when broken) in the behavior of a range of social mammals and particularly primates. Cooperation, for example, is evident in all kinds of behaviors: grooming, group hunting, care for babies, alliance formation, and even play.8
Within the array of social mammals, Bekoff and Pierce describe what they call “nested levels of increasing complexity” as organisms exhibit a higher degree of social complexity and of intelligence—the difference between rats and primates, for example.9 Bekoff and Pierce’s model may help us understand where we stand within nature, especially within the arena of social mammals. We no longer need presume the direct or only slightly indirect operation of hardwired instincts in us in order to preserve and respect evolutionary continuity. Bekoff and Pierce have cut us free from the kind of reductionism to hardwired mechanisms that until now we have thought were entailed by shared homologous evolutionary inheritances.
“Everything in the brain is interconnected—and that of course is the problem.”
—JAAK PANKSEPP, December 13, 2012, lecturer in Puerto Vallarta mexico.
Philosophers, scientists, and regular people in the West have long been asking, in one way or another, why human beings uniquely have ethics, a moral capacity that is one of the glories of what it means to be human rather than animal. But I think based on the evidence about other social mammals and the growing evidence from the neurosciences, we need to ask a different question: why do human beings fail so often and so disastrously at moral behavior, both on the personal level and more egregiously on the societal and political levels? When I tell people I casually meet (not philosophers or neuroscientists) that I am writing a book on ethics, almost invariably they say something like, “Boy, we sure need that. Something really has gone wrong. Are there any ethics anymore? Why do people, the society around us, the corporations and the banks, and the government more often seem to neglect ethics rather than adhere to ethics?” So intuitively, from lived experience rather than traditions of scholarship and science, people are raising what I think is the right question: What has gone wrong? The evidence for empathy and prosocial actions in some species of nonhuman mammals may offer us a clue to what has gone wrong in human beings, despite growing evidence from the neurosciences that human beings may have an even greater basic sociality than other social mammals.
Zoologist and conservationist William Temple Hornaday, director of the New York Zoological Park and a founder of the National Zoo, commented on the superiority of animal “morality” when he wrote in 1922: “It is quite possible that there are . . . a number of intelligent men and women who are not yet aware of the fact that wild animals have moral codes, and that on average they live up to them better than men do theirs.”10 It turns out that our human moral problem may be a matter of too much thinking, too much interpretation. Because human actions, the meanings we ascribe to them, and the beliefs we have about them can take such a vast number of different avenues, we can lose sight of the good.
Openness confuses our prosocial capacities. The evidence from the neurosciences lends support to the view that human beings are off the charts when it comes to the openness and flexibility of our behavior, of our interpretations of behavior. From the standpoint of both evolutionary biology and neurobiology, our human openness in behavior and belief is on a scale and range so vast that it may turn out to be, in terms of morality, a double-edged sword. This is because the prosocial or moral capacities (like the empathic feelings of rats and capuchin monkeys for others in pain, or reciprocity in all kinds of species) that are evolutionary inheritances from the social mammals are mediated by thinking, that is, by language, culture, social group—which is to say, by interpretation. In other species, behavioral possibilities may be narrower because the meanings of behavior are not subject to such variable interpretations.
Recent science leads us toward a second insight: that cooperation is an evolutionary norm, and that humans have as extraordinary a capacity for cooperation as we do for behavioral openness. Bekoff and Pierce comment that “humans have achieved a level of social complexity unparalleled in other species.”11 And tendencies toward cooperation, shared experience, emotional contagion, and social needs may be even more dominant in humans than in other primates and mammals. While we tend to think that evolution is all about individuals competing within a species for survival and reproductive success, Martin Nowak, director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard, has singled out cooperation as the third basic principle of evolution, along with mutation and selection. The overwhelming character of social interactions across living beings is cooperative rather than antagonistic. The very fact of the evolution of multicellular living things bespeaks cooperation, Nowak remarks. Yet this vast human cooperative capacity can be directed toward evil ends as well as good ones.
Third, new research is revealing interconnections between our prosocial capacities and group feelings and the urge to further and protect the self. Our prosocial tendencies are also enmeshed with self-serving urges. So our third moral problem is a double-edged sword as well: our seemingly moral actions are colored by self-serving and self-furthering motivations and aims. But there is some good news as well, for the reverse is also the case: our selfishness is not always in the service of the narrowest interests within our skin or pocketbook. For the self, it turns out, is not “atomic,” not isolated and contained just within our skin. Rather, there is a self beyond itself, beyond the physical body. There is emerging evidence that the self incorporates into itself relationships, family, the social and cultural and historical world, and assigned places in that world. This self beyond itself makes ethics possible, because the boundaries between self and others and between self and environment are loosened or permeable and even shared. The neuroscientist Donald Pfaff of Rockefeller University identifies the loosening of personal boundaries as the only or principal mechanism that makes ethics possible. This solves the problem of altruism, of why an individual might help somebody else, even a nonrelative, and even to his or her own detriment. A neurological mechanism of shared selves—or as a recent conference on Buddhism and science puts it, “the neurobiology of we”—really redefines the problem of altruism because it changes the unit of benefit from the individual to a blending of individuals in groups, small and large.12 Scholars of East Asian cultures and religions have reminded me that the unit of analysis in Buddhist ethics is not the individual but interactions and interrelationships.13
Other recently discovered neural mechanisms also contribute to making extended and shared (or distributed) selves: mirror neurons are everywhere in the news these days—they make possible emotional contagion, other forms of unconscious imitation and joint action, and a grasp of others’ emotions. Another relevant neural mechanism is self-maps, which is the mapping into the bodily neural moment-by-moment representation of the self of all kinds of biographical information and group identifications. In this chapter and the following ones I discuss how these and similar mechanisms operate and contribute to ethics—but I also show how they make moral life precarious and difficult. The self beyond itself all too easily devolves into the group self; the loosening of the boundaries of the self makes it all too easy to lose the self in others. More often than not that absorption of self poses a moral problem, as much as or more than does the individual self.
Our fundamental and overwhelming competitive and self-serving desires, rather than expressing themselves primarily in a dog-eat-dog endless fray, as we tend to presume, actually play out via what neuroscientists are now identifying as our extended self and our shared (or distributed) self. By the extended self I mean all the tools and other things we use to do what we do, from screwdrivers to cars. By the shared or distributed self I mean our social biographical, historical, and cultural selves; these are the social identifications and situations that the self projects itself into and pursues as self. Yet they can lead to the loss of self in and to the group. The extension or expansion of the self to include its tools and the like and the distribution or extrusion of the self into the groups and projects to which one is committed are intertwined, however, as they play out: introjection is followed by self-extrusion and further introjection, and on and on. It is only in theory that we can separate the strands and untangle them for clarity’s sake.
When we put together the vastness of possible interpretations, the extraordinary degree of human cooperation and sociality, and the self beyond itself, we find moral danger as well as extraordinary promise. It was the danger of situation and social identity (the self beyond itself), rather than of individual character, as we tend to assume, that was so devastating in Nazi Germany and even in the Stanford Prison Experiment and more recently in the Abu Ghraib torture cases. Neuroplasticity enables, in an extraordinarily variable way, the social shaping of the individual, and the channeling of individual self-servingness (what I like to call, tongue in cheek, selfiness) toward group purposes. What this means is that our sociality and empathy, but also our basic sense of self, self-protection, self-furthering, and even self-servingness, are all filtered through, shaped, and channeled by our complex world of social relationships, institutions, power relations, and group meanings. So what we human beings bring to the table, I think, turns out to hinder the smooth and direct functioning of empathy, reciprocity, and the like. The vast neuroplasticity of the human neocortex that gives us the capacity for imagining all kinds of behavior, and especially for believing almost anything about that behavior, can enable an almost infinite possible extension of the range and sensitivity of moral concern—but it can also lead us to skew and corrupt moral action toward selfish and group-selfish desires.
The brain changes with anything you do including any thought you might have.
—ALVARO PASCUAL-LEONE
Psychiatrist and researcher Norman Doidge offers in his book The Brain That Changes Itself an overview and history to date of the emerging revolution in neuroplasticity—the discovery of the lifelong adaptability of the brain. Discoveries in the neurosciences have opened windows into how the brain can be trained to rewire and reorganize itself throughout life. One review calls Doidge’s book “an owner’s manual for the brain.”14 And Publishers Weekly remarks that Doidge “turns everything we thought we knew about the brain upside down.”15
For the past four hundred years the brain has been regarded by scientists and neurologists as more or less fixed: it has been thought to be unchangeable after childhood. Brain cells were held to be nonreplaceable, nor was the structure of the brain thought to be capable of change. The common experience that patients with brain damage rarely recovered completely seemed to make the unchangeability of the brain obvious to physician and laypeople alike. The presumption was that the brain is basically a machine that is hardwired and has permanently connected circuits that either work or don’t work, each circuit performing a specific function.16 However, scientists are now able to conduct experiments in which they use neuroimaging technology to observe the brain as it functions, and this has led to rethinking all those long-standing assumptions. Doidge says that in the late 1960s and early 1970s brain scientists unexpectedly began coming up with evidence that “the brain changed its very structure with each different activity it performed, perfecting its circuits so it was better suited to the task at hand. If certain ‘parts’ failed, then other parts could sometimes take over.” This was the origin of the discovery of neuroplasticity, so named because neurons (nerve cells) were, unexpectedly, exhibiting modifiability.17 Scientists were showing that children could sometimes improve the mental abilities they were born with; that damaged brains could reorganize themselves to sidestep areas that were impaired and recruit other areas to perform the function of the damaged area; and, perhaps most surprising of all, it was discovered that “thinking, learning, and acting can turn our genes on or off, thus shaping our brain anatomy and our behavior.” Doidge calls this last “surely one of the most extraordinary discoveries of the twentieth century.”
The first presumption of the standard model of the brain that Doidge challenges is the fixed and specialized localization of functions. He calls this the challenge to “localizationism,” a belief that he points out still has many adherents. “A brain that is hardwired, and in which each mental function has a strict location, leaves little room for plasticity,” he remarks.18 The scientist and rehabilitation physician Paul Bach-y-Rita discovered that the wiring of our senses, rather than being completely specific, can be recruited to fill in to some degree a missing or destroyed sense. Bach-y-Rita called this process “sensory substitution.” Bach-y-Rita recounted the story of a patient, Cheryl Schiltz, whose vestibular system (which maintains bodily balance and gives us a sense of location in space) was seriously damaged as a side effect of an antibiotic. Schiltz had the continuous feeling that she was falling, and she could not focus on objects. Tests revealed that she retained only 2 percent of her original ability to maintain balance and spatial orientation. Bach-y-Rita and his lab created a device that translated location and movement of the body onto the tongue, which in turn sent location signals to the brain. When Schiltz put on the device she not only felt normal for the first time in five years, but the residual effect lasted for twenty minutes after she removed the device. Eventually, after about a year of sessions in which she used the device, Cheryl no longer needed it at all—her brain had rewired itself. Bach-y-Rita described Cheryl’s rehabilitation process as the “unmasking” of “secondary” neural pathways. This is different from the rewiring of the brain and can happen much more quickly because these pathways are there but unused. He described it using the analogy of driving: if your standard way of getting from point A to point B is blocked by the collapse of a bridge, you might initially take secondary roads that are not as direct and make the trip longer. Over time, however, you find shorter pathways. This unmasking of secondary pathways, Doidge reports, is “one of the main ways the plastic brain reorganizes itself.”19
Perhaps one of the factors that enabled Bach-y-Rita to think outside the box is that he had extraordinarily interdisciplinary interests and expertise: medicine, pharmacology, ocular neurophysiology (the study of the eye muscles), visual neurophysiology (the study of sight and the nervous system), and biomedical engineering. At the age of forty-four he returned to medicine after a research career to do a residency in rehabilitation medicine in order to apply more directly his discoveries in neuroplasticity.20 His concern was drawn to both rehabilitation and the plasticity of the brain when his father had a disabling stroke in 1959, from which neurologists at the time said he would never recover. Bach-y-Rita’s brother took over care of their father and began, in a seat-of-the-pants way, to develop a series of exercises to teach him to crawl and then to walk, to exercise his weaker side and hand, and to speak. Their father improved enough in the course of a year to resume work, and he eventually recovered all his functions, yet an autopsy performed on him after his death showed that the brain damage from the stroke was catastrophic. Clearly his brain had rewired itself as a result of the rehabilitative exercises.21
Bach-y-Rita developed a device that enables “sight” in people whose damaged retinas had made them blind from birth. That device was reported on in the journal Nature in 1969. It was (at the time) an enormous device that a blind person sat in and which sent electrical signals of the image of scenes or words to a computer that then conveyed vibrations to the skin. “The stimulators functioned like pixels vibrating for the dark part of a scene and holding still for the brighter shades.” Bach-y-Rita conjectured that skin could substitute for retinas as receptors because both are two-dimensional sheets with sensory receptors upon which pictures form.22 Six blind experimental subjects were able to make out objects, see faces, perceive perspective, and learn to recognize common objects. They went from having a tactile experience to “seeing” things, albeit with fairly poor resolution.23 As Bach-y-Rita said, “We see with our brains, not our eyes”—while our eyes sense changes in light, it is our brains that perceive.24 Bach-y-Rita was one of the first scientists to reject localization of the senses and demonstrate the possibility of “sensory substitution.” He considered the brain as “polysensory”: the nerves are capable of processing electrical signal patterns from multiple senses rather than operating as discrete sensory units. “All our sense receptors translate different kinds of energy from the external world . . . into electrical patterns. . . . These electrical patterns are the universal language ‘spoken’ inside the brain—there are no visual images, sounds, smells, or feelings moving inside our neurons.” The areas of the brain that process patterns of electrical signals, which are sent down the nerves, are all far more similar than scientists have generally realized.25 Recent experiments on animals have confirmed the plasticity of the brain’s sensory processors. And the late Susan Hurley, one of the foremost philosophers to rethink the mind in response to the neurosciences, argued persuasively that it is the body’s activities in a sensory mode (looking around for vision, touching things for touch, etc.) that trigger and engage the rewiring of neurons usually dedicated for one purpose to another.26
Doidge’s second case is that of a woman, Barbara Arrowsmith Young, who was labeled “retarded” as a child although she had some remarkable abilities as well as cognitive impairments. Some of her difficulties were with connecting behavior with its consequences, with understanding logic and grammar, and with comprehending cause and effect; she could not visualize space mentally; she was awkward; she could pronounce words only with difficulty; she could put only a few letters together in reading. She could not decode a TV program in real time. On the other hand, her memory was spectacular. Her observations of children were wonderful and insightful and led to a career in education. Her determination was extraordinary. She was able to overcome much through sheer doggedness and memory. (She would read a paper or a book twenty times over to be able to get it.) She completed college and went on to grad school in education where, in her twenties, she discovered the work of Aleksander Luria, the founder of neuropsychology, about the cognitive and other deficits of stroke and war victims. In Luria’s work she found descriptions of the precise brain functions that might be missing or impaired in herself. At this point Young came upon the research of Mark Rosenzweig on neuroplasticity in rats. Rats that had had more stimulating environments—objects to explore, toys to play with, and climbing and other devices to exercise on—had more neurotransmitters, heavier brains, a greater blood supply in the brain, and more neural connections than genetically identical animals reared in impoverished environments, and they were more capable of learning. Doidge says that Rosenzweig’s research demonstrated that “stimulating the brain makes it grow in every conceivable way.” These kinds of effects on brain anatomy have been shown in all kinds of animals, and evidence from human autopsies has shown that the same holds true for people: for those with higher education, and proportionately as education increases, the number of branches among neurons increases, as do the volume and thickness of the brain.27
Rosenzweig’s discoveries sparked Young to begin on a self-directed program of mental exercises to retrain her brain in just those areas of cognitive deficits that she could now identify. It worked—she overcame her mental deficits and no longer suffers from them. She and a fellow student named Joshua Cohen, who also had had cognitive deficits and who eventually became her husband, expanded their techniques of retraining the mind, and in 1980 they founded the Arrowsmith School in Toronto, where they develop methods to help rewire the brains of children with various learning and cognitive deficits.28
The conventional view sees the brain as made up of a group of specialized processing modules, genetically hardwired to perform specific functions and those alone, each developed and refined over millions of years of evolution. Once one of them is damaged, it can’t be replaced.
—NORMAN DOIDGE
The idea that the brain can change its own structure and function through thought and activity is, I believe, the most important alteration in our view of the brain since we first sketched out its basic anatomy and the workings of its basic component, the neuron.
—NORMAN DOIDGE
The evidence for the astounding neuroplasticity of the brain challenges long-standing assumptions about the localization of functions and mechanisms in the brain. Those standard assumptions envision the brain as consisting of “modules,” enclosed capacities that are not open to modification from other modules and are unable to take over other modules’ tasks. So an ethical module, if there were such a thing, would be a uniquely dedicated brain capacity not capable of being influenced by other capacities—such as emotions, for example. On this view, the discrete module would underlie all ethical behavior. It is this standard modular account of higher capacities that neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp gives a knockout blow to in an article that has attracted quite a lot of attention. In “The Seven Sins of Evolutionary Psychology,” Jaak and Jules Panksepp charge many who advocate the standard modular view, and especially “evolutionary psychologists,” with irresponsibly attributing all kinds of human behavior directly to hardwired genetic modular mechanisms.29 To make the claim of modularity goes way ahead of the available evidence, the Panksepps say. They argue that those favoring a modular view of the brain largely ignore the available and growing evidence about the actual neural mechanisms operative in behavior. “Real neural functions across a variety of species should provide definitive constraints on speculation about what evolution did or did not create within human and animal brain/minds,” they say.30
No modular mechanisms of behavior, the Panksepps point out, have ever been shown to be a product of evolutionary adaptation of the human neocortex when it underwent massive development in the Pleistocene. There are modular emotional and motivational capacities in subcortical (more primitive) brain regions that humans share with other mammals, but there is no current evidence for discrete special-purpose mechanisms and functions in the human neocortex. Instead, the higher regions of the human brain appear at birth to consist “largely [in] general-purpose computational devices.” This does not mean, however, that the neocortex of the human brain is like a digital computer. Instead, its organic brain processes are “spontaneous, self-organizing, and non-linear.”31 Regions of the neocortex, nevertheless, may acquire “special-purpose functions” as a result of life experiences.32 So any special modularized functions in the human neocortical regions of the brain would be softwired, a result of the interactions of the subcortical regions with experience. Enter neuroplasticity. The Panksepps point out that it is not clear yet whether even language emerged from specifically human evolutionary adaptations or instead from the great growth in general-purpose symbolic processing that enabled more of the brain’s capacity to be used for language. The long-standing view that language is a discrete and localized capacity is no longer warranted and has been crumbling.
Psychologists, and especially evolutionary psychologists, some engaged in trying to discover the source of the human ethical capacity, have been all too wedded to a model of the mind as a computer and are loath to give it up despite mounting evidence to the contrary. The commitment to a vision of the brain as a computer has made the discoveries in neuroscience of the actual embodied mechanisms seem all but irrelevant. Modularity is exactly the way a computer works, but, it turns out, it is not the way the neocortex of the human brain works. Modularity both assumes and mandates a much less flexible, less dynamic kind of system. It’s true that both computers and the human brain utilize “action potentials,” but that, the Panksepps point out, is a “surface similarity.”33 Much of what has been thought to be modular “may simply reflect our multi-modal capacity to conceptualize world events symbolically and to relate them to primitive affective feelings that reflect specific fitness concerns.”34 So it is due to the absence of modularity and the presence of neuroplasticity that “ancient emotional systems are able to imbue ‘cold’ perceptions with hot affective charge.”35 Thinking and beliefs are filled with emotion; thought and affect interpenetrate each other. “Creatures like ourselves have been endowed with a massive random-access type of general-purpose intelligence. To some yet unfathomed extent, we have been liberated from the crucible of a mindless biological emergence.”36 So “everything that mature humans do is filtered through their higher neural capacity for flexible ‘intelligent’ action. . . . The nature of the higher regulatory system in humans does permit many alternative courses of action.”37 This is the source of the real and vast openness in human behavior. We now turn to how plastically and changeably and ever responsively the brain maps the body.
The neuroscientist Michael Merzenich has been considered the world’s leading researcher on brain plasticity, having worked extensively on the problem of “brain maps.”38 Before Merzenich, research on brain maps began with the idea that areas in the brain could be found that represent parts of the body and its specific actions. Early experiments with electrodes showed that electrically stimulating a specific area of the brain during brain surgery led to the same feeling in the patient’s hand as touching the hand. That was true of other correlated brain-body areas as well. The brain had a sensory map of the parts of the body’s surface. So too with movement—stimulating specific brain areas that control movement could trigger specific movements such as those we initiate when we move our hands or feet or other body parts. And adjacent areas of the body were discovered to be adjacent on the brain maps.
These brain maps were thought to be universal in a species and immutable. They seemed to lock in localization (and perhaps even point to hardwiring) of brain function—but Merzenich discovered otherwise.39 For he came to brain mapping research just at the moment of the invention of a new technique, micromapping, that made possible the investigation of the firing of individual neurons as communication to other neurons. It was at this level of specificity that neuroscientists were now capable of peering into the brain’s operation and mapping. There are 100 billion neurons in the human adult brain, and a neuron firing lasts about one-thousandth of a second. Many fire at the same time. Just think of how many possible combinations of neurons firing together that makes possible. That’s the source of the vast flexibility, the openness, of human learning, thinking, and behavior.
A basic description of the nervous system will help us understand what Merzenich’s discoveries are really about. The nervous system is divided into the central nervous system, which consists of the brain and the spinal cord, and the peripheral nervous system. The central nervous system commands and controls, whereas the peripheral nervous system relays messages between the central nervous system and the rest of the body. The nervous system as a whole monitors both internal and external environments and responds to them. The peripheral nervous system had been known for a long time to be plastic—a cut nerve in a person’s hand, for example, can regenerate itself. But the central nervous system had long been thought to lack that capacity and to be set.40 Merzenich and colleagues did experiments with cutting a peripheral nerve to the hands of monkeys and sewing the two severed ends near but not touching each other. They anticipated that this would cause havoc in the brain maps of these monkeys since the signals back to the brain would be confused. What they discovered, however, was that the monkeys’ brain maps had accommodated themselves to the changes and were roughly normal. They had discovered neuroplasticity in the central nervous system.
In a later experiment on monkeys in which he cut the median nerve that conveys sensation from the middle of the hand, he found that the nerves that convey the sensations of the outsides of the hand had taken over conveying the sensations of the middle. Looking at the brain maps of these monkeys, he discovered that the brain maps for these two outside sections had nearly doubled in size and taken over the function of the disabled middle nerve. The unused median nerve space was taken over by the two other nerves, which had invaded its map space and was using its capacity to process their inputs. Map space was apparently valuable and functions competed to get more processing capacity. “Use it or lose it” seemed to be the rule—competitive plasticity explains a great deal of why we come to excel at some things but are weak in little-used areas and capacities. It also explains how bad habits can take over lots of map space and be hard to dislodge.41
The maps, Merzenich now surmised, were arranged topographically, which is to say, the map had its own internal organization that is like that of the body, but there is not a point-to-point correspondence between the body and the brain map. That is, brain maps were not like the old telephone wiring systems, in which operators plugged in wires that connected one person directly to the person he or she was calling. Maps were also constantly changing to reflect changes in the body and activity. Merzenich was showing that “maps could alter their borders and location and change their functions well into adulthood.”42 Maps that could reorganize themselves in response to changes in the body, Merzenich conjectured, would confer an incredible evolutionary advantage.43
Neural maps also change through experience. In 1949 the Canadian behavioral psychologist Donald O. Hebb proposed that when neurons fire at the same time repeatedly, the two develop a strong connection; the more they fire together, the stronger the connection. Here is a principle of neuroplasticity that wasn’t just about sensory capacities but broadly applicable to all kinds of learning and experience. The opposite principle was also demonstrated to hold. While Merzenich was doing his doctorate at Johns Hopkins in the early 1960s, some other scientists in the same group discovered that the brains of animals had a “critical period” of extraordinary plasticity in which they were shaped by early experience. Newborn kittens, for example, had to have visual experience in the first few weeks of life or they would be blind. If a kitten had one eye closed by the researcher and one eye open, the visual map of the closed eye would not develop and the cat would be blind in that eye for life. We recall the “imprinting” experiments of Konrad Lorenz in which ducks brought up without a mother in a critical early period bonded with a person as a mother substitute. And Freudian theory is all about critical periods of openness in which a certain development must take place for psychological normalcy. The kitten experiments revealed something else: the parts of the brain map that would have been operative in relation to the closed eye became connected and functionally contributory to the good eye.44 That there is a critical period of plasticity in infancy when the brain is in a state of rapid development began to be accepted. Merzenich, however, began to discover adult plasticity as well.
Merzenich wondered how the topographic order of the maps emerged. He found that repeating sequences of movements in a fixed order link certain functions that are then mapped together. Often these movements are of contiguous areas of the body, such as the fingers of a hand. So the thumb and the index finger are closely mapped because they are repeatedly used together as we grasp things, for example. Another example: low notes tend to occur together, so low sounds are mapped together, as are high sounds. Merzenich and his colleagues developed experiments in which they taught monkeys new skills in order to see what would happen to their neural maps as a result. One experiment had a monkey learn how to spin a disk in a very nuanced way that involved using its fingertips with great sensitivity in order to get a reward. The monkey had to pay very close attention to reproduce the exact spin the researchers demanded. The result was that the area of the monkey’s brain map devoted to fingertips expanded as it learned to exert just the right amount of pressure. A similar effect was also demonstrated for various cognitive and sensory skills such as the recognition of sounds. It turned out that both paying close attention and repetition were crucial factors in initiating and maintaining plastic change. Initial close attention predicted long-term change, and without that initial concentration there was a failure to retain much change in the brain maps.
An even more interesting result was that as the neurons became more efficient from practicing the task, the expansion stopped and eventually began to recede, for at that point fewer neurons were needed to perform the task. The researchers discovered from this and other experiments like it that when neurons are trained through practice and become more efficient, they also process faster and use less brain space. Hence there is plasticity in the very speed in which actions are performed.
Merzenich regards the brain as “structured by its constant collaboration with the world.” All kinds of experiences—sensory, motor, cognitive, emotional—shape and reshape the different functions of the brain. While the cortex has more neurons than other parts of the brain and may be more plastic, plasticity is nevertheless a capacity of all brain tissue, Doidge holds—even the amygdala (a seat of emotion) and the hippocampus (which controls the conversion of short-term memories to long-term ones). “Research has shown that neuroplasticity is neither ghettoized within certain departments in the brain nor confined to the sensory, motor, and cognitive processing areas,” Doidge writes. And Merzenich argues, “You cannot have plasticity in isolation. . . . It’s an impossibility.” His research has demonstrated that if one brain system changes, the systems connected to it also change. This is because brain systems function together.45 “Thinking, learning, and acting actually change both the brain’s physical structure (anatomy) and functional organization (physiology) from top to bottom.”46
But all this speaks to the dark side of neuroplasticity as well as its tremendous potential to be used for human benefit. The dark side includes addictions, obsessive-compulsive behavior, and various other kinds of resistance to change, both cognitive and behavioral. We train ourselves in bad habits through repetition and intensity of focus, and the environment can lock us into patterns of behavior and meaning. Now we can better understand groupthink and the tyranny and danger of habitual interpretations of the world. This is why free will is so deceptive and otherworldly an ideal. It’s not possible for creatures like us. We can’t stand above our brains and rewire them by hand or by will. We don’t choose our beliefs and actions; instead, we are those actions and beliefs because they are written into our brains. We have written them into our brains, not by will but by experience and unconscious osmosis, so to speak. And the neural maps are also one of the sources of the self and also of a feeling of self, as I will discuss below.
Retraining and intense rethinking, however, can give us some freedom from the tyranny of our deeply ingrained patterns of engagement with the environment, and even help us gain new perspectives on ourselves. Now we may begin to have a sense of where freedom lies. Individually, it is in coming to understand how our brains work and seeking interventions that reshape our habits and broaden our thinking. On the societal scale, our freedom lies in developing institutions and cultural beliefs and practices and families that shape our brains toward the broadest good rather than toward narrow interests, and toward health rather than addictive habits and other limitations, starting early in life. We can use the growing understanding of how the brain works to reshape our environments—and thus develop contexts and institutions that foster habits of thought and behavior that further both the personal and the general benefit—and we as individuals can also use that knowledge to broaden our thinking about the world and ourselves within it by intensive and enhanced learning.
Alvaro Pascual-Leone, chief of Harvard Medical School’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, was the first to use transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to investigate brain maps.47 The TMS emitting device can directly make neurons fire in the brain and hence directly influence behavior; TMS can also be used to block temporarily an area of the brain from functioning so that the precise function of a particular brain area can be identified. TMS can also be used therapeutically, for example, to excite areas of the brain that are inhibited in depression. Pascual-Leone has identified what he believes are two neuroplastic pathways, one that brings about a short-term change and another, long-term one that consolidates change. Early in his career he studied the brain maps of blind subjects learning to read Braille and found that the neural motor maps for the Braille reading fingers became larger as the subjects learned to read. The learning occurred during the week from Monday to Friday and then subjects had weekends off. By Friday the subjects’ maps were much larger than on Monday, but by the end of the weekend, the maps had returned to normal size. What was happening? The size of the Monday maps started to change only after six months had gone by. The Monday-to-Friday map changes, Pascual-Leone surmised, were dramatic short-term changes that strengthened existing neural networks, whereas the long-term changes evident at six months were evidence of “brand-new structures, probably the sprouting of new neuronal connections and synapses.”48 Doidge suggests that this two-phase process is probably why we can quickly learn something by cramming for an exam but then forget it just as quickly. Enduring change, truly mastering new skills, takes longer. (In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell argues that becoming an expert at anything whatsoever, from piano playing to sports to computer programming to being a rock star, takes almost invariably ten thousand hours or about ten years of intensively focused work. Not that putting in ten thousand hours necessarily makes you a star; it’s a necessary but not sufficient condition for expertise. There’s also a lot of luck, privilege, and social and cultural context involved, according to Gladwell. It’s a matter not of will but of opportunities taken.)49
After his work on the motor and sensory cortex, Pascual-Leone turned to investigate the way thoughts change the brain. His research involved two groups who learned a piano piece: one group practiced the piece on the piano for two hours per day for five days, and the other group merely sat in front of a piano and imagined playing the piece in their minds for the same length of time. Mental practice, it turned out, produced the same physical changes in the motor system of the brain maps as the actual practice. Both groups played the music equally well at the end. This finding and those like it are enabling the development of devices to help the paralyzed regain function by connecting their thoughts to technological products that can replace their paralyzed limbs, for example. They can learn to move devices with their thoughts, it turns out, by going through the exact thinking sequence that moving the limb would entail and then linking that sequence to a computer that recognizes it and is attached to a device that can produce the motion. Experiments with rats have borne out the feasibility of such an invention. It worked with rats: through a series of steps rats learned to merely imagine their paws pressing a bar for water, and a computer that recognized the neural pattern that precedes the action delivered them water.50 Thinking is not a passive process, as we tend to assume, nor is it emotionally detached. It would appear to be as engaged and active in terms of our brains as learning a piano piece through mental practice.
Thinking is a form of action, it turns out. Pascual-Leone likens our brain to Play-Doh. “I imagine,” he says, “that the brain activity is like Play-Doh one is playing with all the time.” Everything we do changes the shape of the Play-Doh.51 Neural pathways are always being laid down or strengthened. It is these stable patterns that give us a sense of identity as the same person over time. We are our brain maps and our brain mapping.52
When we learn, the structure of neurons is changed, and synaptic connections are formed and re-formed. These findings won Eric Kandel, Norman Doidge’s mentor at Columbia, the Nobel Prize in 2000. Subsequent research by Kandel and others showed that learning alters which genes in our neurons are expressed or turned on and which are not.53 This is a process that is implicated in psychotherapy as well as other kinds of learning, according to Kandel. In a way this turns our standard assumptions about the direction of genetic causality on its head: not only do genes cause behavior, but behavior influences how our genes operate. Nature and nurture are far more deeply interwoven and mutually implicated than we had ever imagined. There are thirty billion neurons in the human cortex, which means that our brains have the capacity to make one million billion synaptic connections; the possible neural circuits made up of these connections reaches a number impossible to even grasp: 10 followed by a million zeroes!54 We need to begin to come to grips with the extraordinary vastness of our human neuroplasticity, of the extraordinary openness of the range of our possible thinking and behavior. That ungraspably enormous range is to think biologically about ourselves as a species. To think biologically about our humanness is not to invent narrow, evolutionary psychological tales about who we are as a species and how we must therefore act—for example, that we are inevitably promiscuous or violent or monogamous or hierarchical. Our neuroplasticity blasts open our possible ways of being in the world to proportions unfathomable and, for all practical purposes, infinite.
We are neural beings. . . . Our brains take their inputs from the rest of our bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world thus structures the very concepts we can use to think.
—GEORGE LAKOFF
What the world is like can be part of what enables us to experience what it is like. . . . Evolution has no reason of principle to respect the [boundaries of the] skin in enabling experience.
—SUSAN HURLEY
Given the unimaginable vastness of neuroplasticity, how do we become distinctly who we are rather than mere harborers of infinite possible actions, beliefs, and selves? With the kind of openness that constitutes us, how can we ever decide on anything? Become a stable and recognizable personality? Have any continuity across time? If we, our “selves,” are our brain maps, how do these maps get drawn up and pinned down? In what ways do they remain open as well as set? How do our experiences and interactions and engagements in the world—our family, where we were born and grew up, our autobiography, our place in the biographies of other people who were close to us and in the larger immediate and historical world, the great historical events of our lifetime, our roles in the family and at school and in all kinds of institutions and groups, and on and on—come to be pathways in the neuroplasticity of our brain maps?
A significant part of the answer to this question is what cognitive scientists call cognitive framing.55 Our minds are not receptacles of isolated pieces of information but rather built of cognitive frames through which we organize and interpret our experience and the world around. These frames are largely unconscious—that is, we are unaware of how they arose, we are aware (or conscious) of them in the use of them, and we can become self-consciously aware of them as well. They are also emotionally laden; we absorb them from the cultural, familial, institutional, and historical environments we grow up in. George Lakoff, a linguist and cognitive scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, has been one of the foremost contributors to rethinking language and philosophy in the light of findings in the cognitive and neurosciences; he has also applied these new fields to rethinking politics and political language. Our lives, and the stories we tell about them, shape the basic beliefs through which we perceive our environments. “Our brains and minds work to impose a specific understanding on reality,” Lakoff writes, so “not everyone understands reality in the same way.”56
Lakoff points out that language uses “frames, prototypes, metaphors, narratives, images, and emotions” in shaping our understandings or interpretations of ourselves and our contexts. But language, he warns, “is the surface, not the soul, of the brain.”57 Deeper things are going on that get expressed and modified in and by language. For example, the unconscious character of 98 percent of our thinking (as the cognitive psychologist Michael Gazzaniga and others estimate) gets expressed in covert ways via language. The emotional ladenness of our thinking gets expressed in and through language. The narrative character of life or of experience generally—that our experiences have a pattern of beginning, middle, and end that we impose upon them—gets expressed in language. We use metaphors based in bodily experience to conceive ourselves and our lives, and this shapes language.
Lakoff tells us that cognitive frames are “scripts” that “are among the cognitive structures we think with” and that “frames tend to structure a huge amount of our thought.”58 An illustration he offers is of a murder mystery, a frame we all know. There is a murder, a detective, a process of investigation and discovery, the catching of the murderer, and so on. So “each frame has roles (like a cast of characters), relations between the roles, and scenarios carried out by those playing the roles.”59 And such frames even provide the underlying structure of key institutions. We all know, for example, that in the United States, public schools are regionally distributed, have teachers, a principal, janitors, classes generally divided according to age, sports activities, school colors, and summer vacations. The school frame enables us to grasp any given school quickly and know generally what it’s about, how it operates, and what the basic roles within its structure are. Events also have cognitive frames.60 Take a baseball game, for example: we know it has innings and teams, we know the arc of how the game progresses, we know how a game is won, and we know the rules that govern the process to completion. We can tell the story of the Red Sox winning the World Series for the first time in eighty-six years in 2004 because we have in our minds, especially as Americans, the general cognitive frame of how baseball games work.
Even simple actions that we perform, such as taking a drink of water or tying our shoes, are dependent upon event structures that transpire over time. These are simple narratives or stories about first lifting your arm to the sink, turning on the tap, and so forth.61 It turns out that the same narrative structures are engaged both when we perform a particular action or live out a narrative and also when we understand someone else’s action or series of actions or hear their story.62 So our mind, through its cognitive frames, is a social mind both in its comprehension of its environment and in its active engagement with that environment. It is also broadly cultural and historical as well as autobiographically nuanced, which involves a smaller social arena of history, culture, and location. We are our cognitive frames, so we have selfiness (feelings of ownership and desire for their furtherance) toward them. Those cognitive frames are also “groupy”; that is, they arise in all kinds of socially and historically shaped contexts and express shared understandings that we grasp and enact. It is via cognitive frames that basic social mammalian moral feelings and tendencies are embedded and played out—and it is within these frames that they arise, for that matter.
Cognitive framing exposes how neuroplasticity, at the very least, links meanings to each other and to context and to our individual biographical selves. We don’t have words all jumbled in our minds or objects in little cubbyholes. We don’t pick out isolated words or isolated objects to create scenes and meaning. Instead, we draw on highly contextualized, overlapping meanings, language, and experience frames when we think, talk, learn, and encounter new experiences. We constantly enrich our neural maps by filtering our experience through interpretive frames, which in turn are modified in the process. Lakoff points out that the evolutionarily oldest part of the brain, the limbic system, one of the brain’s basic emotional regions, has two emotional circuits, one producing positive emotions and the other negative emotions, and there are pathways in the brain linking these circuits to the forebrain, where it is thought that cognitive framing and interpretation take place, binding rapid and unconscious emotional reactions to narrative sequences. This “allow[s] the right emotions to go where they should in a story. They are the binding circuits responsible for the emotional content of everyday experiences,” Lakoff says. “Narratives and frames are not just brain structures with intellectual content,” he continues, “but rather with integrated intellectual-emotional content.”63 The highly emotional quality of cognitive frames makes them feel very personally owned. They are selfy. They offer and anchor a personal point of view.
We all know the rags-to-riches narrative frame. That frame has special cultural resonance in the United States, as does the political narrative frame of being born in a log cabin and rising to become president. These are two special narrative frames that evoke “cultural prototypes, themes, images, and icons” and, as a result, powerful emotions and national group ideals and attachments.64 Other examples of narrative frames that have special American cultural resonance and attachment involve the reinvention of the self and the redemption of the self. Bill Clinton’s “Comeback Kid” nickname exemplified the redemption story as well as the born-in-a-log-cabin and rags-to-riches stories. George W. Bush’s dramatic turning away from alcoholism in his forties evokes the redemption and reinvention stories; he had to play down the born-with-a-silver-spoon story and invoke the just-a-regular-guy-to-go-have-a-beer-with story to get the American people to feel he was presidential material; by contrast, John Kerry didn’t evoke that story and he didn’t play down the silver-spoon story enough to appeal to Americans’ sense of collective ideals and identity. Who we are, or who we think we are, and the narratives and images that evoke those senses of self have enormous emotional power to shape our choices and decisions—and they do so beneath the level of conscious and rational thought.
The stories of people’s lives can be told in a vast number of ways. In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell chronicles the rise of the very famous and highly successful, beginning with the standard cultural narrative of great success as the result of special talent and even genius. But Gladwell seeks to undermine this conventional narrative, retelling the stories of software billionaires like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, renowned Canadian hockey players, and even the Beatles, as stories that reveal success as the product of extraordinary opportunities encountering cultural and familial legacies. Those who were lucky enough to have both and who could and did take advantage of them through obsessive focus and work succeeded in a big way. Gladwell’s purpose in reframing how we think about success is to induce in us changes in our cognitive framing of success—to change the stories we tell ourselves and give as explanations of success, decisions, and social and cultural trends. This is possible because of neuroplasticity. For example, he wants us to think that extraordinary focus and hard work are more important and effective in success than any natural talent or even genius. The neuroplasticity of cognitive frames suggests that the best intervention to get people to change their behavior may be to change the way they see the problem. It’s surely a necessary first step. Now we can understand why Republicans and Democrats spar endlessly over the way problems are defined. Are welfare recipients cheats, or are they deserving poor humbled by circumstances we could all fall into, such as losing a job or becoming ill or losing health insurance? Is buying one’s own health insurance a way of standing tall, or is it the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical companies exploiting the vulnerable and sick for profit? Which story wins out over the other in these cases determines a lot of our future. Narrative frames are in competition, and embedded within them are personal and group interests. They are neither neutral nor innocent.
Lakoff holds that there are three types of cognitive frames: universal ones, group and cultural cognitive ones, and individual and highly personal ones. These, of course, all intersect and interact in complex ways within us. But the personal one is perhaps the most emotionally charged and motivational for us. It is, Lakoff says, a “personal narrative,” a life story that is at the center of who we are. Each of us has an overall cognitive frame that is our life story; that phenomenon is the most up-to-date way that psychologists define personality, according to Lakoff. We live out and from our personal stories. But these stories are largely implicit, an unconscious background that structures who we are and where we are going. “The roles in narratives that you understand yourself as fitting give meaning to your life, including the emotional color that is inherent in narrative structures,” Lakoff writes.65 The roles we implicitly assign ourselves (or have assigned to us by family and other contexts) include hero, victim, and helper, he says. So Lakoff proposes that a nurse may see himself as the helper to the hero-doctor. A president may see herself as hero-rescuer of a victim-nation. These are stories that we are not born with but born into. Lakoff points out that many deep narratives are activated together—personal, cultural, situational, familial—and that these complexes affect how we fit ourselves into social structures, how we understand our world and place ourselves within its patterns and meanings. These patterns of simultaneous activation of cognitive frames become fixed in our neural pathways. They unconsciously shape our brains, selves, and worlds. They enable us to understand our environments. They determine our choices.
The Greeks understood that moral character was not just about imbibing moral rules or even virtues but about understanding, rethinking, and reimagining the trajectory of one’s life. That the unexamined life is not worth living was Socrates’s moral insight, the philosophical elaboration of the Delphic maxim to know thyself. For Aristotle, ethics was not just about acting according to the golden mean or the acquisition of discrete virtuous habits (as his theory is generally presented in America today) but also about developing the self-understanding and understanding of the human world—and even of the cosmos and of our place within it—needed to discover the ideal life and the best trajectory of a life for a human being. That best human life, in Aristotle’s estimation, was the life of the mind, engaging in a lifetime of wide-ranging investigation and learning.66 What could be more central to rethinking ethics than becoming aware of how our lives follow available narrative patterns gained from our biographies and social contexts and cultural meanings, which we also project into our futures and invoke to explain our pasts? Yet if these frames are largely unconscious (by which I mean implicit) social, cultural, and biographical interpretations that we enact rather than self-consciously construct, then ethical engagement has to take place at a different level from self-conscious deliberation about discrete moral decisions or principles. It is really something else entirely.
Moreover, cognitive frames that pin down interpretations personally and culturally must be understood against the background of our human enormously vast neuroplasticity, with its infinite possibilities for meaning and action. When we recognize that interpretation, belief, and understanding are so open-ended that they can take almost any form, from the most anchored and literal to almost infinite flights of complex metaphorical, symbolic, highly culturally specific, and technically specialized meanings, and that they can also be easily hijacked by self-serving cognitive framing, we see both promise and danger. Action, including ethical action, can be managed and directed via interpretation, which is to say at the cognitive level of belief and understanding and their accompanying emotions and motivations. How do we ensure that we embrace the cognitive frames of the saintly rescuers and not those of the Nazi perpetrators? If our cognitive frames, our well-worn paths of understanding, associated emotion, and action, are mostly implicit rather than available to self-conscious awareness, inherited rather than chosen, enacted rather than explicit, largely social and cultural and institutional rather than individual and self-made, how can we develop and ensure a reliable ethical life for ourselves, for our children, and for the society and world in which we live? The flexibility provided by neuroplasticity gives us hope. Intervention and change would seem possible, in fact, vastly possible. But how? It seems that ethical changes in our neuroplastic pathways must come principally from changes in social and cultural beliefs and practices. Yet is there also the possibility of developing a more individuated self, a self whose pathways of understanding, belief, motivation, and action differ from those of the crowd and are oriented toward a more independent moral sense and sensitivity? It is to these questions we now turn.