These people study the way biology, in the form of genes, influences behavior. But they’re also trying to understand the complementary process of how social behavior changes biology.
As I've written elsewhere, there is an enormous difference in creative power and abilty to act as a sort of "receiver" for cosmic life energy between interactions and interactions that form a loop, let alone a self-aware and self-regulating loop.
Brooks notes that the average age of these researchers is in their 20's. The field requires letting go of legacy constraints on fields with linear causality, which I've advocated here since the beginnning.
As these researchers move into areas their older faculty colleagues shun, they will need to develop the mathematics to deal with closed, interacting, nested loops of interaction.
(I'll flesh this out with links to original sources later.) Brooks says:
All of these studies are baby steps in a long conversation, and young academics are properly circumspect about drawing broad conclusions. But eventually their work could give us a clearer picture of what we mean by fuzzy words like ‘culture.’ It could also fill a hole in our understanding of ourselves. Economists, political scientists and policy makers treat humans as ultrarational creatures because they can’t define and systematize the emotions. This work is getting us closer to that.
The work demonstrates that we are awash in social signals, and any social science that treats individuals as discrete decision-making creatures is nonsense. But it also suggests that even though most of our reactions are fast and automatic, we still have free will and control.
Many of the studies presented here concerned the way we divide people by in-group and out-group categories in as little as 170 milliseconds. The anterior cingulate cortices in American and Chinese brains activate when people see members of their own group endure pain, but they do so at much lower levels when they see members of another group enduring it. These effects may form the basis of prejudice.
It is "feedback" for example that makes the difference between a rain shower and a tornado. Feedback is what allows a truly great team of people or sports players to discover their socially-empowered selves as they help each other discover each other's vitality and socially empowered selves -- versus the deadwood, mechanical non-discovery operation of a tight-disciplined-hierarchy -- which has the dead power of a drill-press or a circular saw, and the dead order of a crystal of rock-salt.
Closed feedback systems don't just do the same thing that open-feedback (or no feedback) systems do --- they open up entire new dimensions of possibilities that cannot even be conceived of by dead non-feedback systems. (For math lovers, see the difference between IIR and FIR feedback systems.)
We create and recreate the world around us every day. With the power of compounded, closed feedback interactions, the entire social planet could be recreated in a few weeks. The entire psychology of inner city Detroit could be rewritten, out of the box, outside the limits we've written it off into. It is only our imaginations, or lack of them, that hold us back.
Closed feedback loops are the primary receivers of life-energy, the leaves of our tree of life that capture the solar energy of Nature or God or whatever it its, and convert it into revitalizing, rejuvenating power for us all to use.
Conversely, it is precisely the LACK of a feedback loop that destroys the vitality of a strict-hierarchical workplace, where the BOSS commands but never listens, or a centrally-planned government, where the government officials decree and dictate but don't really listen, or a failing automobile company, where management keeps trying to TELL customers what customers want, but doesn't really listen to the response.
The same effect is why, say, an electronic medical records system that affects social behavior and collaboration has to be responsive and adapative, in order to form a closed feedback loop and pick up ACTUAL wisdom about the ACTUAL world. The alternative that we almost always see is a sort of death-warmed-over scenario where the dead mental image of some dead programming team shows up and is imposed on a living, breathing, health system, dragging it downwards like cement blocks on a swimmer. A few, expensive, "prioritized" change requests a year does not constitute "feedback". The system has to LISTEN at least as well as it DICTATES, and THEN it will take on the shape that is completely surprising and unpredicted by the process designers, the shape that ACTUaLLY works and ACTUALLY helps.
It doesn't matter how perfect the STATIC portion of the system is, whatever that means in practice. That just sets an operating point. What matters is the DYNAMIC FEEDBACK capacity of the system. A great system continually debriefs the users and says "how about this? does THIS work for you?" and listens for, hears, accepts and adjusts to the response in a nurturing and supportive way.
Versus a dead system where users are monitored for "bad" behavior,which is anything that is not aligned with the dead system that someone is trying to impose upon them.
Brooks ends with these thoughts, that are worth repeating over and over, and which, of course, I I enjoy since it's what I've been saying all along in this weblog:
WadeI... it is possible to change the lenses through which we unconsciously construe the world.
Since I’m not an academic, I’m free to speculate that this work will someday give us new categories, which will replace misleading categories like ‘emotion’ and ‘reason.’ I suspect that the work will take us beyond the obsession with I.Q. and other conscious capacities and give us a firmer understanding of motivation, equilibrium, sensitivity and other unconscious capacities.
The hard sciences are interpenetrating the social sciences. This isn’t dehumanizing. It shines attention on the things poets have traditionally cared about: the power of human attachments. It may even help policy wonks someday see people as they really are.
T.S. Eliot, in the Four Quartets , said
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
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