Brett Davidson: In the communications and narrative field, we often hear that the brain science says this, the brain science says that, about what sorts of messages are most effective. But it's not always clear to me how accurate these statements are, or even what some people mean when they say brain science. So I thought it might be helpful to start by going back to some basics. Maybe you could just tell us, what is Neuroscience? What exactly does it study?

Suparna Choudhury: Broadly speaking, Neuroscience is the study of the structure, function and development of the nervous system. So that's the brain and the distributed nervous system across the body. It's a very multidisciplinary field. So depending on what level you want to study the brain and nervous system, whether it's molecular, cellular, whether it's the level of neurophysiology or cognition, you would use different techniques for measurement. And I think what's probably most relevant to our conversation is the field of cognitive Neuroscience. Cognitive Neuroscience is the study of the relationship between brain activity and cognitive processes. So it involves asking questions about consciousness, about behavior, and also about when behavior or when cognitive processes go awry, so mental disorder or mental illness, and predominantly the techniques are EEG MRI and functional MRI, so magnetic resonance imaging, which looks at the structure of the brain, functional MRI, which looks at functional correlates through blood flow EEG electrodes, which is when you see those caps and electrodes and lots of wires coming out, which looks in real time, electrical activity in the brain.

Brett Davidson: It all sounds a bit frightening. You know, that this can give people power. That if you know what someone's thinking, you can start to control their thoughts. And I just wondered, is that something we should be worried about? Is that a helpful way to think about this kind of Neuroscience research?

Suparna Choudhury: I, over time, answer that question really differently. So yes, on first listening to the way that you framed that it sounds deterministic. It sounds horribly reductionistic, in a way. At the same time, there's an enormous appeal to that, I think. And it's that very seductive appeal of objectivity, and it's this idea that many of us have, mostly outside of the Neurosciences, that if it's in the brain or in the nervous system, then it must be real, then it must be true or hardwired in some way. So it depends on the question that we're asking. If it's, for example, about communication strategies or narrative strategies, there's something very compelling about saying, well, we want to kind of activate the brain in a certain way, because it will yield the most powerful results. But I think there are so many contingencies in Neuroscience research, and I guess my whole career having trained at the lab bench has been in unpicking those contingencies. We have to remember that we're always drawing inferences. We're drawing results from large groups of people in these studies, and then we are applying them to individuals. So our thinking in Neuroscience is necessarily probabilistic, but what we do with it is pretty binary. For example, in the criminal justice system, we might look to a Neuroscience apparatus to ask ourselves, is this person culpable? Guilty of a crime or not? And we look at comparisons between groups of subjects to arrive at the information that we want to use – at the frontal cortex, for example, was it developed enough to take responsibility? We're looking at groups to derive probabilistic answers, but in court, we're going to determine whether someone is guilty or not or goes to a detention center or not. So there's this leap that we make, and this is something that we always need to be problematizing. Having said that, the technology has moved on in leaps and bounds, and it is absolutely methodologically more real that these things are with us right now and raising major existential questions, because we are all the time now using neuro technologies, whether we like it or not. They're there in mainly in marketing algorithms on the internet. Companies looking to track our eyes and figure out how to capitalize on the way that we look at screens and capitalize on our biggest resource of our time, which is our attention.

Brett Davidson: And you know that brings up the question of social media. Things like the Cambridge Analytica scandal and others, that happened some years ago, these actors, they're trying to gather our data, right? They're trying to understand what catches our attention, what will cause us, you know, to act on something, share something, and so on. And so the pressure, then, is the people on our side, if we want to call it that, what we call using it for good, that we should be using this knowledge and these techniques, which sometimes seem really unethical and manipulative. And I'm wondering, you know, how do you think about that?

Suparna Choudhury: Yeah, I think it's important to remember, and you've already pointed to the like dual nature of this question, that this kind of brain tracking or hacking, however we talk about it, can benefit humanity immensely, and it already is. So people with physical disability who want to have control of robotic arms, for example, or folks with intractable depression, epilepsy, there are cases where this kind of mind reading through neuro technologies allows and affords great advantages for living with certain disabilities, for example. The other side of it is, as we want to advance these technologies for good, or what we would consider good, there are all sorts of threats to self determination, to privacy, to security, and to what some people have already theorized about cognitive liberty, to the point where folks are talking about whether we have to rethink aspects of the human rights declaration to protect our cognitive liberty. We never used to think that the insides of the bounds of our skull could be amenable to all sorts of manipulation and misuse. But now, of course, they can, and so as we think about the development of wearable brain sensors and other similar technologies, eye tracking, for example, some aspects can be empowering for mental health, for our well-being, for our control over our own health. At the other end of the spectrum is a set of queries about who gets access to this information. And I don't know the answers in any sort of prescriptive way, but these things certainly need to be worked out in terms of regulation, and I think they're really complicated questions. There's an ethicist who's talked really well about it in a recent book. Nita Farahany has talked about this distinction between expressed behaviors and as yet unexpressed behaviors. So some things we make choices about and we express, and these might be amenable to meta or even Coke and Pepsi, there are old examples of neuromarketing that have looked at our choices and our preferences for different tastes and so on, and these are being used and manipulated to sell us things, which is already insidious, but at least those are expressed behaviors that we've made. What happens when brain sensors or any other kind of wearable technologies that look like earbuds, for example, can detect unexpressed thoughts? So when we dream or like when our minds wonder, these are thoughts that we own but may never take shape in the world. What happens if technologies can make inferences about things that are unconscious? Can they be used to kind of stigmatize us, mark us as different from others? There are some really insidious misuses and so regulation for this kind of thing and rethinking wher our human rights, how deep they go. They to the point of the insides of our skull is a whole fraught area that's really up for grabs. And of course, you know what might be relevant to us thinking about narrative and things like political affiliation. There are examples out there where wearable brain sensors are being used to detect for fatigue. For example, they may be to protect people, you know, truck drivers and night shifts and to be wary of accidents. The other side of that, though, is the same technology might be used in the workplace to monitor-stroke-control people's productivity. It's being done, or we might be able to track an infer looking time at certain kinds of stimuli out in the world and infer sexual orientation, political affiliation, all sorts of things that pertain to our personal identities. These are things that might be relevant to communications. But there's a really insidious side to using these and accessing these data.

Brett Davidson: You were influential in founding the field of critical Neuroscience, can you say a bit about your role in there? Yeah,

Suparna Choudhury: So towards the end of my PhD, I founded this subfield of Critical Neuroscience, bringing a sensibility of Anthropology and History and Philosophy of Science to bear on how we were doing Neuroscience, and it was really a moment. It was such a Zeitgeist. It was just after Bush one declared the decade of the brain, and there was so much funding being pushed towards Neuroscience studies at the expense of the humanities and social sciences. So this was a moment of great enthusiasm and enormous amounts of money being put behind the promise of Neuroscience and our role in critical Neuroscience. We were a group of philosophers. It began in Berlin, and then we sort of built it through workshops in LA and in Montreal, eventually, and now there are lots of courses on Critical Neuroscience, but the idea is just to raise a kind of awareness of the contingencies of experimental research. So when we're studying something – risk taking, for example, and we're looking at young people in a brain scanner, the idea of Critical Neuroscience is to look at what are the cultural, historical, social assumptions that we're making when we set up an experiment? Who gets included in the studies? Are we starting to extrapolate data that are premised on 12 white Harvard undergrads and applying them to the rest of us? And it's looking critically at questions like this, which has become much more the norm now, but at the time, it was quite unusual. It was also looking at the categories that we use of mental illness and the contingencies of the diagnostic manual of psychiatric illnesses. It was looking at the social life and political life of Neuroscience. How do these things play out in society, just like the questions you were asking me. There was a lot of interest in gender difference, for example. This would be a really hot topic and really controversial topic right now to look at the Neuroscience of like binary sex and gender, and what are the implications of doing that? We started to think about culture. Culture was this very messy stuff that was left to sociologists and anthropologists, and we were saying, hang on a second. Why are we assuming that everyone is culturally homogeneous in these experiments? We bring very different cultural backgrounds that must shape our perception of the world, that must shape our reaction times, our responses to different stimuli. But there are risks of doing this kind of work, of course, because you don't want to reproduce old colonial science that looked at cultural differences and studied biological underpinnings of cultural differences. So how to do that in a nuanced way that appreciates difference but looks carefully at what lines of difference we're drawing between people? So these were some of the questions and the kinds of work that we were doing.

Brett Davidson: So are there some kinds of key insights from Neuroscience that can help us understand the role of narrative, symbol more generally, in how people understand issues and then how we should be communicating?

Suparna Choudhury: I think an important one is a kind of recent, sort of recent insight from Neuroscience that the human brain is a social brain. That social cues are especially salient when you can make a certain communication stimulus, whether it's a narrative or a visual image, self-referential. When a person can step in easily, into the shoes of the person, the protagonist, it's particularly powerful. And I think that's why stories are especially compelling, because they invite humans to step into the role of the protagonist, to read minds, to empathize. And this is a whole fascinating field of Neuroscience, social Neuroscience, that I think is very relevant. We tend to simulate, like other humans. Primates simulate other primates, and we in Neuroscience talked about this in terms of the mirror neuron system. So I think social cues are particularly salient. I think Neuroscience can teach communications folks about the way that visual stimuli are especially compelling. It can teach us about when the brain fatigues and when there's too much information, when the brain can get distracted, and how to streamline stories.

I do think there's a lot to be learned, and I want to make a quick point that it's always important to ask, what is Neuroscience telling us that psychology hasn't already told us? And here is this kind of mistrust that we often have in the subjective and in the psychological. We tend to believe it if we can see it, because it's grounded in the brain, but often these Neuroscience studies are absolutely dependent on a subjective level. We can't make sense of what we see in a brain scan without asking a person what they think. So we never get rid of the realm of psychology. But yeah, I think Neuroscience can show us how emotions matter, how motivation works, processes of decision making, and the ways that emotion shapes decision making. It's already done that. It's already informed a lot of creative advertising and product development, but I think we are talking about it in a slightly different way, not to just exploit what we know grabs attention, because in many ways, there's an irony here. We don't necessarily want to exploit the brain in the same way that's already been done by the forces that we're trying to subvert and critique. And that's when I think the critical Neuroscience perspective is helpful, because it reminds us that the brain is bathed in a body. The body is among other people, and these people are in social institutions of power, and a purely neuroscientific perspective tends to omit the structural. And critical Neuroscience was really premised on the idea that reductionism is colluding with a lot of these forces that we -- and I speak about you and I and our community, you know that we critique and we always want to have an eye on the structural, the social, structural, social inequality, systemic racism, power dynamics between institutions. And so I think Neuroscience can be part of our strategy, and always just a part of a strategy. And we've always got to keep an eye on the bigger picture, the human as situated in the world, among others.

Brett Davidson: So do you think maybe we pay a bit too much attention to messaging as such, and too little to things like social context and other kinds of cultural context in which the messages happen?

Suparna Choudhury: Yeah, I think within experimental science, it's waking up to all this noise about culture, and the noise is more than a metaphor, because we used to cast away questions of culture as too much noise in the lab. Now this noise is the stuff that we want to study, and experimental setups are getting more sophisticated. For example, we always used to look at the individual brain simulating the external world in a video game, for example, that they're looking at. And we know that the presence of another person shapes our behaviors, our choices in the real world. We know that through Neuroscience as well. So now people are starting to do, or they have done, for at least a decade now, hyper scanning, which is putting two people in the lab together, both having their brain scanned at the same time, knowing that the other - and being in interaction. And so people are starting to think about the group, starting to come up with more ecologically valid paradigms, even taking out EG caps and doing experiments in situ. Like fieldwork that's out there, looking at psychedelic experiences, ayahuasca rituals, studying all these kinds of things in different settings. It's not without its limitations, but it's getting to those kinds of questions, I think relevant to a lot of this is remembering that the brain is not a static thing, and that there are now a good few decades of research showing us that the brain is really malleable. It's a shifting entity. It's plastic, as we say in Neuroscience, and so that's an important piece of science for us, if we're thinking about questions of solidarity, for example, or changing people's minds. Adult brains can change. We always used to think this was limited to childhood or like sensitive periods of development like adolescence, but actually, given certain conditions, we don't have to be stuck in our ways and Neuroscience science, trying to understand, like, what are the conditions to maximize plasticity, to help people bridge across difference? These are questions that I think are kind of useful pieces of science for us.

Brett Davidson: So in a political context, a social context with a lot of polarization, which we see now, I guess the tendency might be to want to do the most effective messaging to persuade someone to think as I do, or as you do. You know we're coming up to an election in the US. The stakes are pretty high, and we want to ensure you know people vote a certain way, or many of us do. And I'm wondering how to weigh that against this idea of cognitive liberty. So do we want to rather maximize people's cognitive liberty, right? And the options for people to make free decisions and explore the options for themselves? Y

Suparna Choudhury: Yeah, it's a really tricky question. I actually intuitively feel like it's problematic to just apply messaging that is to push and persuade in the same way that advertising -- to, you know, to hit dopamine reward centers. And in fact, to really understand that decision making is not that straightforward, that there are lots of historical factors in a person's life. We tend to forget when we think about Neuroscience of an individual history and that cultural context and a political wider context. But are there ways to think about all these things together so that the person who's coming up with a narrative strategy can be mindful that one person is weighing up their thinking based on their lived experience of a history of oppression, or of certain freedoms or of certain relationships, that, yes, they are biological beings as well, and they're driven towards certain impulses, but to kind of treat our approach and strategy with a lens of thinking that humans are more than just these kind of primal beings driven chemically towards certain things. That's just my politics and my intuition. But of course, people have made very compelling messaging campaigns using, you know, stimuli and very biological, you know, exploiting that kind of information.

Brett Davidson: So are there some things when you know you see popular media accounts of Neuroscience and what people are saying, the Neuroscience says, or what it does and what Neuroscience is telling us? Are there any misunderstandings that drive you nuts every time you hear them that you just wish you could debunk once and for all?

Suparna Choudhury: Well, causality. I'm often seeing the way that things are written, like this region in the brain made someone do something. It's just a fallacy. There's also like -- because things are correlational. It's kind of like when I was talking about group level differences and extrapolating to look at an individual. That's certainly one thing. Talking about things as causal. We never really know. We only know that when I reach to touch a key on my keyboard, this part of my brain in the motor cortex, is activated. We don't know that it caused me to do that. There are lots of slippages that we make. You know, touching a key on my keyboard has no major social implications, but something about criminal action or political orientation does. I think about intergroup differences and cultural differences, and how in the excitement around this new subfield of cultural Neuroscience that arose not so long ago, people started to recreate these divisions at the level of the brain between Eastern people and Western people, and it was tremendously problematic because there were lots of overlap in these studies between who was deemed Eastern and Western. And we live in an increasingly globalized world, we are mixed up beings, and so studying it in such simplistic ways is really problematic for me, and I think, I think there's been a bit of a kind of wakeup call around that already.

Brett Davidson: Okay, so what are some ways for someone like me to stay abreast of what's being researched, what's being learned, and then pay attention and I guess, translate some of that research into how we do this work of trying to bring about social change.

Suparna Choudhury: I think, you know, journal publications, the high impact, well peer reviewed journal publications. They're fast. They're always churning papers out fast, but real engagement - I think it's really important in the field that we're in to maintain lines of communication directly with scientists, because often scientists are much more willing to talk about the errors and limitations of the sciences than when it's already gone through media channels or policy channels, and extrapolations have been made. So I think increasingly for this kind of narrative strategy work, having partnerships between researchers and strategists is a really important field. Is a really important space, and not only for interpreting and using the science in narrative work. But I think it's really important for scientists to have the voice of the people who apply it, asking what, what are people looking for from the sciences? How should we like nuance our paradigms to make it relevant?

And it's really important to understand the potential uses of science to set up experimental paradigms in a way that they won't necessarily be misused. It's not always possible to control that, but it is possible to be mindful of that. And I think, for example, now having one foot in the sciences and one foot in your world of narrative strategy, I would look to Neuroscience for a few things down the line, and it would be really good to have a conversation between researchers and folks like you to really tease out these research areas. And they are uncertainty. We need to increase the tolerance for uncertainty among all of us, humans, as we live in an increasingly uncertain world, whether it's economic precariousness, conflict or ecological catastrophe. And I think we become polarized when we can no longer tolerate grayness. And we need things to be binary. We need them to be either/or. How can we understand the brain's tolerance for kind of both/and thinking and hold it? I also, you know, I think there should be lots of work on polarization, and how do we overcome the tendency for this polarization? It's connected to that. How do we build solidarity and trust? There's lots of really exciting social Neuroscience on trust that could be used in-group, out-group research. We know that core to human beings is a need to belong, to not be othered. How can we use some of the insights of social psychology and Neuroscience to think about that and the effects of social exclusion and overcoming in-group, out-group barriers to work? You know, a lot of us want to be working towards solidarity, overcoming lines of difference, and so some of this kind of research might be relevant to us, so I think it's definitely worth looking to researchers for that. And finally, I would say we talked about plasticity and malleability. Our thinking can change, and I think it's better to say our thinking than our brains. And if it so happens that our brains can change, but we can change our minds, and there's lots of research to support that. And so thinking about that, as we develop strategies, we might present people with certain scenarios. We might encourage people to empathize with what they think are very unlike others, and it can build trust, build solidarity.

Brett Davidson: So what are some things that keep you optimistic when it seems like there's so much that could you know, can do the opposite? What gives you hope?

Suparna Choudhury: So although we worry, because there's all this sort of sci-fi, futuristic, ethical worry, which is very real, as we're seeing, about the uses and misuses of neuro technologies. There's a lot of excellent thinkers in the lab beavering away who want to keep it very ethical. We've gone through major methodological sea changes in cognitive Neuroscience in the last few years, where from students to senior academics, there was a real exposure of statistical slippages that were going on. So there's been a tightening of rigor, and there are some really robust methodologies being put to good use. So I trust that neuroscientists are working collaboratively across sub-disciplines, and there's exciting, creative research coming out, and that we need good partnerships between researchers and people who want to use this research. Lots of dialog and increased scientific literacy outside of science as well, and that's on the part of scientists, to communicate the science really well, accessibly, but also accurately.