Not in the United States?Psychology Press Interview with Dr Jamie Ward - Transcription
This is a transcription of our recorded interview with Dr Jamie Ward, the author of The Student's Guide to Cognitive Neuroscience, originally published on our podcast in September 2006, which can be found on this page.
Psychology Press: Dr Jamie Ward is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Psychology, University College, London. He has a special interest in Synaesthesia, a subject in which he is a leading authority and he has contributed to an understanding of it in both academic and lay circles. His research uses a number of methods in cognitive neuroscience including human neuropsychology, functional imaging and TMS which is Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation.
Jamie Ward's latest book is The Student's Guide to Cognitive Neuroscience, which is published by Psychology Press. Reflecting recent changes in which cognition and the brain are studied. This book provides a comprehensive student guide to cognitive neuroscience, which covers methods, theories and findings in all the key research domains.
So firstly Jamie could you give us a basic overview of the new discipline of cognitive neuroscience.
Jamie Ward: Cognitive neuroscience, I think, is one of the most exciting developments to happen in the study of the mind and brain for many many years. Basically one of the reasons it excites me is that it's a bridging discipline between many different ways of thinking about the mind and the brain.
For example, psychologists have been interested in cognition - how we think, how we perceive, how we remember. Neuroscientists have been interested in cell signalling and so on. Neurophysiologists have been interested in how the brain's blood supply works, and geneticists have been interested in how the brain's wiring is configured, and cognitive neuroscience is really pulling all of this together. It is enabling us to understand how physical matters such as the brain can produce our mental experiences of seeing and thinking and remembering and out emotions and so on.
Within our culture we tend to think about the mind and brain as being completely separate, and this comes back from thousand of years about thinking of our souls as being separate from our bodies. But, as scientists, none of us really necessarily believe this as true, but still solving the problem of how the two can be linked together remains a real mystery.
Cognitive neuroscience is starting to address these questions and throw up some interesting answers and solutions about how this might happen. So, one of the reasons why cognitive neuroscience is possible now but is wasn't possible say twenty or thirty years ago is that we now have the technology to study the brain in vivo completely harmlessly.
So, with fMRI we can monitor how blood-flow changes in the brain and this links back to electrical activity in the brain - when neurons fire they need more oxygen and more blood and this is effectively what we are measuring in these techniques.
We can also stimulate the brain quite harmlessly by using methods such as transcranial magnetic stimulation. This applies weak magnetic fields to the brain that triggers the neurons and causes them to fire. This is completely harmless because when you are thinking or speaking (or listening to my words now) your brain is active all the time and all you are doing is just making it a little bit more active by applying these magnetic fields.
Psychology Press: What do you hope that cognitive neuroscience can actually bring to our understanding of cognition?
Jamie Ward: Cognitive neuroscience will hopefully give us a brain-based explanation of cognition, because the measures that we get from the brain using techniques such as fMRI are just another variable in the way that reaction times and errors are one thing you can measure. Blood-flow and electrical activity is just another measure, so in a way cognitive neuroscience is just increasing the diversity of ways in which we can study the mind and the brain.
The actual theory of the mind and the brain is very much the same as it was before and we are just incorporating these new methods and hopefully, by linking these methods together, we can reach a fuller understanding of how the brain creates our cognition.
In the past cognitive psychology has used methods such as reaction time analysis in which you present stimuli to participants and they have to press a button as quickly as possible. Now, using methods from cognitive neuroscience, what you can do is you can actually study the brain processes directly involved with that, so in reaction time studies what you are wanting to do is infer what is going on in the brain and infer the cognitive structures. But you can do this using other methods that are more directly involved in cognition.
Psychology Press: What do you see as the most exciting development in cognitive neuroscience?
Jamie Ward: I think that there are two developments that really excite me, which I have included in this book.
The first development is the study of consciousness which was kind of outlawed for a lot of the time in the study of psychology - people dismissed this as being trivial and so on - but the question of how the brain produces our conscious experiences and feelings is really one of the hot topics around at the moment.
The reason why cognitive neuroscience is important for understanding this is that a lot of the brain processes that go on are unconscious. The neurons that give rise to unconscious processes work in the same way as neurons that give rise to conscious processes - there is no magical chemical that distinguishes between them. So what is it that distinguishes between them? Is it to do with different patterns of activity in the brain? Is it to do with the way that neurons fire? Maybe they fire in synchrony in a conscious condition and they fire out-of-synchrony in an unconscious condition? We don't really know this, but these are the kinds of questions that we can start to address now.
The second issue that I think is really new, and that excites me a lot, is the study of how we interact socially with each other. This, in the past, has been studied by sociologists and social psychologists who use methods such as questionnaires and so on which still have some validity now, but what we can do is still study people as they interact with each other and measure what goes on in their brain.
So, for example, if people are playing a game in an fMRI scanner and they think they are competing against another human you will see different patterns of brain activity than if they think they are competing against a computer program that is behaving randomly or not, even though the program is the same in both instance.
You can see different neural correlates depending on whether they are interacting socially or whether they think they are just playing a game with a robot. This has given rise to a whole new sub-discipline called "social cognitive neuroscience" which is specifically looking at these questions of how the brain interacts in social circumstance and what the brain does when it is dealing with other people and how we make social decisions.
So, does that differ, for example, for making a social or a non-social decision? Are we using the same types of mechanisms or not? So, for example, is one type of decision-making more governed by emotions and the other is more governed by logic, or are all of our decisions governed by emotions, whether they are social or not? These are the kinds of issues that we are only really starting to grapple with now.
Psychology Press: You mention in your book that the media loves to simplify the findings from cognitive neuroscience with the use of sensationalised headlines such as "Sex, It's all in the mind", and in articles that blame the stroppiness of teenagers on brain changes rather than hormones. What is your opinion of the media in the role of cognitive neuroscience, does it help to popularise the topic and provide an easy way to understand the more challenging material or does it lead to misunderstandings?
Jamie Ward: I think the answer to this question has to be 'yes and no'. I think that the role of the media is very useful both in generating awareness of what is going on and in generating a certain level of understanding about what scientists are wanting to do.
I think, unfortunately, the media just misses the point on a lot of what they are doing, because I think that the basic premise of the media when they see a lot of the study in cognitive neuroscience is "Wow! The brain does that!", when in fact people know things such as sex and mood are to do with the brain. People have known this for a hundred years so finding out that this is in the brain doesn't really take us much further.
The kinds of studies which are genuinely interesting is knowing why it should be that bit of the brain and not any other bit, or, for example, if a study has a particular hypothesis that this part of the brain will react in a certain way and that hypothesis is born out or isn't born out, then that's genuinely interesting.
I think a lot of the time the way the media portrays cognitive neuroscience is as a kind of phrenology, so they are saying here we have got a lump of the brain that seems to be involved in 'this', and you can choose anything you like such as gambling or love of money or any king of these traits, whether somebody likes or doesn't like animals, and sure enough you will find a neural correlate for this because every aspect of mental life and our behaviour does belong in our brain. There is no aspect of our behaviour that doesn't, really.
Finding a neural correlate of the fact that somebody is a dog lover or that somebody isn't is very trivial. What would be truly astonishing would be if you found a region of the brain that responded to the love of dogs and to nothing else whatsoever.
Of course this isn't what we do find, but this is what the media portrays. It makes it sound as if there are regions of the brain that are dedicated to sex and only sex, regions of the brain that are dedicated to understanding monetary concepts and concepts of numbers and nothing else, and it is never quite as straightforward as that. So each region of the brain probably does multiple functions and these functions might be related, but the idea that you can strictly localise something in the brain and that is what that region of the brain does is a huge over-simplification.
To give one example which was very popular in the media, a study about ten years or so ago looked at racial biases in face perception. What they did is they gave white American participants white faces to look at and black faces to look at, and what they found was a part of the brain called the amygdala was active especially for the black faces but not white faces.
The reason that this was picked upon by the media is that this part of the brain is known to be involved with fear. So the idea is that maybe these people have racial prejudices that are only revealed by the brain, and that these people aren't aware of. So it is almost as if you can get an answer from that brain different from what these people are actually saying.
The question here is that "are these people really racially biased or aren't they racially biased?". The media play on this and make it sound as if the brain can tell whether somebody is racist or not, when in fact the final story is probably a lot more complicated than that.
For example, if you show people famous black faces that have positive models such as Martin Luther King you don't necessarily get the same brain activity. It has been suggested that the reason that black faces might be special is that the amygdala is very specialised for detecting eyes, and if you have got black skin and white iris then this is just a better eye detector than if you have got pale skin and the eyes. So it could be even something as trivial as that, but we don't really know what it is. But the idea that you can instantly detect whether somebody is racist by putting them in a brain scanner is probably a little bit naïve. So, in some instances the media does give a disservice to the findings of cognitive neuroscience.
Psychology Press: There has been some heated debate recently about the usefulness of functional magnetic resonance imaging to our understanding of the brain and cognition with suggestions that fMRI has been over hyped. Professor Paul Bloom from Yale University argued in an article called "Seduced by the flickering lights of the brain" in Seed Magazine, that "the media, critical funding decisions, precious column inches, tenure posts, science credibility and the popular imagination have all been influenced by fMRI's seductive but deceptive grasp on our attentions".
What is your position in this ongoing discussion?
Jamie Ward: I have a certain amount of sympathy for what he says. He does actually point out in his article that there are a number of really good studies that are done using these techniques, and there are. But for each of these studies there are poor ones and these are the ones that sometimes get picked up in the media and so on.
For me one of the good things about cognitive neuroscience is that it does use a lot of methods including more traditional methods that psychologists have used in the past, and I think what we don't want to happen is that in order to be respectable you must have to use one particular method and not another.
I have got some sympathy for what he is saying in the sense that people feel that in order for your data to be respectable you have got to have these images of the brain, and I don't think that that is true: I think that you can use a lot of other methods. And I think that the way cognitive neuroscience has to develop is to enable all these methods to work together alongside each other.
In his article Bloom gives an example of a study where there are a number of statements and people have to say whether or not they believe them and so on. And then in a second study what he does is gives the same statements but adds something about "brain imaging research has shown that...".
What he shows is that people are a lot more likely to believe them and be sympathetic to these statements if it is accompanied by some statement about the brain, even though the actual science is the same. So I think people do have a tendency to think that this is 'better science' if it is using the brain or if brain images are displayed, and that isn't necessarily the case. We do have to find a happy medium here between the use of these techniques and the use of more traditional techniques, and also between good science and bad science, so just using these techniques doesn't necessarily make it good science.
Psychology Press: Your personal main area of interest is Synaesthesia, a condition in which people's senses intermingle. So, for example, a synaesthete may experience colour when they hear, or a spoken work may trigger a specific taste. In your expert view can you tell us a little more about synaesthesia?
Jamie Ward: People with synaesthesia experience the ordinary world in extraordinary ways. So, for example, for some people when they are listening to my words now each word might trigger a concrete taste experience in their mouth. For example, the word "mouth" might taste of vinegar and the word "word" might taste of beef. For other people days of the week might have colour and numbers might have colour, so "5" might be a particular shade of red, music such as a Beethoven symphony might trigger complex experiences of movement and colour and shapes popping in and out.
Synaesthesia is really fascinating - it challenges our idea that we all see the world in the same way, because some people just clearly don't. Synaesthesia has been known about for over a hundred years, but it has only been the last few years that people have really taken it seriously and developed ways of showing it is genuine.
For example, people with synaesthesia show reaction time interference if they see a synaesthetically red stimulus printed in green ink - you have got a conflict between the red and green. The colours don't merge but it slows down the processing of the colours and we can measure that in the lab.
Synaesthesia is one of these things that runs in families and they probably have different wiring of the brain although we don't really know very much about how that occurs. One of the reasons why people are interested in it is that maybe it will help us to link together different levels of explanation, so in this instance going from the genes to brain wiring, from brain wiring to perception, and from perception to actual conscious experiences of the world.
The problem that synaesthesia researchers had in the past is that nobody believed that synaesthesia was real, and now we actually have techniques that can look at what is going on in the brain of synaesthetes. So, for example, if they say that they are experiencing colours when they are listening to sound, we can actually show that this is probably the case by putting them in an fMRI scanner and playing them sounds and showing that regions of the brain that are dedicated to colour are active.
It enables us in the first instance to corroborate perhaps some of the subjective reports that they are giving in a way that wasn't necessarily possible before. I think cognitive neuroscience has helped inform research on Synaesthesia just by showing us that all our senses are linked in everybody's brain, so before we didn't really realise that when you hear something and when you see something at the same time that these two sources of information are linked together.
Often there is a part of the brain that pulls the stream of information together, and this is something that we all do. This is something that cognitive neuroscience has enabled us to understand and it sheds light on synaesthesia because mainly what is going on in synaesthesia is that these same mechanisms that we all have are being over activated.
In one study we have done, people look at people being touched on their face. So, for example, a synaesthete may look at somebody being touched on their left check and what they report is "I feel something on my left cheek". When they see touch on another person if feels like touch on themselves, and this sounds very very strange but infact what you can show is that when everybody sees somebody being touched they also have the same experience.
They have the same mechanisms in the brain, they do it presumably at an unconscious level - some of us might occasionally flinch if we someone being punched or in pain, and this is probably using the same type of mechanism that synaesthetes are using when they actually have a conscious feeling of touch on their body that isn't there, and most of us perhaps do this unconsciously.
Psychology Press: Your new textbook The Student's Guide to Cognitive Neuroscience has received some great praise with leading authorities such as Professor Alfonso Caramazza from the Cognitive Neuropsychology Laboratory, Harvard University, saying that by writing it you had "done a great service to the Neuroscience community".
What were your objectives in writing the textbook and is the reaction to the book so far what you had hoped for?
Jamie Ward: I'm very pleased with the reaction to the book and basically what I did when I set out to write it was to explain it in a very basic way but in a way that actually made people think a little bit more about it. So often in previous textbooks they would present the results of the studies but without any critical appraisal or without really explaining how the methods work. So at the start of the book I have three or four chapters that explain in some detail how the methods work, what they actually show you, and what they don't show you.
The methods aren't necessarily panaceas - each method has their own flaws. In order to evaluate the results in cognitive neuroscience I think it is really important that students understand what the limitations of the methods are. That is one of the aims that I wanted to put across in the book, that I think distinguishes it from other books. I also wanted it to be quite accessible and to give examples from everyday life or just unusual situations.
My own background is also in neuropsychology which looks at the effects of brain damage on cognition, so people that are unfortunate enough to have brain damage can often have very unusual and striking patterns. Maybe they can recognise objects around them but they cannot recognise their own wife or other people in the street that they used to know.
That is very striking because it tells us that maybe there are separate neural substrates in the brain for dealing with people and faces, and dealing with other classes of object, and that in a way quite counter intuitive.
What I have tried to do in the book is introduce these sorts of examples and make them interesting and accessible, and also to convey some of the excitement in the field and to tell students what we don't know as well as what we do know. That gives them a sense of "maybe there is something I can contribute by coming into this field". We don't have all the answers yet but we can at least think about what the questions are and think about why we are asking these questions and what it might eventually tell us.
Psychology Press: Do you have plans to write another book in the near future and if so can you tell us a bit about it?
Jamie Ward: The next book that I am very keen to write is a book on Synaesthesia which will be aimed at the general public. It will be a science book in the sense that is based on research and so on, but it is aimed at people who don't necessarily have science degrees but do have a general interest in science.
Synaesthesia research has taken off a lot over the last ten years and the number of finding produced in literature is increasing substantially. What I would like to do is pull this together, but rather than have a book on Synaesthesia have it as a book on how the senses work and using synaesthesia as an illustrative example of this.
We all link together our senses in the brain and there are certain perceptual illusions that show this. If you look at somebody speaking and you are also listening to them then you pull together the information from the lips and what you are actually hearing. But you can distort this by making the lips say something slightly different by what is actually coming out of the mouth. This can distort what you actually hear and this shows that we all link together our senses.
So what I'd like to do is use these kinds of examples to show that we all link together our senses and that synaesthesia is maybe one extreme form of this.
One example of how we link together our senses is also in eating. Eating is also a very multisensory experience, we see the food and it has got certain colours, we also smell the food as well as taste it, and the food as a certain texture - maybe when you bite into it, it has sounds associated with how crunchy it is - and it is all these factors can link together in our appreciation of food and decide what we like and what we don't like. You can make a carrot taste crunchier by amplifying the sound it makes, for example.
This suggests that we are all able to link together our senses in ways that we don't fully understand and synaesthesia can give us one handle into this process.
Psychology Press: Thank you very much Jamie that was excellent, very illuminating. I would just like to say that Doctor Jamie Ward's new textbook The Student's Guide to Cognitive Neuroscience is published by Psychology Press and is available in bookshops and online stores such as Amazon, and direct from Psychology Press through their new website The Cognitive Neuroscience Arena which can be found at http://www.cognitiveneurosciencearena.com.
Sign Up For Special Book Offers