doi:10.1093/brain/aws214
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BRAIN
A JOURNAL OF NEUROLOGY
BOOK REVIEW
Wit and wickedness: is it all in the brain?
Simon Baron-Cohen has a justified reputation as one of the
world’s leading authorities on autistic spectrum disorders. He is
not only a prodigiously productive and imaginative researcher
but also a brilliant popularizer who has done as much as anyone
to communicate the clinical and scientific understanding of autism
to the world at large. This is not, however, without its hazards, the
most striking of which is the Freudian slip of seeing the world
beyond the clinic through clinical eyes.
In The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme
Male Brain (2003), he argued that people with autistic spectrum
disorders, most of whom are male, are like men only more so. His
reasons for suggesting this are tenuous to say the least. One of
the most striking features of autism is a ‘mind-blindness’ expressed
as an inability to see things from another’s point of view, and to
tap into, or empathize with their emotions. Many people with
autism, however, will have preserved, or even enhanced, abilities
to engage with the physical world, particularly in the sphere of
logical reasoning. While they feel utterly at sea in social situations,
they are at home in the world of facts and logic and material
objects. Isn’t that ‘just like a man’, who may be good at maths
and not notice that you are on the verge of tears? And how unlike
a woman, who will indeed see the expression on your face but not
be particularly interested in your pitilessly detailed account of the
specification of the latest car that has taken your fancy.
Thus, on the basis of the observed characteristics of autistic
individuals who lack empathy and yet are often hyper-systemizers,
was launched the notion of the fundamental difference between
the empathic female (ideal for nursing) and the systemizing male
(ideal for engineering). The basis for Baron-Cohen’s leap from the
clinic to the entire human race, and for an essentialist account of
the difference between the sexes, which marginalizes cultural factors, was a cerebral determinism. Males are low empathy systemizers because they have low empathy systemizing brains; and
females are high empathy non-systemizers because they have
high empathy brains that are less inclined to systemize. The reasons for this can be traced to prenatal exposure to testosterone
expressed in differences of brain function and, more interestingly,
brain structure.
Unfortunately, many of these differences remain controversial,
with initial exciting findings disappearing when attempts are made
to replicate them. Females, for example, were found in one much
publicized study cited by Baron-Cohen (critically reviewed in
ZERO DEGREES OF
EMPATHY: A NEW
THEORY OF HUMAN
CRUELTY
By Simon Baron Cohen 2011.
London: Allen Lane
ISBN: 9780713997910
Price: £20.00
(Hardcover).
INSIDE JOKES: USING
HUMOR TO REVERSE
ENGINEER THE MIND
By Matthew M. Hurley,
Daniel C. Dennett and
Reginald B. Adams, Jr. 2011.
Cambridge: MIT Press
ISBN: 978-0-262-01582-0
Price: £20.95/$29.95
(Hardcover).
Bishop and Whalsten, 1997), to have a proportionately larger
corpus callosum than males—as a result of which he speculates
that they might have superior verbal fluency. Unfortunately, as he
then admits, numerous less publicized studies have failed to find
this structural difference in adults. What is more, the behavioural
and psychological group differences between males and females
are small compared to the range of performance within each sex
(Eliot, 2009). So much for the ‘male’ and ‘female’ brain.
In Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty,
Baron-Cohen takes his neuralization of human differences much
further and argues that brain science can help us to understand
ß The Author (2012). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved.
For Permissions, please email: [email protected]
Book Review
why some people are evil, even monstrously so, and others are
not. His thesis has three key props: that cruelty is due to the lack
of empathy; that empathy exists in a certain quantity and can be
measured; and that measured empathy not only correlates with,
but also is due to, the state of something he calls ‘the empathy
circuit’ in the brain. None of these assumptions withstands close
scrutiny.
While many individuals are cruel because they do not, or
cannot, imagine what it is like to be one of their victims, empathy
or its absence is not the whole story and sometimes may be only a
small part of it. The pleasure that sadists derive from hurting
others is enhanced by imagining what their victims are going
through: sadism does not treat the person as an object but
rather needs the victim’s subjectivity. In non-sadists, episodic violent behaviour may be provoked and regretted—rather than
enjoyed. Cruelty may also be prompted by fear or disgust. We
may be vile out of a desire to conform to others, as many social
psychologists have demonstrated, and this is in part driven by an
‘over’-developed awareness of what those others think of us.
There are strong, sometimes irresistible, social pressures to treat
our fellows abominably, as is evident from the behaviour of soldiers in war, lynch mobs and those who were responsible for
running concentration camps. Baron-Cohen himself points out
that many of those who made the Holocaust possible were bureaucrats who were still capable of empathy but reserved it for
those with whom they identified. He cites the example of the
‘Nazi guard who shoots a prisoner in the daytime but then goes
home at night, kisses his wife and reads a bedtime story to his
young child’. British bomber pilots—whom we think of as opposing, rather than being, evil—risked their lives to ignite urban firestorms which would foreseeably incinerate thousands of innocent
children. And we don’t have to look to such extreme examples to
make this point. Tolstoy’s famous story of the princess weeping
buckets at the sentimental tragedy in the theatre while her coachman is freezing to death outside captures something about all of
us. Holidaymakers in India may feel uncomfortable at the spectacle of starving street children but in most cases this doesn’t spoil
their trip. The truth is that empathy and a potential for what may
be judged evil behaviour are not only culturally but also situationally dependent. And this is not always a bad thing. No one could
be a surgeon and empathize with the experience of the patients
he or she operates on—or not while performing the operation.
It is therefore rather odd to think of empathy as a stable characteristic, and yet this is what Baron-Cohen seems to believe. We
all have empathy levels, he argues. They are normally distributed
in the population: each of us has a place on his ‘empathy Bell
curve’. This leads to his second prop: a tool for measuring the
Empathy Quotient (EQ). You can determine your own EQ by
self-administering a questionnaire which includes items such as ‘I
can easily tell if someone else wants to join into a conversation’ or
‘I really enjoy caring for other people’ with answers ranging from
‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’.
Even if we set aside the distinct possibility that when the questionnaire is self-administered the EQ may simply measure the
extent to which we are deceived about how empathic we are,
the questions do not get anywhere near the propensity to the
horrific cruelty that preoccupies Baron-Cohen. Indeed, those
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who have a low score on the EQ—ascribed ‘zero degrees of empathy’ by this measure—are likely to be individuals with autistic
spectrum disorders (although I am surprised that they should be
sufficiently self-aware to be reliable respondents), rather than violent psychopaths.
Baron-Cohen realizes this; and so, by what seems like an ad hoc
modification, he divides those who have a low to zero degree of
empathy into ‘positives’ and ‘negatives’. People with autism are
‘positive’, not only because they rarely intend the upset they cause
by their blindness to the needs of others but also because they are
likely to be systemizers, which in some cases may be expressed in
extraordinary talents from which we all benefit. Being something
of a systemizer himself, he finds that the Systemizing Mechanism
in the brain has six settings just like the Empathy circuit—an amazing coincidence.
Baron-Cohen’s main concern is with those who have zero
degrees of empathy and no redeeming features. These are divided
into three types: Borderline Personality Disorder (Zero Negative
Type B); psychopaths (Zero Negative Type P); and narcissists
(Zero Negative Type N). In fact, his EQ doesn’t seem to enable
him to sort out these terrifying, appallingly damaged and appallingly damaging characters. And so he has to supplement the
questionnaire with a checklist to tell us ‘how to spot’ (his
words) them. They include ‘impulsivity’ and ‘unstable and intense
personal relationships’ in the case of Type B; ‘performing acts that
are arrestable offences’ in the case of Type P; and ‘a grandiose
sense of self-importance’ in the case of Type N. Significantly,
‘unempathic’ is only one out of nine characteristics in the case
of Type N. Nevertheless Baron-Cohen believes that the fundamental defect in all of these types is ‘zero degree of empathy’.
He hangs on to this simplifying belief in the teeth of the complex
features of the individuals that he himself describes, because he
wants to map their behaviour on to a putative ‘empathy circuit’—
his third prop.
The empathy circuit (also called ‘the social brain’) is an ensemble of at least 10 areas, encompassing not only the usual suspects
such as the amygdala and the inferior frontal gyrus but also areas
less traditionally associated with the ability to think about others
such as the anterior insula and the somatosensory cortex. In a
book meant for the general public (of which more presently), it
is difficult to judge the consistency with which these structures
have been observed to be associated with social capacities
(such as the anterior insula with ability to sense another person’s
emotional state). As already noted with the corpus callosal sex
differences, studies that are repeated may fail to deliver the
same results. What, however, raises one’s suspicions that the identification of the ‘empathy circuit’ is an exercise in neo-phrenology
is the way the centres divide the labour between them. The allocation of jobs is quite modern with the portfolio career replacing
the single vocation. For example, the temporoparietal junction on
the right side plays a key role, we are told, in judging someone
else’s intentions and beliefs (so that it is important for that aspect
of empathy which involves putting one’s self in another’s shoes)
but it is also responsible for ensuring that you feel that you are in
your own body and for non-social functions such as attention
switching. This is an impressive versatility.
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And there is another difficulty. The allocation of different bits of
empathy to different places in the brain raises the question of how
that which is kept tidily apart is then brought together in the living
empathic person. This may seem to be a non-issue because we are
talking about ‘a circuit’ whose components are all active at once,
so that the ‘coming together’ is realized in this co-activity. But this
then raises the question of why they are separated in the first
place and also from what viewpoint, or centre, in the brain the
total activity in the circuit is realized as an integrated totality.
These may seem to be questions for another time and for the
future development of social neuroscience; but there is one question that cannot be postponed. It relates to the privileging of brain
circuitry in the aetiology of empathy deficiency, and it is highlighted by the case histories where Baron-Cohen talks about
people rather than bits of brains. Consider Carol who has borderline personality disorder. Her appalling behaviour towards everyone including her own children, her total self-absorption expressed
in unstoppable talk about herself and her volcanic anger, are easily
traced to the hideous treatment she received as a child at the
hands of her parents. Little further explanation is required: those
to whom evil is done (early enough, intensely enough, long
enough) may well do evil in return. More specifically, those
from whom empathy has been withheld and who have been subjected to cruel treatment may be entirely without empathy to
others and treat them with great cruelty. What would we gain
from an alternative narrative that (for example) argues that
chronic stress in early childhood may cause ‘arborization’ of the
basolateral nucleus of the amygdala and hence damage the empathy circuit even if did correspond to repeatable findings? Does it
deepen our understanding of what is going on between Carol and
the people who abused her and those whom she abuses in turn?
Is it closer to the truth about empathy deficiency than psychological explanations not tethered to the micro-anatomy of brain?
Anyone who maintains that it is closer to the truth must at least
concede, on the basis of the alternative narrative of interactions
between ‘people’, that the cerebral empathy circuit, if it is an
objective reality, is only one component in much larger (and
better understood) circuits—namely, the circuits of interaction between one’s self, other selves and the world and society that
makes sense of them. The fatal error of social neuroscience is to
imagine that brain circuitry is somehow an independent, overwhelming determinant of what we are, rather than a component
of the complex dynamics of our social life. In short, it falls into the
trap of seeing us as predestined enactors of a cerebral destiny—or
rather passive spectators of an organ that mysteriously has the
capacity to initiate events in an otherwise causally closed world
in which nothing is initiated by anyone. Our brains play their part,
of course, but people act on each other’s and their own brains.
Brain-based explanations, even if they were plausible, would not
trump people-based explanations. For example, the horror of the
Holocaust is not to be explained by looking to intracranial causes
and postulating an outbreak of a mysterious disease affecting,
with stereotactic precision, empathy circuits in the brains of
members of the Third Reich. If explanations are to be found,
social psychologists, sociologists and historians will have more to
offer us.
Book Review
Even if biology were the best explanation of human behaviour,
there would be no reason why we should stop at the brain which
is, after all, a product of genes. Baron-Cohen embraces this conclusion with indecent eagerness and devotes an entire chapter to
‘The Empathy Gene’. (He needs anyway to appeal to genetic variation to explain why some people with appalling childhoods do
not automatically grow up to have damaged empathy circuits.)
The climax of this chapter describes the moment when he and
his co-workers ‘waited with bated breath’ to see whether there
would be a correlation between certain genes and variation on EQ
scores. ‘[I]magine our excitement’ he says when 4 out of 68 candidate genes tested ‘showed a strongly significant association with
the EQ!’ It is difficult to judge the statistics here but I could
equally imagine being disappointed that 64 failed to show a significant association. In the original paper, Baron-Cohen concedes
that ‘None of our results would survive an experiment-wide
Bonferroni correction for the total number of genes tested’
(Chakrabarti et al., 2009). And although this is followed by a
robust defence against the charge that the findings could have
occurred entirely by chance, I think it would have been appropriate to put this finding in context before declaring in a book meant
for the general public (though in parts its reads like a monograph)
that ‘we had found four genes for empathy’ in a chapter entitled
(without a question mark) ‘The Empathy Gene’. As Baron-Cohen
himself admits, ‘Genes simply blindly code for the production of
proteins, blissfully unaware of their ultimate long-range effects’.
What is more, given that the genetics of something as clear-cut as
autism is getting more and more complex, with three articles in
Nature published in 1 week in April 2012 (Neale et al., 2012;
O’Roak et al., 2012; Sanders et al., 2012), it seems unlikely that
there will be much of a connection between genes and something
as ill-defined as empathy. Indeed, genes are a long way from the
kinds of awareness and respect for norms that separate empathic
from psychopathic behaviour. Complex traits are the result of
complex epigenetic and non-genetic influences, not the least
those that influence gene expression. The majority of these are
best described in environmental, in particular, sociological, rather
than neurological, terms.
Baron-Cohen’s brain-centred story of what makes us evil is
flawed at many levels, not least because it does not separate individual from collective, or impulsive from organized, wickedness.
But it would be remiss of me not to report one abiding impression
left by this book: the deep humanity that informs his inquiry, expressed not only in his horror of the evil things we do to each
other but also in his ache to do something about it and his wanting to reach out to, redeem, even those who are beyond the reach
of sympathy and of whom many would say ‘Lock’em up and
throw away the key’. But scientific claims must stand or fall by
the quality of the relevant arguments and data, not by the goodness of the intentions behind them.
In some respects, trying to explain humour is even braver than
trying to make neurological sense of evil. This, however, is what
Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett and Reginald Adams do in Inside
Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Human Mind. If it is
true, as Nietzsche said, that ‘every joke is an epitaph on the death
of a feeling’, it is equally true that every explanation of a joke risks
being an autopsy. Their book is peppered with hundreds of jokes,
Book Review
some of them excellent, but the smile they put on this reader’s
face was soon wiped off and replaced with a frown, as I tried to
concentrate on the complex claims that the authors make about
what neuroscience and evolution tell us about humour and what
humour tells us about evolution and neuroscience.
There is an excellent survey of the front-running theories about
what it is that makes us laugh. This is a formidable challenge, since
an adequate explanation would have to encompass puns and
wordplay, wisecracks, funny faces, rude noises, caricatures, situation comedies, slapstick, cartoons and dignitaries falling on their
dignified bottoms. Play, assertion of superiority, release from
excessive nervous arousal, incongruity resolution, surprise and
the observation of mechanical inelasticity in humans capture
some aspects of the beast, but Hurley, Dennett and Adams
argue that these are merely symptoms of a deeper cause and to
find this we need to look to biology. Only an evolutionary perspective can unify the protean manifestations of humour and
answer the 20 questions (all listed) they feel need to be addressed
when we try to make sense of laughter.
The authors’ answer neatly encompasses ‘What is humour for?’
and ‘How does it work?’ They note that humour, most obviously
in the case of jokes, is characterized by surprise, as when you are
seduced into an agreement with the apparent premises of a story
that are then pulled away. They support this with hundreds of
instances, for example:
‘I celebrated Thanksgiving in the old-fashioned way. I invited
everyone in my neighbourhood to my house and we had an
enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land.
Jon Stewart’
Jokes expose our propensity to have presuppositions, precisely
those presuppositions that are necessary for us to function at the
requisite quick-witted speed if we are to survive. The slow-witted
shall inherit the grave. Our brains are therefore ‘engaged full time
in real-time (risky) heuristic search, generating presumptions about
what will be experienced in every domain’. Inevitably, some of
these presumptions will be wrong. There has, therefore, ‘to be a
policy of double-checking these candidate beliefs and surmisings,
and the discovery of these at breakneck speed is maintained by a
powerful reward system—the feeling of humour, mirth—that must
support this activity’. Humour is useful, in short, because it trains us
to challenge presuppositions; and it is rewarded with pleasure, to the
point where it may become addictive, because it is so useful.
My actions from moment-to-moment must inescapably be
underdetermined by the facts. I have to jump to conclusions courtesy of ‘just-in-time-spreading-activation’ in neural networks,
otherwise it will be too late. Hurley, Dennett and Adams argue
that ‘just-in-time-spreading-activation’ is necessary to create
‘mental spaces’ that close down the potentially infinite range of
possibilities fanning out from any moment. This is revealed by
what has been called ‘the frame problem’ in artificial intelligence
that becomes evident when we consider all the instructions that
would have to be built into a robot performing even the simplest
functions in an open domain. In deciding what to do at any
moment, we have to compromise between considering all
possibilities (which would leave us as a paralysed free gift to
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predators) and intelligently cutting corners in arriving at a best
guess as to what is going on, what will happen next and
what therefore we have to do now. Hence the need for
‘just-in-time-spreading-activation’; but its confident pruning of
the combinatorial explosion that would result from considering
all possibilities and all appropriate responses thrown up by the
infinity of rules implicit in the transition from a situation to an
action to amend it carries risks. Hence humour, which confounds
your expectations and brings you up with a jolt, warning how
presupposition can be dangerous. It is ‘always triggered by the
detection of a false belief in a mental space’. Humour ‘pays for
its expensive reward system by protecting us from epistemic
catastrophe’.
The authors attempt to deal with the most obvious objection to
their theory, namely, that we find many things that surprise (or
even shock) us not at all funny or rather funny-peculiar rather
than funny-ha-ha. We find things funny-ha-ha, they say, when
the belief that is confounded is ‘active’ and ‘committed’. When it
is not, we simply register an unexpected event as ‘funny-peculiar’
or not funny at all. This doesn’t seem terribly convincing, if only
because it is not clear what is meant by ‘active’ or ‘committed’.
There is also the problem of laughter, an expensive business that
interferes temporally with breathing and can render one helpless.
Besides, what makes some people laugh leaves others po-faced; or
what makes you laugh on one occasion will fail to do so on another. The receipt of useful presupposition-challenging information
is not enough.
Hurley, Dennett and Adams alight on the theory put forward by
many thinkers that ‘laughter is a tool to facilitate non-aggressive
play’, an extraordinary suggestion given that laughter is often
extremely cruel and the prelude to much aggression and conflict.
They don’t entirely buy it and admit that they find other suggestions from primatologists unpersuasive. Even so, they are committed to evolutionary biology as an explanatory framework—as
a matter of faith: something Darwinian will turn up.
The authors slither between mind-talk and brain-talk via
computer-talk, which is not surprising if you think as they do
that the mind is neural activity, and that neural activity can validly
be re-described using computers. This makes the social sphere in
which jokes are thought up, told and enjoyed, seem something of
an after-thought, especially as they opt for brain-talk as the more
fundamental mode of discourse. So they discuss a search for ‘the
neural funny bone’ but add that it is not a single brain region but
‘a very complex, and structurally distributed system that requires a
coordinated set of responses involved in generating expectations
and associations, perceived incongruities, revision and coherence,
and of course [!] the affective and expressive responses’. Quite so.
And their list of 12 or 13 regions and systems would be enough to
wipe the smile off anyone’s face, particularly if one does not think
of humour as a property of the isolated brain.
In the end, Inside Jokes fails because the authors’ neurobiological mission forces them to look away from the very domain
where jokes have their meaning, a place that cannot be found in
the stand-alone brain or translated into reward circuits in bits of
the stand-alone brain: the community of minds, where the culture
that leads people to find some things funny and other things
definitely unfunny is forged. This is where we should seek an
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explanation of why we humans, who after all are not alone in
facing the epistemic challenge of rapidly responding to situations
on the basis of presuppositions, are unique in enjoying and cultivating humour. William Hazlitt hit the spot when he said that:
‘Man is the only animal that laughs . . . for he is the only animal
that is struck with the difference between what things are and
what they ought to be’. This normative sense is the reason why
we humans are the only objects in the universe that giggle at it.
Tracing how the infinitely subtle modulation of our sense of
‘ought’ versus ‘is’ is exploited in humour would take us a long
way from neural tissues and indeed from evolutionary theory.
Notwithstanding value-laden talk of ‘reward circuits’, brain circuitry, while most certainly not gormless, is normless. This makes
the brain an unpromising place to find the explanation of laughter.
Indeed, I would like to place a bet that Inside Jokes could be
rewritten without brain-talk and not much of substance would be
lost. As it is, we have a rather wonderful collection of jokes
embedded in a story cooked up by writers who subscribe to one
of the world’s fastest growing faiths: biologism.
Raymond Tallis
Emeritus Professor of Geriatric Medicine
University of Manchester
Advance Access publication October 17, 2012
Book Review
References
Baron-Cohen S. The essential difference: men, women and the extreme
male brain. London: Penguin/New York: Basic Books; 2003.
Bishop KM, Whalsten D. Sex differences in human corpus callosum:
myth or reality? Neurosci Biobehav Rev 1997; 21: 581–601.
Chakrabarti B, Dudbridge F, Kent L, Wheelwright S, Hill-Cawthorne G,
Allison C, et al. Genes related to sex steroids, neural growth, and
social-emotional behaviour are associated with autistic traits, empathy
and Asperger syndrome. Autism Res 2009; 2: 157–77.
Eliot L. Pink brain, blue brain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 2009.
Neale BM, Kou Y, Liu L, Ma’ayan A, Samocha KE, Sabo A, et al. Patterns
and rates of exonic de novo mutations in autism spectrum disorders.
Nature 2012; 485: 242–45.
O’Roak BJ, Vives L, Girirajan S, Karakoc E, Krumm N, Coe BP, et al.
Sporadic autism exomes reveal a highly interconnected protein network of de novo mutations. Nature 2012; 485: 246–50.
Sanders SJ, Murtha MT, Gupta AR, Murdoch JD, Raubeson MJ,
Willsey AJ, et al. De novo mutations revealed by whole-exome
sequencing are strongly associated with autism. Nature 2012; 485:
237–41.