We Already Knew This!

After watching this, your brain will not be the same.

This was the title of a clickbait I recently fell for on YouTube. Surprisingly, the video turned to be quite informative and I enjoyed it.

It was a TED talk by Dr Lara Boyd, a neurobiologist working at the University of British Columbia, about the research her team has been doing about brain plasticity and ways to use the knowledge to rehabilitate stroke survivors better.

Wait a minute! Brain? Plastic? What the hell are you talking about?

Yes, your question is plausible. 

Plasticity of the brain has to do with the ability of neurons to form new connections between each other each time we have a new experience or learn a new skill. Dr Boyd also went on to debunk the commonly held notion that our brains stop developing after we reach the age of maturity at the end of adolescence.

The essence of her talk was that when we learn a new skill or build upon our knowledge, in order to support that change, new connections are formed between our neurons through synapses(places where two neurons 'talk' to each other). Not just that, but when we practice that new skill or study a particular thing deeper, the synapses and the connections grow stronger. An example she mentioned was about blind people having an enhanced sense of hearing. We know this to be true from reading and from people telling us about it. But research into neuroplasticity now shows us that blind people hear better because in the absence of sight, they need to rely on sound more, and that leads to the auditory portion of the brain developing extremely strong connections between those neurons. The same also holds true for anyone who has gained expertise in a field or skill.

It was all good until I scrolled down to the comments section, only to be disappointed. Here are some of the gems I found:

• Amazing how these "scientific" discoveries always amount to the most simple and obvious ideas any rational thinking person could realize on their own and have realized for thousands of years.
• Sum up the whole Ted Talk in one sentence - Practice and do the work.
• Blah blah blah...whats new?

I was amazed at how much the speech had been oversimplified.

This is just one example of how scientific research is often dismissed by saying "We already knew this!". This, however, is not a novel phenomenon. Science and research have been subjected to such dismissals and simplifications ever since science has existed but we never learn. We don't see the point of it all; that is:

The aim of science and research is to understand the 'why' and 'how' of  the things we observe.

Remarks like the ones above stem from the fact that we know some things to be true- through repetitive observation. With reference to the TED talk, we know it to be true that practising something makes us better at it. This is the 'what' of it. But what Dr Boyd, explaining her research, is trying to tell us is the 'why'.

Let me give you another example of new research whose conclusions seem fairly obvious. An article in Quartz magazine talks about team-building rituals that most companies have. They are fairly commonplace among a lot of the modern firms and we know from observation that they can help promote the company's culture among its employees. The article goes on to mention how some new research suggests that these rituals, while largely helpful, can cause some individuals not part of the rituals to become isolated or marginalised. It also mentions how rituals, when team-specific, can also lead to friction between different teams.

Again, if you think about it, all of this is obvious. We form groups with people who we tend to agree with and don't mingle much with the 'outsiders'. Sometimes, we also tend to despise said outsiders.

So what's new?

What's new is that we now know better why and how this happens. When we form groups and do rituals, respond to rewarding feedback to in-group members in the same way we would track rewards to ourselves as individuals. We process a reward for a fellow group member in the same way we would a reward for us. But we respond to punishing feedback to out-group members in the same way we would track rewards to us: a punishment to an outsider is a reward for us. The Germans, of course, have a word for this phenomenon – schadenfreude.

This got me thinking and I remembered another instance of rituals being used to manipulate people- 1984, by George Orwell. Big Brother used to monitor each and every citizen of the country of Oceania and have them perform rituals- having elements of jingoism and Two Minutes of Hate'. 

We did not have such research back when the novel was written. Yet, George Orwell knew this to be true. We knew that rituals are a great way to rally people, to mobilize people. But we did not know why. We do now.

Another example is the 'discovery' of gravity. Every human grows up seeing objects fall down. We grow up experiencing gravity so that the knowledge is deeply ingrained. It is intuitive. We just know that things go down if left on their own with nothing to support them. But did we know why before Sir Isaac Newton questioned it? No! It was only after he studied this very obvious phenomenon and found the 'why' behind it that we came to know what makes things fall down.

All of us, through our faculty of observation, know plenty of things to be true. What we don't know is why they happen and how they happen. Scientific research helps us to get from the 'what' of something to its 'why'. It is unfair to label research that appears obvious at first glance as just truism. It is essential to understand the purpose of the research and once given a second, third or even a fourth thought, you will find what seemed fairly obvious before is not so anymore.  :)