Brain, Mind, and Media

From Dualism to Emergentism

Scientists and philosophers of the mind have long attempted to understand the nature of the mind by questioning the relationship between our conscious experience and the physical world surrounding us. This question is known as the mind-body problem (for an extensive discussion, see Dennett, 1991). Many have attempted to tackle this issue but René Descartes put forth one of the most well-known explanations. In his now-famous phrase, cogito ergo sum, “I think therefore I am,” Descartes drew a sharp distinction between the body and the mind. It was logically possible, he argued, to doubt the existence of the body. But it was logically impossible to doubt the existence of the mind as doubt is a thought and thinking is a product of the mind. This suggests a fundamental difference in kind between mind and body, a distinction known as substance dualism.

Dualism is typically justified on the basis of what Chalmers (1995) calls the “hard problem” of consciousness. Simply put, how can phenomenal consciousness – the subjective experience of qualia, like the sensation of color or pain – arise in a physical system? The body is a material entity governed by physical laws, whereas the mental experience of a sensation does not seem to be a material thing (cf. Dennett, 1991, who argues against the concept of qualia). Monists tend to find this distinction untenable because the mind and body apparently interact. If substance dualists are right that the mind and the body are composed of fundamentally different substances, by what means can that interaction take place?

Descartes argued that the mind and body were integrated in the pineal gland, a small area located deep within the brain near the brainstem. His rationale was based on anatomical data suggesting that, unlike so many other brain structures, the pineal gland was not bilaterally organized (for an extended discussion, see Seung, 2012). The pineal gland’s proximity to the spinal cord was also used as evidence that it was the place where the mind was able to exert its influence over the rest of the body. Dennett (1991) critically calls this central point of mind-body integration the “Cartesian theater” – a point where sensations experienced by the body are made available for observation by the mind. It implies a homunculus (Latin for little man), or “central meaner” that guides consciousness and behavior.

Modern philosophers of mind generally find the Cartesian position invalid (Dennett, 1991), and even those who continue to reject strong mind-brain supervenience tend to favor alternatives such as property dualism, predicate dualism, or non-reductive physicalism. For instance, the anomalous monism of Davidson (1980) asserts that thoughts are physical, but are not subject to law-like relations. Alternatively, the biological naturalism of Searle (2002) contends that consciousness is physical but irreducible, holding out the possibility that neuroscience may eventually solve the “hard problem” and explain how consciousness emerges as a high-level process in the brain. The general shift toward these views must be understood in the context of the historical progression of brain science and its capacity to explain mental events.

In 1796, Franz Joseph Gall proposed a method where measurements of the skull were thought to index different cognitive abilities (see Seung, 2012). Phrenology, as the approach was called, subdivided the cortex into a number of regions with each belonging to different psychological processes. The size of each region was thought to determine individual ability and could be measured in living subjects by examining the skull. Phrenology has largely been discredited by modern neuroscience, but the approach represented a turning point in thinking about the brain. Phrenologists were among the first to conceptualize the brain as a collection of different regions involved in different cognitive process. This idea is known as modularity (Fodor, 1983).

In the 19th century, physicians began examining the impact of brain damage (lesions) on cognitive function. Paul Broca performed autopsies on stroke patients who suffered language deficits and demonstrated that language production could be localized to a specific region in the brain, later called Broca’s area. Around the same time, Carl Wernicke’s research demonstrated that damage to a different neural region (Wernicke’s area) was responsible for impairments in language comprehension. This is a now classic example of what is known as a double dissociation. Patients with damage to Broca’s area suffered impairments in speech production but not comprehension whereas patients with damage in Wernicke’s area suffered impairments in speech comprehension but not production. Such double dissociations became the gold-standard for demonstrating the modular function of a given neural structure (for an extended discussion, see Caramazza, 1986; Robertson, Knight, Rafal, & Shimamura, 1993).

Near the end of the 20th century, other disciplines were beginning to take notice of the physicalist-modular view of the human brain. Evolutionary psychology proposed the concept of evolved psychological mechanisms (EPM; Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992), or genetically based and environmentally influenced psychological processes that regulate human behavior. Analogous to the way in which computer hardware enables computer software, modular neural structures in the brain enable EPMs. And, like most computer programs, EPMs were conceptualized as narrowly-cast programs that evolved to perform a specific function or enable a specific behavior (Pinker, 1997). It seemed that science was working toward a unifying theory of the mind, one that had the potential to integrate a diverse number of disciplines including neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, artificial intelligence, and communication under the banner of cognitive science.

But soon issues underlying the modularity perspective began to emerge. For instance, in one heavily cited study, language areas were electrically stimulated in 117 patients waiting to undergo neurosurgery to treat epilepsy (Ojemann, Ojemann, Lettich, & Berger, 1989). Two critical findings challenged modularity. First, areas where electrical stimulation impacted speech were generally much smaller than the historically defined Broca and Wernicke areas. A second issue was that there was considerable variability in the localization of the areas where electrical stimulation impacted speech. Today, this finding is bolstered by various meta-analyses (e.g., Yarkoni, Poldrack, Nichols, Van Essen, & Wager, 2011) demonstrating that the same neural structures are often involved in a wide variety of cognitive tasks. Growing consensus understands the human brain as more than just a collection of domain specific modules.

Today, most scholars in cognitive psychology and related disciplines argue that the brain defines a complex system (Bassett & Gazzaniga, 2011). From a complex systems perspective, numerous distributed brain structures exert mutual influence over one another and the combined output of this joint computation is thought to be greater than the sum of the individual parts; an idea known as emergence (for further discussion on the emergentist perspective, see Weber, Eden, Huskey, Mangus, & Falk, 2015). Scholars who adopt the emergentist view endorse the notion of strong mind-brain supervenience as they understand the mind as an emergent property of the brain. Scholars who reject the notion of strong mind-brain supervenience make a valid and empirically testable proposition. As the articles in this special issue and in many other journal issues demonstrate, the evidence seems to be mounting against them.

Biological Perspectives in Media Psychology

Building on this materialist framework and mind-brain supervenience, a tradition of media psychologists and communication scholars have adopted a biological perspective (for overviews see, e.g., Beatty, McCroskey, & Floyd, 2008; Cappella, 1996; Floyd, 2014; Hickson & Stacks, 2010; Lang, 1994; Potter & Bolls, 2011; Ravaja, 2004; Sherry, 2004). Encouragingly, our field is experiencing an increasing number of publications with a special focus on biology and neuroscience (e.g., Afifi & Floyd, 2015; Anderson et al., 2006; Boren & Veksler, 2011; Floyd, 2006; Liang & Vom Brocke, 2014; Loving & Campbell, 2011; Weber, 2015). In addition, we are seeing an increasing number of biologically-inspired research in media psychology and communication science presented at our major annual conferences. As just one example, within the last 3 years the International Communication Association (ICA) has organized and promoted three well-attended pre-conferences with a focus on evolution, biology, and brains.

This Journal of Media Psychology special issue provides an additional selection of studies that demonstrate how neuroscience can be integrated into media psychology in meaningful ways. Cooper, Tompson, O’Donnell, and Falk (2015) show evidence that brain activity in response to online antismoking messages can significantly increase prediction accuracy of smoking behavior change. They find that adding brain responses as predictor variable explains variance beyond traditional, theory-driven self-report metrics such as intention, self-efficacy and risk perceptions. James, Potter, Lee, Kim, Stevenson, and Lang (2015) lead the integration of neuroscience into media psychology in the area of computer mediated communication. As people spend more time in interactions with mediated representations of characters, this study increases our understanding of the cognitive mechanisms that govern the processing of real versus simulated agents. Using electroencephalography (EEG) and other physiological data, Ravaja, Aula, Falco, Laaksonen, Salminen, and Ainamo (2015) confirm that corporate reputation alters the way in which corporate messages are processed by receivers’ motivational and emotional systems. Yegiyan (2015) proposes that the processing of promotional messages following emotionally arousing stimuli is a function of the interaction between motivational system activation and consolidation of the preceding message content in memory systems. Yegiyan (2015) uses physiological evidence to test two competing hypotheses, and her results lend clarity to this area. Weber, Eden, Huskey, Mangus, and Falk (2015) showcase studies that apply a cognitive neuroscientific perspective to important questions in media psychology and communication science, but also address potential reasons why this integration is relatively slow compared to other sub-fields in psychology.

Many people have contributed to this special issue in important ways. I personally want to thank all our reviewers who provided abundant insightful suggestions – sometimes in multiple rounds of reviews. I also want to thank our authors for their patience with the review and editing process and for their hard and timely work on their revisions. A special thank you should go to the editor-in-chief Gary Bente who had the idea of this special issue and provided important advice for the call and the reviewing process. I am also grateful for Nicole Kraemer’s (editor-in-chief since 2015) thoughtful reviews and her help in finalizing the special issue. The support that I received from “my” students at UCSB’s Media Neuroscience Lab was invaluable for me and deserves special recognition. In particular, the many critical discussions with Richard Huskey and Michael Mangus about media neuroscience were vital for this special issue. In fact, the thoughts on philosophical foundations of neuroscientific reasoning in this introduction are in part a summary of the discussions the three of us have regularly had over the last several years. Thank you! Finally, I would like to thank all readers of this special issue in advance for your interest in the integration of neuroscience into media psychology. I hope that you find the articles in this special issue to be informative, thought-provoking at places, and that they may even lead to some new ideas for your own research.