Is Repudiation of Science a Sixth Sense?

A lot of theories have been presented about what the 2016 election represented. However, whether one believes that the Democrats lost because they ignored the white working class or because Hillary Clinton was too much a part of the Establishment to excite voter turnout, it is hard to argue with the Oxford Dictionaries choice of “post-truth” as the 2016 word of the year. Defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief,” it embodies the tone, not just of the US presidential election but also, as many have noted, the earlier Brexit campaign in the UK and other recent elections across Europe (Austria excepted). While this has led to much hand-wringing in certain circles and given rise to memes such as “science is not a liberal conspiracy,” perhaps the right way to view it is as the possible genesis of a new enlightenment.

The Enlightenment version 1.0 coalesced as people made a broad array of methodical observations about the world around them and recorded data systematically. That structure has become the scientific method, the basis for advances in almost every area of human life over the last several centuries. Observation is a key component, but so far, we have accepted that our brain cannot sense directly and needs organs such as our eyes and ears to collect data and relay back.

What if that is not always the case? What if the popular embrace of “alternative facts” is based on a feeling that some of our neurons actually do directly perceive the environment around us? While the theory might give too much credit to the idea that crowds have wisdom and may sound too much like fantasy to be taken seriously, neuroscience is still a relatively young field of research.

A sort of converse is true for octopuses: approximately 2/3 of their 500 million neurons are in their arms rather than centralized in their brains. In humans, our neurons are concentrated (86 billion of them) in our brains, where, to the best of our current understanding, all our conscious decision-making is undertaken. While direct sensing via our brain neurons would bypass the peripheral nervous system, octopuses instead have moved executive function closer to the source of stimuli. This allows each arm some independent control over actions.

A theory behind the octopus’s neural subcontracting is that it decreases the overall resource demand, a notion that has given rise to biomimicry in the design of robot arms. In this way, octopuses have pushed most of their neurons closer to interaction with their surroundings, while humans keep ours tucked away inside our skulls. In octopuses, direct physical sensing – we would say “touch,” although it is apparently more like “taste” to an octopus – is still integral to the collection of information by those outsourced neurons, but perhaps neurons do not necessarily need intermediation.

Neurons work via electricity and chemicals, and the skull is impervious to neither. As far as I know, there isn’t any research that suggests neurons can process information directly, but transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a recent innovation that seems to enhance neurological performance by passing a current of electricity through the skull, showing that not all positive inputs to the brain need a go-between in the form of our sense organs.

In general, investigations of the brain are relatively nascent. The MRI machine is barely forty years old, and new discoveries are still being made at a surprisingly basic level. For instance, less than two years ago, a new brain structure – lymphatic drainage – was discovered, which has potential implications for a range of neurological disorders. If the physical attributes of the brain are still being mapped, it seems reasonable that the truth of its operational mysteries might still sound like science fiction to us today.

The Oxford word of the year suggests that there has been a wholesale repudiation of observation via the standard five senses as a basis for discourse. It is conceivable that “post-truth” and “alternative facts” are nothing more than pandering to the older parts of our brains, which developed short-cuts allowing humans to make split-second decisions not only about potential threats from voracious predators but also, more importantly, about quickly shifting social alliances that could mean life or death amongst the small bands of early humanity. However, given recent advancements in neurological research and the vast amount that we still don’t understand about the most important of our organs, it might be worth considering that the wisdom of the crowd is somehow recognizing something beyond the five senses.

Discovering a new way of sensing our environment wouldn’t suddenly make truth out of “alternative facts,” but it might help explain why so many people seem eager to dismiss the scientific method. It is a mistake to ignore the information gathered by the other senses – particularly when we don’t have a way to measure what other information the brain may be gathering without intermediation – but it is at least more hopeful to think of post-truth politics as possibly sparking new insights into neuroscience rather than as merely an embrace of our most base selves.