Magnet-modified morality

“Magnets can modify our morality,� said the headline of a recent article on the BBC News Web site. The details were also intriguing. The brain’s right temporol-parietal junction, RTPJ, when stimulated by electromagnetic pulses, caused 20 volunteers to alter their judgment about whether a particular action by another person toward a third person was acceptable or unacceptable.

Participants were asked first whether it was OK or not for a young man to tell his girlfriend that she could safely walk across a bridge he knew was unsafe. After receiving a 500-millisecond magnetic pulse to an area of the scalp previously pinpointed by an MRI, they said that telling the girlfriend to go ahead on the unsafe bridge was fine so long as she got across it unharmed.

In a second test, the volunteers were asked whether a person who swerved a car to avoid a cat but then hit a pedestrian was to blame for the accident. After receiving the pulse, most volunteers said the driver was blameless.

In both tests, the volunteers judged as OK other people’s decisions that in normal circumstances they would have deemed not OK.

The strong effects of the stimulation in altering moral judgment even astounded the lead researcher, Dr. Liane Young of MIT.

Of course there are implications from this experiment for mind control and warfare. I expect DARPA, the Department of Defense’s funding agency for far-out notions, to jump headlong into this field. Any weapon aimed at a crowd will have a tough time hitting the individuals’ RTPJs, but I’m sure some would-be defense contractor will try to make one, with millions of dollars of taxpayer money.

“We must not allow an RTPJ-magnet gap,� I imagine a latter-day Dr. Strangelove saying to the Pentagon when confronted with the possibility that the Chinese are already exploiting this vulnerability.

I’m more interested in what the recently reported neurological experiment, and the others that led up to it, are revealing about how morality develops in human beings and is reflected in society.

As the researchers verified, the moral sense has to do with our judgment regarding the thoughts underlying the actions of other human beings, what Harvard’s Rebecca Saxe refers to as “people thinking about thinking people.�

There is neurological and behavioral evidence that the moral sense develops late and is not fully formed until after the age of 21, according to Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a brain expert at the University College of London. This conclusion, derived from her own experiments, also piqued my interest because I have argued this for so long — to my children when they were recalcitrant teenagers, to Amish parents who insisted on taking their kids out of school at 14 and to politicians who send boys and girls under 21 to kill on battlefields.

Actually, there is a whole set of mental behaviors that develop late, and it includes a full moral sense, critical judgment and proportionality of response to stimuli. The understanding of these faculties’ late development is why we delay asking students to critique literature until they are juniors in high school, why we don’t allow voting in elections until age 18, why we want kids to remain in school until they have had time to sufficiently develop as thinkers, and why we do not issue learner’s driving permits until children turn 16.

Yes, there’s a difference between a moral sense and morality. Morality is the considered judgment of a society. One of our judgments is embodied in laws that make it illegal to yell fire in a crowded theater when there is no fire.

Speaking of which, we’ve seen lately that some demagogues are clearly able to exert a — you should pardon the expression — magnetic influence over their audiences, bending their viewers’ and listeners’ sensibilities to mirror their own. Current neuroscience research has implications for understanding those audience members who yield so willingly to the fulminations of a Glenn Beck or the Texas secessionists or the speakers at the current Tea Parties, and willingly espouse violent overthrow of the government, of the status quo and of everything that is not going their way.

We are now able to identify those ultra-responsive audiences as, at the least, having had their RTPJ’s compromised. What else could cause them to regress to having the undeveloped moral senses of children and to be particularly susceptible to appeals based on the amoral notion that the end justifies the means? There is no fire in the theater, but the magnetizers are convincing the crowd that they are in imminent danger.

Salisbury resident Tom Shachtman has written more than two dozen books and many television documentaries.