How Science is Showing that Free Speech is Built into the Brain

Free speech is invariably discussed in moral, political or philosophical terms, but today an intriguing new scientific angle on the issue has emerged. It can be summarised this way: that it is not so much an issue of free speech as one of free thought. Indeed, insights into how we think suggest that the tension between free expression and repression is not so much Freudian as genetic, neuro-anatomical and developmental. We’ll look at each in turn.

The first, genetic, originates in insights into autism. Autism is an early-onset cognitive disorder which features impairments in what you might call mentalistic cognition: social and inter-personal responses, abstract thinking and imagination. This goes with narrowing of interests often focused on what you could correspondingly call mechanistic cognition: fascination with gadgets, machines and mechanisms of all kinds, along with a tendency to literal, logical thinking and an obsessive focus on detail.

A classic test of autistic cognition is the pencil-in-the-sweet-tube test. The child is shown a tube of sweets and asked what he (and it is more likely to be a he by at least four to one) thinks is inside. He’s disappointed to discover that rather than the sweets he expected, the tube contains pencils. But now he is asked what another child who had not been shown the contents would think and typically replies, “Pencils!” Normal children can pass this test from about age four and realise that another child would think as they did that the tube contained sweets. One of my own sons, aged about three, had been cautioned by me not to tell his mother that he had bought her a present the day before her birthday. But the moment he heard her coming into the house, he rushed up to her and exclaimed, “Mummy, I mustn’t tell you that I have bought you a present!” Typically for his age and for autistics much older, he had failed what is known as a test of false belief: the ability to realise that others may not know what you know — or in this case, need to be kept in ignorance of it.

If you think about it, thought-policing — and indeed all dogmatic intolerance of differing points of view — amounts to an autistic-like denial of what the agent regards as others’ false beliefs. Indeed, leading authorities on Asperger’s syndrome comment that some high-functioning autistics go into so-called “God mode” and become “an omnipotent person who never makes a mistake, cannot be wrong and whose intelligence must be worshipped” (see T. Attwood, The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome). Clearly though, this cuts both ways, and people who routinely are in ‘God mode’ where others’ speech and beliefs are concerned could be seen as acting like autistics, with thought-policing as an institutionalised deficit in appreciation of false belief.

A second insight comes from the discovery of an antagonistic relationship between two large-scale cortical networks in the brain — the task-positive network (TPN) and the default mode network (DMN). Neural activity in the TPN tends to inhibit activity in the DMN, and vice versa. The TPN is important for problem solving, focusing of attention, making decisions and control of action. The DMN plays a central role in emotional self-awareness, social cognition and ethical decision-making. Because activation of the TPN tends to suppress activity in the DMN, an over-emphasis on task-focused leadership may prove deleterious to social and emotional aspects of leadership. Similarly, an overemphasis on the DMN would result in difficulty focusing attention, making decisions and solving known problems (see A.I. Jack, A scientific case for conceptual dualism: The problem of consciousness and the opposing domains hypothesis). Indeed, it has been proposed that “hyperconnectivity within the DMN appears to be associated with the delusional paranoid phenomenology of a sense of self under attack” (P. McNamara, The Cognitive Neuroscience of Religious Experience). […]

— Read More: dailysceptic.org