Psychology, Capitalism, and Liberation

With Lessons from Emerging Concepts in Neuroscience

 

 

Steven L. Strauss

Department of Neurology

Franklin Square Hospital

Baltimore, Maryland

 

Presented at the Rouge Forum

Louisville, Kentucky

March 15, 2008

 

 

 

            We Need a Psychology of Freedom

I want to talk this morning about recent developments in neuroscience.  I hope you are asking what a talk on neuroscience has to do with education and the overthrow of capitalism.  If not, let me ask the question.

What does neuroscience have to do with education and the overthrow of capitalism?  The answer is:  quite a bit.  In fact, so much that I will focus my talk only on the most crucial aspect of the matter, the one that has to do with freedom.

Neuroscience has uncovered mechanisms of brain function that give a material basis for understanding the psychology of freedom.  Newly emerging concepts are directly challenging 100 years of psychological theory which tells us that we are controlled either by the stimuli of our environment, as the classical behaviorists argued, or by bits and pieces of information in the environment that our cognitive brains automatically and unconsciously process, as cognitive psychologists argue.  In neither of these conceptions are we truly free in the sense of being the subjects of our own actions.

Yet we are in desperate need of a psychology of freedom, because our society is not a free one, despite all illusions to the contrary, and because we need to know that when we fight for freedom we will not, in the end, bump our heads against the biological and psychological constraints of our own brains.  If freedom is truly an aspect of our species-being, the term Marx used in trying to understand human nature, then we can feel more confident knowing that the struggles we wage against oppression are not only struggles for truth and justice, but that they are, at the same time, struggles to regain our own humanity.  

The undoing of this humanity is rooted in class society.  Marx called it “alienation”.  It expresses itself through mass psychopathology.  And a feature of the alienation itself is that it engages in endless otiose attempts to explain mass psychopathology through means other than the effects of social dislocations on the human mind.  It’s like an acutely psychotic individual trying to explain his own thought processes. 

A psychology of freedom describes the mental state that transcends alienation.  In our current diseased society, with pandemic alienation, the struggle for this psychology must proceed on the basis of participation in the social battles for freedom and democracy  --  for workers rights, the rights of minorities, women’s rights, and the rights of lgbt’s.  Participating in these struggles combines truth, justice, and the naturalness of human freedom.  That’s why social activism is psychologically healthy.

In a society whose infrastructure already promotes the true freedom of the individual, whose infrastructure actually thrives on such freedom, the psychology of freedom will express itself via the pursuit of one’s passions, unconstrained by class-based morality and violence.  I believe that in such a society, what we now refer to as “higher states of mind”, states that overcome physical pain and that realize our oneness with the universe, will be a far more achievable phenomenon than what passes for spirituality in our atomized society.

 

We Are Not Free

The dominant psychological paradigms of the past century turned freedom into an illusion.  Yet other approaches to understanding human psychology have made efforts to deal with freedom.  The constructivists, from Vygotsky to Piaget to Bruner, emphasized that the mental representation of reality is the result of creative, constructive mechanisms of the mind.  Noam Chomsky revolutionized linguistic theory with his insights into how human language use is fundamentally “stimulus-free”, and how its appropriate use in essentially unpredictable situations is driven by our capacity for “creative self-expression.”[i]

But these constructivist notions are not the favored ones of the rulers of society.  Just look at what the government is interested in, what they fund, what they find useful for their own goals.  They were tickled to death at the behaviorist idea that humans are controlled by the environment, so controlled in fact that people could even be connived into believing that they freely generate their own thoughts.  But science itself undid the behaviorist paradigm.  It recognized that a complex mental reality lies between stimuli and responses, to such a degree that the whole notion of stimulus-response theory was called into question.  Yet behaviorism was not replaced by a psychology of freedom, even though the constructivists, in their own way, were calling for it. 

It wasn’t even replaced by “cognitive psychology”, despite a prevailing belief to the contrary.  Rather, it was replaced by one version of cognitive psychology, the information-processing version, the one that sees the human brain as a complex, carbon-based computer that solves problems and spits out answers based on the data it is fed.

Now, the capitalists love this one too.  In the age of information technology, they are compelled to manufacture a workforce that can solve software problems, troubleshoot hardware breakdowns, and keep themselves at the cutting edge of technological competitiveness. 

The capitalist think-tanks have dubbed the kind of literacy they want “21^st century literacy”.[ii]  It is information processing raised to the level of literary genre.  

This is the entire basis of the supposed literacy crisis they claim we are in, that helped justify No Child Left Behind.  The literacy crisis, from the corporate point of view, is not that the population is unable to read critically and thereby challenge authority, but rather that it is ill-prepared to deal with the information technology competition coming down the pike from India, China, Japan, and the countries of Europe.

 This is why they love intensive phonics, because in this behaviorist-inspired, pseudoscientific approach to reading theory and instruction, transforming letters to sounds conveys the message that reading is information processing, not the stimulus-free, creative construction of meaning.  They also love phonics because no child would ever base a lesson plan on such utterly boring material, which means it has to come to the children from the outside, from external authority, and they have to submit to this authority in order to be good students. 

It is an interesting fact that experimental studies on phonics refer to the words children have to process as test “stimuli”.  In phonics, the marriage of behaviorism and information processing, presided over by the corporate high priests of reading and education, is consummated. 

The candidates running for president are keenly aware of what’s at stake for corporate America.  The supposedly antiwar presidential hopeful, who voted for every Iraq military appropriation, who wants to keep enough troops in Iraq to guard the U.S. embassy and fight al-Qaeda, who wants to “re-deploy” troops (to Venezuela?), who wants to add 90,000 more troops to the U.S. arsenal, who hasn’t taken bombing Iran off the table, who wants to continue the U.S.’s “unique defense relationship” with Israel, and who voted for the Patriot Act, had this to say about U.S. education in a college commencement address he gave a few years ago:

…while most of us have been paying attention to how much easier technology has made our own lives—sending e-mails back and forth on our blackberries, surfing the Web on our cell phones, instant messaging with friends across the world—a quiet revolution has been breaking down barriers and connecting the world's economies. Now business not only has the ability to move jobs wherever there's a factory, but wherever there's an internet connection.

Countries like India and China realized this. They understand that they no longer need to be just a source of cheap labor or cheap exports. They can compete with us on a global scale. The one resource they needed were skilled, educated workers. So they started schooling their kids earlier, longer, with a greater emphasis on math and science and technology, until their most talented students realized they don't have to come to America to have a decent life—they can stay right where they are.

The result? China is graduating four times the number of engineers that the United States is graduating. Not only are those Maytag employees competing with Chinese and Indian and Indonesian and Mexican workers, you are too. Today, accounting firms are e-mailing your tax returns to workers in India who will figure them out and send them back to you as fast as any worker in Illinois or Indiana could….

If you've got the skills, you've got the education, and you have the opportunity to upgrade and improve both, you'll be able to compete and win anywhere. If not, the fall will be further and harder than it ever was before.

So what do we do about this?  How does America find its way in this new, global economy?  ………. we're all in it together and everybody's got a shot at opportunity. That's what's produced our unrivaled political stability.

Instead of doing nothing or simply defending 20th century solutions, let's imagine together what we could do to give every American a fighting chance in the 21st century.

What if we prepared every child in America with the education and skills they need to compete in the new economy?[iii] 

    

Certainly Mobil corporation would like us to believe that “we’re all in it together”.  “We’re drivers too”, they say.  We’re all in a competitive race together to defeat our economic rivals.  It’s too bad for the losers, both here and abroad.  But at the very least we can try to make sure that every kid’s “got a shot at opportunity”, so they can compete in the 21^st century imperialist rivalry.

            We know where the 20^th century imperialist rivalries led us  --  to the slaughters of World Wars I and II.  Does anyone really believe that the nature of the rivalry has changed in such a way that World War III is not a possibility?  

            The architects of NCLB haven’t ruled it out.  If kids don’t learn the “skills they need to compete”, NCLB offers an alternative career  --  competing on the battlefield.  Of course, if neither competing on the economic battlefield nor competing on the military battlefield works out, there’s always prison.  That’s the default case in U.S. society.  The default case never has to be specifically mentioned.  It applies whenever the stated options fail to apply.  That’s why it’s not specifically mentioned in NCLB.  But it’s there implicitly.

            We will be disoriented in our fight for democratic education if we do not recognize and acknowledge a simple truism:  There is nothing free about any of this.  What great democratic decision-making process led to math and reading being the only subjects that count in school?  And a distorted view of reading at that.  Which parents and teachers and students voted to police themselves with high-stakes testing and punitive accountability?  When was there a referendum to make federal education funding conditional on accepting military recruiters in the schools?

            Freedom in capitalist America is one part truth and nine parts myth.  It is true in the existentialist sense that also applies to the freedom associated with choosing to go to work.  Of course you can choose not to, and then you can freely accept the consequences.  Indeed, one of the big differences between chattel slavery and wage slavery is that in the latter you are free to quit.  But even that freedom is for the boss’s sake, since unlike the plantation owners, who both bought and procreated the slaves they needed, capitalists need workers who are free to quit in order to lure them away from their former employers.      

Virtually all of our productive hours are spent following plans laid out by the bosses and their representatives.  Yet we do not vote for our bosses.  We do not vote on what and how much to produce.  We do not vote on whether to fire the boss.  We do not vote on the tens of thousands of layoffs that the bosses administer with the stroke of a pen.  We have no say about the bulk of our waking hours.

And they tell us we are free.

We are free because every four years we get to vote for a candidate of their choosing.  They place every conceivable obstacle before alternative viewpoints, whether that involves media coverage or simply the astronomical cost of running a campaign, that is, of buying votes.  They plead with us to vote.  They really do want us to vote.  Because the more we vote the more they can remind us that we are free and that we chose our rulers.  They rule through the illusion that we freely created the world as it is.

 

What Do the Capitalists Really Tell Us About Freedom?

If we look at what the capitalist-controlled media tells us is really behind human behavior, thinking, and action, it is very clear that they work overtime trying to convince us that we are not free, though they never say that directly.  Their message is implicit.  The message is that we are controlled by inner and outer forces which work through the body’s biological whips and chains.

Often they appeal to genes.  Blacks have a genetically-based IQ palsy.  Women are genetically inferior in mathematics.  There’s just no overcoming this built-in handicap.

More and more, the brain is competing with genetics as a font of capitalist pseudo-explanation.  The culprit behind the recent $7.2 billion bust at the French bank Société Général was not the capitalist-inspired greed of junior trader Jerome Kerviel, but rather an impaired nucleus accumbens in his brain.  He just couldn’t turn off this pleasure center, we are told.[iv] 

The reason God “won’t go away”[v] is not that it seductively offers an illusion of explanation in a world still overwhelmed with lies and economic insecurity, but rather that there is a part of the brain that encodes the reality of the spirit.

And the lesson to be learned from Eliot Spitzer’s sexual trysts[vi] is not that patriarchal society connects sex to power, and turns sex into a commodity, but rather that Spitzer, like so many others, is not fully free to behave otherwise, since he has abnormal concentrations of monoamine oxidase A in his brain, which interferes with the normal functioning of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that plays a vital role in sensing pleasure. 

And whereas brain science is competing with genetics for popular pseudo-explanations of common, everyday problems, both are competing with the scriptures, which is losing its hold on many people, but remains a strong pole of attraction.  Genetics is the new Old Testament.  The brain is the new New Testament.  All are invoked to provide a rationale and authority for whatever prejudices people want to justify  --  for the notion of “just wars”, for the inferiority of women and the dark-skinned races, for the unnaturalness of homosexuality, for class society and the naturalness of privilege.

Capitalist class society turns the producers of wealth into victims of the very system for which they produce.  The products of their own hands are taken away from them, even used against them.  This is Marx’s notion of alienation, the social factor in mass psychopathology. 

Ruling class propaganda tries to convince workers that this is the natural order of things.  They are workers first, not free to question the boss.  They are free only in their own homes.  But even there the consumer society legally breaks and enters, through relentless television commercials, junk mailings, and telemarketing, all in an effort to get us to buy things. 

The mass psychiatric dislocations that result from this are of such epidemic proportions and of such fluctuating character that even genetics and brain science cannot provide an adequate explanation.  It is obviously ridiculous to even consider that the rise in the incidence of depression, anxiety, and even suicide that accompanies economic downturns is due genes and biology.  At best, this only begs the question.  How did the economic insecurity activate the gene or the brain?  A better explanation is social-psychological, such as was attempted by the French sociologist Durkheim in his study of suicide. 

Social phenomena, says Durkheim, are real.  They may be tasteless and odorless, but we learn how to recognize them nonetheless.  They express themselves in social relations, how we communicate with others, how we behave in social settings.  We interpret social reality.  And in the worst case, we may interpret it as confirming that our futures are hopeless and that the present is without value.  We don’t need genes and the neurotransmitters of the brain to explain the rise and fall of such psychopathology.  And even if genes and the brain played a role, there can be no doubt that social reality amplifies the biological capacity for disease, much as nuclear weapons amplify the capacity for cancer.  

 

Alienation in the Classroom

The psycho-damage of the larger society reveals itself in its local institutions.  As our society tightens the competitive screws of a capitalism falling apart, a capitalism that has very little to offer the masses of ordinary working people other than mindless jobs, firing a gun, or living behind bars, so too does the school classroom feel the pain.  The classroom, after all, is created in the image of the larger society.

The damage is already being felt.  In one study of children’s reactions to high stakes testing, Anne Wheelock, Damian J. Bebell & Walt Haney demonstrated that children’s drawings revealed a pathologic anxiety and fear engendered by the stressful testing environment.[vii]  One child drew a picture of himself being attacked by two giant pencils while sweat was dripping down his face.

Spokespeople for the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry have reported rising rates of anxiety and depression and suicide among schoolchildren, and they attribute this directly to the increased stress associated with the harsh testing environment we have created.[viii]

The National Association of School Psychologists follows the kinds of things children rate as most stressful.  Traditionally, the biggest stressors have been loss of a parent, going blind, and being held back in school, in that order.  For years, this was basically a given.  According to the NASP, however, “[i]n 2001, 6^th grade students rated grade retention as the most stressful life event, followed by the loss of a parent and going blind.”[ix]  No Child Left Behind can only be adding salt to the wound.

This is mind pollution of seismic proportions.  Mind warming.  The pediatric mind on the endangered species list.  Mind extinction, if we take it to the end. 

Imagine how we all react when we see on television that a piece of Antarctica has broken off, or that the glaciers covering Greenland are slipping into the ocean, or that polar bears sunning themselves on the ice are drowning when the ice, thinner than they thought, cracks, or that 40% of amphibian species are endangered with extinction.  What was the probability that in the momentary flicker of time we call a human lifespan we would see a piece of Antarctica break off, a piece that had been attached for billions of years?

You can deny global warming and environmental pollution all you want until you see images of these calamities. 

Now consider that some 6^th graders fear being held back in school more than losing a parent.  A piece of the collective mind of children is breaking off.  You can deny alienation and its psychopathologic manifestations all you want until you see children quiver before a high-stakes examination. 

And Barack Obama wants education to prepare our children for the insanity of global capitalist competition.  It is an insanity that generates depression, neuroses, anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress, and loneliness in epidemic proportions.  This is the mental swamp that the capitalist system has created.  It is a characteristic of modern society, and is reproduced in the classroom. 

Learning in public school is competitive, egotistical, and individualistic.  The main lesson all children learn is exchange value  --  not in money, that comes later  --  but in grades and test scores.  The more you accumulate the more doors you can open, in order to accumulate more, to open more doors, to accumulate more.  The grades and test scores turn into money, which is then passed on to your children as doors to higher grades and test scores.  But this soon breaks down.  They call it grade inflation, which then heightens the competition for other forms of educational exchange value  --  extracurricular activities, advanced courses, sucking up.  It’s an endless internal scream.

It must make you reconsider any simplistic liberal notion that the classroom is the key to democratizing society and raising people from poverty.  The issue is more than democracy and poverty  --  as important as these are.  The issue is alienation.  And if we continue to reproduce the greater society’s social relations in the classroom, we will take the whole personality apart.  Democracy is a farce if the participants are damaged goods.

There is no other solution to this than the elimination of capitalism.  And the sooner the better.  Or else our diseased minds will be swimming in bubbling hot oceans.

 

Alienation and Neuroscience

It was Marx’s overriding concern in his critique of capitalism and class society that it produced alienated human beings.  And with the exploited becoming the overwhelming majority of humanity, the alienation is epidemic, like the black plague.  Some fall off the edge, as we hear periodically with school shootings. 

Alienation derives from the loss of control of the worker over the product of his or her labor.  The worker is the object of the work, not the subject.

But alienation is more than that.  It is also that the world we create through work becomes more and more of a Frankenstein, affecting the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the diseases we contract.

Alienation manifests itself in psychological problems that feel individual  --  and are painful to the individual  -- but are rooted in social relations.  The most acute pain is borne by those with the fewest coping mechanisms  --  children.

Teachers and physicians see the disease in individuals.  And we are naturally drawn to help each individual.  But if we don’t also do something about the larger picture, there will be no end of the line of people waiting for us to help them.  And we’ll need to take a break to get help for ourselves too.

In this context of oppression and the true denial of freedom and liberty, the only way to stay sane is to fight back.  Fighting back exposes the lies, reveals the truth, places the fighter on the side of truth, and also places the fighter on the side of justice.  There can be nothing more satisfying in class society than that.  This is what makes us whole again  --  truth and justice. 

Fighting back takes place on many levels.  We need to organize teachers and students, workers, women, people of color, gays and lesbians, and immigrants.  We also need to cut through the lies that have filled the corporate controlled media and school curriculum.  We need to understand things from our perspective. 

And this is where neuroscience comes in.  Neuroscience is about what makes us human.  It is about upright posture, the freeing of the upper extremities to work on the material world, and the capacity for otherwise impenetrable minds to communicate via language.  In other words, human neuroscience is about both the individual and social dimensions of humanness.

Neuroscience has always been the “man behind the curtain” for theories of psychology.  For classical behaviorists, drawing the curtain revealed the spinal reflex arc.  Touch your finger on a sharp object and the finger immediately withdraws.  Stretch the patellar tendon of the knee and watch the leg extend.  These are actions that occur without input from the mind.  And since the mind is unobservable and therefore an unknowable illusion, reflex neural circuitry is the foundation of psychology.  All that is mistakenly referred to as mental life is just the learned assemblage of stimulus-response networks built up on the basis of the primary reflex arc, with the brain itself incorporated into the essentially spinal mechanism.

But if behaviorism was the psychology of the spinal cord, then cognitive psychology became the psychology of the brain.  I truly believe that many psychologists breathed a Freudian sigh of relief when breakthroughs allowed them to center their work in the brain after the behaviorists had tried every which way to keep those doors locked. 

Cognitive psychology acknowledged a level of mental reality whose structure could not be explained as a product of stimulus-response learning.  The syntactic grammars of human languages were one such mental reality.  The capacity to recognize faces were another.  In general, the way sensory information becomes mental representation defied the notion of reflex networks.

Cognitive psychology made use of the two great traditions in modern neuroscience.  On the one hand, the localizationists identified regions of the brain that accepted and processed distinct sensory inputs.  On the other hand, generalists identified the mechanisms common to all such sensory processing.

Thus, raw visual information is sent to the posterior, occipital cortex of the brain.  It becomes more and more conceptual as it proceeds to nearby secondary and tertiary cortex.  Raw auditory information is sent to the lateral, temporal cortex of the brain, and also becomes more and more conceptual as it too proceeds across secondary and tertiary cortex.  Raw tactile information is sent to the parietal cortex, and becomes more and more conceptual as it proceeds across its secondary and tertiary cortex.  The various sensory modalities may blend together, to produce multi-modal conceptual representations. 

In its travels across the cortex, sensory information is processed and mental life is produced.  A leading neuroscientist summarized this scheme of things as follows:

That is, cognitive psychology is information processing and information is derived from sensory inputs.

But in this, information-processing cognitive psychology is not fundamentally different from behaviorism in the way it views the relationship between the organism and its environment.  Whether in responding to stimuli or processing information, both behaviorism and information-processing cognitive psychology subordinate the agent to the environment.  The agent is the object of psychological processes, not the subject.  The world acts on the organism; the organism does not act on the world.

Now, it is indeed true that mindless reflexes are abundant.  And it is true that the mind must analyze information in order to solve problems.  But it is also true that human mental life involves another level of reality, namely, the creative level, the level that imagines, predicts, and anticipates with a certain degree of what Chomsky called “stimulus-free” mechanisms, that is, freedom from the control of surrounding stimuli or environmental information.

There are psychologies based on this view.  The meaning-centered, whole language view of reading, for example, maintains that good readers construct their own text, parallel to that of the author’s, on the basis of predictions, which themselves are grounded in the reader’s own background knowledge and belief systems.

And now neuroscience is beginning to understand the brain mechanisms of prediction, hypothesis-formation, anticipation, and creativity.  As is true for science in general, the revolutionary rethinking in neuroscience is based on an accumulating set of facts that require a new paradigm to achieve a satisfactory level of explanation.

So, for example, the neuroscience scaffold for information processing holds a very definite view of the relationship between the brain’s outer cortex and one of the brain’s deeper structures, the thalamus.  The thalamus is a sub-organ of the brain, just above the brain stem, to which are sent visual, auditory, and tactile information, prior to their arrival in the cortex.  The thalamus, in this sense, is a relay station.  It has been referred to as the brain’s “gateway to the cortex.” According to this classical view, “[a]lmost everything we can know about the outside world or about ourselves is based on messages that have had to pass through the thalamus.”[xi] 

The concordance between Mesulam’s cognitive processing and Sherman and Guillery’s thalamocortical arrow is more than coincidence.  It represents the dominant mode of scientific thinking about humans in the world, a bottom-up conception which sees the world as primary and the organism as secondary.

But this is nothing less than the self-propagation of bourgeois modes of thought on the scientific enterprise.  It is not that behaviorism had nothing to say  --  there are behaviors mediated mindlessly through the spinal cord.  Nor is it that cognitive psychology has nothing to say  --  there are cognitive structures that solve problems by processing information.  The problem is that these conceptions are, both individually and even when taken together, entirely incomplete and unsatisfactory as a scientific paradigm for understanding humanness.  It leaves out the dialectically necessary complementary component, the counterpole that allows humans to freely act on the world, Chomsky’s stimulus-free creative self-expression, or Marx’s unalienated human who is not merely the object of history, but also its subject.       

This is why certain emerging concepts in neuroscience have a significance of profound proportions.  There are facts about brain structure that are simply incompatible with the bottom-up view of the relationship between the thalamus and the cortex.  It is becoming increasingly clear that the cortex can hold a dominant position over the thalamus, quite the opposite of the classical teaching.

First of all, the thalamus actually relays to the cortex more than just the sensory information it has received from the body’s sensory organs.  It also receives information from some parts of the cortex and sends it to others.  Furthermore, as many researchers have noted, there are ten times as many nerve fibers running from the cortex to the thalamus than nerve fibers running from the thalamus to the cortex.  It makes little sense to think of these as merely feedback fibers  --  why should there be so many more feedback fibers than feedforward ones? 

These and many other facts about corticothalamic connections have led Sherman and Guillery to remark that the classical view of the thalamus-cortex relationship is “beginning to be less useful than it was in the past” (p. 4).  And another important figure in the field has commented that because “corticothalamic synapses largely outnumber afferent synapses, … the notion of the thalamus as a relay station, linking the periphery to the cerebral cortex, should clearly be revised.”[xii]

When the thalamus is regarded as the controller of the cortex, via its function as a “gatekeeper”, then it is easy to align this with a bottom-up, information-processing view of psychology.  But when the cortex is dominant, then a new psychological interpretation is called for.  Destexhe summarizes the fundamental property of this new psychology in his observation that “[t]he descending corticothalamic information could therefore be a ‘prediction’ of the sensory input.”

            Extending this logic, Hawkins (2005) observes that the biological basis of the psychology of predicting is that “the neurons involved in sensing … become active in advance of them actually receiving sensory input.  When the sensory input does arrive, it is compared with what was expected” (p. 89).  Hawkins draws the extremely important conclusion that “[t]he cortex is an organ of prediction” (p. 89).  To this can be added the notion that the thalamocortical relays constitute the organ of confirmation and disconfirmation.  And, no doubt, other neural structures, including ones involved with language, belief systems, memory systems, and so on, stand in the same relationship to the cortex as does the thalamus.  In this way, the brain makes predictions, and either confirms or disconfirms them, on the basis of far more than just raw sensory information.

            The psychology of prediction and confirmation/disconfirmation is fundamentally creative and stimulus-free.  It involves planning and projecting into the future.  It is naturally at home with imagining the possible and testing against the actual.  It is the psychology underlying the naturalness of scientific hypothesis formation and testing.  It is, ultimately, a psychology in which the agent is the subject of his or her own actions, not the object.  And now there is empirical evidence from neuroscience that not only justifies such a psychology, but even requires it.

            The psychology of prediction/confirmation/disconfirmation will figure into the eventual construction of a future psychology of freedom.  It will do so because the mode of operation it ascribes to the human brain is one that is liberated from the controlling ties of external stimuli or information.  This in no way implies that information processing and reflex behavior need to be tossed overboard.  Rather, it emphasizes a dialectical relationship of modes of thought and behavior, from the most primitive, namely automatic spinal reflexes, to a somewhat higher mode, namely the processing of information, to the highest mode so far discovered, namely the capacity to be freed from the here and now, in order to plan, anticipate, and create.

            We can therefore no longer be told that we are totally controlled by our biology, for while biology does provide a set of constraints on what we can think and do, it also opens up the capacity for creativity, problem solving, and imagination.  One day, when such an understanding of human psychology is regarded as common sense, when it feels as natural as the notion that opening our eyes allows us to see the world, then we will know that we are living in a free society.