Science Literature

The science community places great weight on sound reason, clear logic and objectivity. Whilst this works most of the time, it does not explain paradigm shifts (as articulated by Thomas Kuhn) which appear to involve pronounced human factors. Nor does it explain the origins debate involving scientists, where each of the viewpoints finds it hard to understand why other parties find it so difficult to follow what they regard as a simple argument. For example, some say that Darwinism provides a full and satisfying mechanistic explanation for design in living things so that it becomes possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist, whereas others find Darwinian mechanisms capable of doing little more than providing fine-tuning of organisms to their environments, with no prospect of building complexity by these means. How can this situation be explained? Why is rationality, logic and objectivity (affirmed by all the parties) inadequate for resolving the controversies? Diehard positivists have a tendency to insist that they are in the right and all who differ from them represent the forces of darkness. However, new findings from neuroscience are emerging that show that our mental processes and the choices we make are influenced by prior convictions and beliefs.

What wine can tell us about the nature of reality

The most recent contribution to knowledge comes from social scientists involved in the way marketing actions can enhance or inhibit experiences of pleasantness of wine. Subjects tasted five samples, identified by their retail prices: $5, $10, $35, $45 and $90 per bottle. During tasting, the brain activity of the subjects was scanned using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging). The Press Release summarises the results in this way:

The subjects consistently reported that they liked the taste of the $90 bottle better than the $5 one, and the $45 bottle better than the $35 one. Scans of their brains supported their subjective reports; a region of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex, or mOFC, showed higher activity when the subjects drank the wines they said were more pleasurable.
There was a catch to the experiment, however. Although the subjects had been told that they would taste five different, variously priced wines, they actually had sampled only three. [. . .]
"Our study [shows] that the neural encoding of the quality of an experience is actually modulated by a variable such as price, which most people believe is correlated with experienced pleasantness," [said co-author Antonio Rangel].

An informative and insightful analysis of this research is by Jonah Lehrer.

"What they saw was the power of expectations. People expect expensive wines to taste better, and then their brains literally make it so. Wine lovers shouldn't feel singled out: Antonio Rangel, the Caltech neuroeconomist who led the study, insists that he could have used a variety of items to get similar results, from bottled water to modern art. [. . .] The human brain, research suggests, isn't built for objectivity. The brain doesn't passively take in perceptions. Rather, brain regions involved in developing expectations can systematically alter the activity of areas involved in sensation. The cortex is "cooking the books," adjusting its own inputs depending on what it expects. [. . .] [T]he work has broad implications. People assume that they perceive reality as it is, that our senses accurately record the outside world. Yet the science suggests that, in important ways, people experience reality not as it is, but as they expect it to be."

Neuroscience research, then, raises questions about the concept of objectivity and that challenges Positivist science in particular. We cannot escape being influenced by our expectations! Objectivity may be an ideal for science, but scientists, being human, cannot attain to it.
Expectations in science are linked to worldviews and paradigms of thought. This is what inhibits communication and understanding of controversial issues that are approached via different paradigms. This is the explanation why people on different sides of issues like these find it easy to impute irrationality or prejudice to the other side.

As a final thought, it is worth considering where neuroscience research is heading. Materialists think we are "nothing more than proteins and electrical impulses" (for a recent blog on this, go here). They should note that the findings of neuroscience are revealing that our "electrical impulses" do not reinforce the concepts of objectivity and rationality which are espoused by positivist science. As has been noted here, post-modernism is an inevitable consequence of positivist science. The underlying materialist philosophy is a universal acid that eats away everything it meets - including science itself. On this basis, the standards of objectivity and rationality have to be replaced by the socially constructed nature of science.
But should we throw up our hands and conclude that endless debates about the science of origins cannot clarify the truth? As long as Materialism prevails, there is no escape from this conundrum. However, when Theism replaces Materialism as the underpinning philosophy, the picture starts to look very different. Then, there are new grounds for justifying realism and rationality. Indeed, all the traditional emphases of science are reinforced by Theism - with the sole exception of secularism. This is not a negative point. Many of us regard secularism as an intrusion into the world of science, and we welcome having a rationale for removing it.

Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness
Hilke Plassmann, John O'Doherty, Baba Shiv, and Antonio Rangel
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences US, January 22, 2008, 105(3),1050-1054.

Abstract: Despite the importance and pervasiveness of marketing, almost nothing is known about the neural mechanisms through which it affects decisions made by individuals. We propose that marketing actions, such as changes in the price of a product, can affect neural representations of experienced pleasantness. We tested this hypothesis by scanning human subjects using functional MRI while they tasted wines that, contrary to reality, they believed to be different and sold at different prices. Our results show that increasing the price of a wine increases subjective reports of flavor pleasantness as well as blood-oxygen-level-dependent activity in medial orbitofrontal cortex, an area that is widely thought to encode for experienced pleasantness during experiential tasks. The paper provides evidence for the ability of marketing actions to modulate neural correlates of experienced pleasantness and for the mechanisms through which the effect operates.

See also:

Wine Study Shows Price Influences Perception, Caltech Media Relations, January 14 2008

Lehrer, J. Grape expectations, The Boston Globe, 24 February 2008.