Does a white-privileged neuropsychologist have anything useful to contribute to discussions about racism? Can science pave a path toward decency and equality? See what you think.
The racism context generally subsumes the following problems:
Although it’s an oversimplified outline of racism, this structure can provide a framework to support a meaningful analysis of the role that brain science may play in reinforcing racism and, hopefully, mitigating its continued effects.
Progressive medical marvels of our age include neuroscientific studies and brain imaging that show deeply embedded brain reactions to the presentation of various stimuli. Using a number of high-power scanning techniques, researchers can measure and document differential brain activation when subjects are shown provocative stimuli.
Methodical studies have measured deep brain reactions to presentations of food, sexual, images, accidents, words, stimulating visual imagery, etc. Expanding upon these findings, recent research has included evoking and measuring brain electrical and blood flow responses to imagery depicting different races and their associations with potentially fear evoking reactions.
Medical science has established that the human brain contains specific circuitry that activates the fight-or-flight and fear responses basic to our survival, specifically oriented toward the detection and avoidance of threat and danger.
These mechanisms are centered in the amygdala, a substructure deep in the brain that controls the limbic system. The limbic system is a neural network that mediates many aspects of emotion and memory. When the amygdala and limbic system are overactive or too easily stimulated—the result of traumas and many other predisposing factors—the brain and nervous system sustain extended fight-or-flight states promoting anxiety, overarousal, fear, stress, sleep problems, and poor concentration, among other deficits.
The brain’s “gut-level” reactions are neurologically extended to impede cognitive control and impinge upon belief systems that eventually justify evaluations and actions that reinforce racist, oppressive, and punitive attitudes and actions.
In his new book, Behave, Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a highly regarded Stanford neuroscientist, cites numerous studies highlighting differential brain responses that indicate racial bias. Among these studies were experiments in which subjects were rapidly shown pictures of people holding either a gun or a cell phone and were told to “shoot” only gun toters. The underlying neurobiology concerns focused on “event-related potentials” (ERPs), which are stimulus –induced changes in electrical activity of the brain (as assessed by EEG—electroencephalography). Threatening faces produce a distinctive change (called the P200 component) in the ERP waveform in under two hundred milliseconds. Among white subjects, viewing someone black evoked a stronger P200 waveform than viewing someone white, regardless of whether the person was armed. Then, a few milliseconds later, a second inhibitory waveform (the N200 component) appeared, originating from the frontal cortex—the cognitive part of the brain that evaluates “let’s think for a second about what we’re seeing before we react.” Viewing a black individual evoked less of an N200 waveform than did seeing someone white. The greater the P200/N200 ratio (i.e., the greater the ratio of “I’m feeling threatened” to “Hold on a second”), the greater the likelihood of reacting adversely to an unarmed black individual.
Sapolsky cites similar experimental studies showing biased responses where whites showed heightened sensitivity and attunement to ambiguous images of blacks who were perceived as threatening. These findings have significant implications in understanding the subconscious bias that may precipitate police violence against minorities.
In my practice, we have measured ERP and P200 responses by conducting QEEGs (Quantitative EEGs) while measuring deep brain responses and activation when subjects were given recognition and response tasks. In such clinical settings, the latencies (shown in ERP and P200 responses) give information on the brain’s attention, impulse control, and flexibility.
The data cited by Sapolsky reveal the subconscious behavioral responses that may predispose whites to judge and precipitously overreact to blacks, as they are perceived as threatening. Underlying the obvious and significant relevance to real-life social situations having devastating consequences is the relevant neurobiology linking amygdala and limbic system activity to impulsive and inappropriate cognitive control.
We are not “proving” that all whites are suspicious or afraid of blacks. Rather, the uncovering of neurobiological evidence that fear-based brain responses have perceptual and behavioral racial differentials (in science, they are actually called “discriminants”) suggests the hypothesis that training people to calm their fight-or-flight responses may have sweeping sociological impact in addition to personal health improvement and overall functioning.
We can assume that many people have subconscious and automatic neurological limbic responses to people of different race and ethnicity. The evidence from brain imaging reveals that activation of the amygdala is often heightened in response to “other” races.
Subsequent to the perception of threat, the mind—in keeping with its dutiful role in justifying emotional and neurological response—comes up with rationalizations and belief systems that accord with primitive, automatic, and often subconscious fear arousal.
Through association and repetition, the conditioned fear responses on the part of those in power may play a role in the propensity to subdue and restrict populations associated with perceived threat. This pattern eventually limits freedom, opportunity, and equality, thus propagating and reinforcing institutional racism.
This relay system from primitive brain overarousal to potentially embedded racism bears striking similarity to the anxiety-addiction cycle that creates and reinforces substance abuse and chemical dependence.
In addictions, there is interplay among biological need and habituation states, brain disregulation, attitudes and justifications supporting continued use and abuse, and the larger social issues common to addiction, including habits, lifestyle, relationships, culture, and socioeconomic impact.
What originates as an attempt to mollify internal anxiety and discomfort can quickly turn into neurophysiological dependence, accompanied by beliefs and rationalizations about use and need, and eventual impairment and disruption of the fabric and context of a person’s life.
The racism outline proposed above is both a top-down and bottom-up scheme in which historical practices and personal beliefs and attitudes (including subconscious ones) interact with each other as well as with the subconscious neurological and emotional responses to classes of people whose presence, actions, and very existence the brain finds threatening. Subconscious emotional neurological fear responses give rise to perceptions, belief systems, and generalized biased attitudes that eventually infiltrate and support racist institutional practices. In defensive response to objections and protests, the cycle projects top-down to spawn defensive reactions based upon perceived threat to security of the privileged.
Neurofeedback (EEG biofeedback) has been used successfully for decades to train and regulate brain function. It has many applications to conditions and symptoms, including trauma, anxiety, depression, sleep, brain injury, psychiatric disturbances, development learning and behavior disorders, seizures, headaches, pain, sociopathy and more.
By displaying and training the brain’s deep neural networks, neurofeedback promotes self-regulation of the brain and nervous system with enduring and often transforming results.
The relay systems in the brain that control communication and modulation affecting states of arousal and calming along with cognitive and perceptual control become much more flexible and adaptive with this training.
From a clinical standpoint, a high percentage of our population suffers from symptoms, disorders, and health and functional impairment directly related to and correctible through the brain’s EEG firing patterns. Simply stated, neurofeedback rescues people from sustained fight-or-flight mode.
In addition to its vital applications to individual personal issues, we can think of neurofeedback as one solution to an underlying pernicious factor in racism: fear.
People who struggle with fear, panic, and anxiety are very familiar with the disconnectedness between these reflexive internal responses and attempts to subdue them by reason. Enlightened mental health professionals are increasingly recognizing that treatments to reduce or eliminate fear based on rational or cognitive approaches are largely ineffective.
Why not use neurofeedback as a foundational method to subjugate the automatic (and subconscious) fear response of the amygdala and limbic system that propels racist emotions and associated thinking and belief systems?
Breaking the cycle among emotional, fear-based overreactions and attitudes, beliefs, individual actions, and embedded institutional biases causally and logically originates with the elimination of irrational fear.
When the brain is calm, it is much better at planning, evaluating, and thinking logically. A composed, flexible, self-regulated brain is necessary and fundamental to developing and modifying perceptions, opinions, and realistic expectations of others.
As in the addiction comparison cited above, taking action to change behavior and outlook becomes overwhelmingly impeded when one is in the throes of physiological emergency (i.e., fear, panic, threat, withdrawal).
For generations, oppressed minorities have struggled to raise awareness and educate the majority classes to dissipate prejudice and come to see minorities as equal and deserving. The recent prominence of advocacy, demonstrations and protests, and the erudite and impassioned eloquence of minority leaders in all walks of our society are gaining momentum in giving an impactful voice in the struggle to overcome racism.
The horrors of violence unequally meted and captured on video have further riveted attention on the systematic and lethal results of fear and oppression. This past year has raised consciousness to heightened levels regarding inequality, white privilege, and systemic institutional racism.
This is necessary. Yet, information, explanation, and demonstration will have diminished impact in the face of recalcitrant fear. The mind justifies what the body feels and experiences. The “privileged” may acknowledge injustice, pay lip service to the need for change, and even work to modify certain behaviors. But, the ingrained response of perceived threat to personal security from “those people” lies just beneath the surface of the scalp. As an analogy, telling addicts about dire consequences and the need for abrupt change will not go far in the face of their painful withdrawal. Sadly, the “haves” are all somewhat addicted to the status quo.
Surely, we as a society need fundamental change in social systems. We must address racism and inequities through legislation, institutional and legal reform, opportunities, and economic stimulus. We must continue to promote examples and elevate the exposure of successful minority role models. We must vigorously educate the majority and eradicate harmful stereotypes. We need also to uplift the education of those disadvantaged and disenfranchised by the current system.
Along with environmental reforms, we can facilitate receptiveness by promoting and bolstering brain calmness and flexibility.
To simplify and emphasize the role of fear-based responses endemic to racism, I have focused on the limbic system relay and its effects on cognitive control, attitude, and behavior. There is another related aspect of brain response to experience that plays a critical role in both sides of the racial divide. That is trauma.
We experience trauma when we are or feel threatened. Trauma comes in many forms as a part of life. No one can avoid it, although some traumas are horrendously worse than others. From both physical pain and emotional shock, the brain stores events in time encapsulated emotional memory. The brain continues to respond—perseverates—as if the event were still happening or yet about to occur. Trauma invokes the fight-or-flight response. Trauma is very personal, but it can also be triggered by collective or vicarious events.
Living black in America is a series of traumas. To witness the George Floyds and many other perpetrations on media is to trigger the individual traumatic experiences that most, if not all, blacks have experienced in our racist society. And this is true of and for other minorities, as well. Note the ubiquitous occurrences of fear-based overreactions, as in the media displayed incidences of a white woman calling the police on a black passerby in Central Park, and another white woman assaulting a black teen because she was sure he had stolen her phone (that she had left in an Uber). These are jarring examples; yet, there are many “Amygdala Amys” and “Limbic Larrys” reacting primitively against imagined and overblown perceptions of threat.
The innate fear response of the sub-brain not only fuels white racism—it plays a role in the accentuated and reinforced traumatic brain responses of those oppressed. The suspicion and avoidance of law enforcement ingrained in minority experience is clearly justified by the offenses of law enforcement and the criminal justice system. But, tell that to the amygdala! Those on the receiving or victim end of racism have their own traumas to overcome.
This is where neurofeedback can be so helpful. Yes, we must change the social system. We must also heal and liberate the traumatized brains of those who have been victimized.
I am aware that it’s common for parents of black children to have the talk—a reference to explaining and warning black youth about the dangers of police and protocols for dealing with police in order to ensure survival. I, of course, never experienced the harassment or the “talk” common to African-Americans.
My white father gave me a different “talk.” He, a doctor, instructed me on how to ingratiate myself with an accosting police officer. “Son,” my dad told me, “if a cop stops you, follow his instructions, but comment offhandedly that you contribute to the Patrolman’s Benevolent Association.” (Is there still such an entity?) “Show him your professional license and tell him that you give professional courtesy to police officers.” How White. Thanks, Dad—I have never followed this advice.
The personal and vicarious collective traumas of those facing racism is a significant subset of the legion of traumas that harm millions of people. They continue to have very personal individual and large-scale social impacts.
Neurofeedback has demonstrated proven effectiveness in healing traumas. While the amygdala and limbic system networks play a pivotal role in reflexive and inappropriately sustained fear responses, brain integration and communication is more complicated. Through neuroscience and clinical experience, we know that the brain’s right hemisphere (and specifically the right temporal and parietal regions) largely store, process, and interpret trauma and emotional memories. By targeting the whole brain integration of these areas with default mode neural networks, we enable people to overcome trauma neurologically and subconsciously and to emerge from the internal prison of frozen mistrust and indefinite fight-or-flight default.
Brain-based trauma healing is needed on both sides of the battleground of oppression. Traumas affect mental health, physical health, and public health. Addressing these issues should be an integral part of social and public health policy.
A large-scale study by headed by physicians Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda examined the relationships of adverse childhood experiences with disease in adulthood. Their study found significant correlations between adverse childhood experiences and incidences of obesity, heart disease, drug abuse, smoking, depression, anxiety, suicide attempts, sexually transmitted diseases, cancer, diabetes, traumatic brain injury, overall poor health, and early death. This study (known as the CDC-Kaiser Study “Relationship of Childhood Abuse and Household Dysfunction to Many of the Leading Causes of Death in Adults”) included over 17,000 Kaiser patients.
Among the striking findings from the research was the link between mental health precursors in childhood and the development of physical, life-threatening illnesses in adulthood. This marshals quite a challenge to the attitude that “it’s all in your head.” Statistically, it’s in your body—literally—and wreaking havoc consequentially with health and longevity.
The basis for the study was correlations between scores on a self-reported instrument of childhood experiences and adverse adult health conditions. The instrument used for patient reports is called the Adverse Childhood Experience Test. It is a self-report based upon individual recollections and answers to ten questions.
To read more about ACE and its implications for health and social adjustment, see my article, Let’s Not Just Talk About It; Duality of Dysfunction in Mental Health, or look up on the Internet: ACE, Adverse Childhood Experiences.
The cry is heard: “We have been oppressed and enslaved for four hundred years! It’s hard to have hope and trust.”
Why don’t we carve inroads by making neurofeedback available and accessible to sectors of the population disadvantaged economically and with associated elevated levels of health impairment. The traumatic impact of adverse childhood experiences is surely more prevalent and dramatic among those on the receiving end of racism.
Whether you trumpet the interests of housing, justice, economic equality, heart disease, mental health, or stigma—we have a lot of work to do for all members of society. We owe these interventions as a duty to combat and defeat racism. As we more effectively regulate the brain’s unrestrained fear responses, we can better control a humane narrative of acceptance and equality.
Let us lead this bold venture with programs to heal the brains of our most needy and to make possible for them lives of freedom from fear, both internal and in the environment.
— Mark Steinberg, PhD
