Could
we be reaching the end of materialist neuroscience?
It’s
possible. It’s becoming conventional to assert that the mind is not the
brain—even New York Times columnist David Brooks, who wrote an
“evolutionary psychology” novel a few years ago, is now doing it.
Literary Darwnism, as represented by Brooks’s widely panned novel, is
also taking a hit.
And science tabloid New Scientist has started to scoff at
the idea too. Of course, medical neuroscientist Raymond
Tallis
has been scoffing at it for years, as have others.
But
perhaps the most significant new development is that top biology review The
Scientist recently featured a cautiously favourable
review of a new book trashing the idea that current neuroscience is close to
“reading minds,”Brainwashed:
The seductive appeal of mindless neuroscience by
psychiatrist Sally Satel and psychologist Scott Lilienfeld. The book is a
comprehensive discussion of why we can just forget the pop media claims about
the power of fMRI imaging, leading many to believe that neuroscience will
eventually be able to read minds. Indeed, one well-known defender of that
proposition allows us to know that for now
psychiatry and psychology can continue. Never mind the government reading your
mail; neuroscientists will read your mind.
Claims
like, for example, that conservatives are turned on by “their own
disgust”
and liberals just like being turned on, period are taken seriously, as a portent
of things to come.
As
if that would generally explain responses to a local issue like a new plaza or
discharge home for parolees? Would some such claim really override the
difference it would make to the lives of the individuals in the neighbourhood?
Maybe, maybe not. People, otherwise liberal, have been known to be alarmed when
they discover that a local group home may house serial violent offenders.
Conservatives could be for or against a new road.
This
changes matters because, as the New Scientist article puts
it,
"That,
at least, is the popular conception of neuroscience and it's worth big money.
The US and the European Union are throwing billions of dollars at two new projects
to map the human brain. Yet there is also a growing anxiety that many of
neuroscience's findings don't stand up to scrutiny. It's not just sensational
headlines reporting a 'dark patch' in a psychopath's brain, there are now
serious concerns that some of the methods themselves are
flawed."
For
one thing, all that fMRI ((brain imaging) really does is show which brain areas
have high oxygen levels when a person is thinking something. It simply cannot
tell us what people are thinking, because many brain centres are active and
those that are active may be activated for many reasons. Each brain is unique so
data from studies must be averaged. But thoughts are not averaged; they belong
to the individual.
Flawed
methods are only a minor problem with this pseudodiscipline. A bigger one is the
basic idea that the mind is simply what the brain happens to be doing. For
example, as Satel and Lilienfeld note, you don't have to be a Cartesian dualist
to doubt that hate, generally, can actually be detected in our brains in a
useful way, as one study has attempted to demonstrate.
From
The
Scientist:
"'Brains
are hot,' Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld acknowledge in
Brainwashed, their 'exposé of mindless neuroscience' (mostly practiced
not by neuroscientists, they stress, but by 'neuropundits,' among others). The
'mediagenic' technology of fMRI imaging has made the brain, aglow with metabolic
hotspots, into a rainbow emblem of the faith that science will soon empower us
to explain, control, expose, exploit, or excuse every wayward human behavior
from buying to lying, from craving to crime."
As
if. If religion can’t save us, science won’t either. And it is not clear that
very many of the claims made are science.
Note:
“Neuropundits?” One outcome of the many questionable claims made for brain
imaging is the rise of terminology like “neuromania,” “neurohype,” and
“neurobollocks.” The authors of such bon mots are, typically, sceptical
neuroscientists.
Denyse
O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual
Brain.
