How the growing wave of popularity and misunderstanding of neuroscience distorts the understanding of human nature. Our understanding of humans has already changed thanks to neuroscience.
Sometimes it seems that through the computational work of cognitive and neural processes, literally everything can be explained - from romantic love and religious revelations to gastronomic addictions and affection for cats. It seems that all our subjective experiences are just a cunning illusion that our brain generates. There is no character. It's all the brain. There is no personality. It's all the brain. There is no free will.
According to the unforgettable formulation of Jacob Moleschott, "as the kidney excretes urine, so the brain excretes thought."
The brain of the Italian physiologist "singled out" this idea when brain science was still in its infancy. Much has changed since then: new theories and new technologies have emerged that have allowed us to look inside the working brain. The smallest features of our behavior can now be traced back to their neurochemical correlates. As a result, a whole branch of scientific disciplines with the prefix "neuro" appeared: neuroethics, neuroaesthetics, neurosociology, neurophilosophy, and neuromarketing. Mentions of dopamine and serotonin can be heard in everyday conversations.
Neuroscientists are emerging as new pop stars and experts on everything from terrorism and drug addiction to the latest art and architecture. Popular culture is plagued by neuromania. Moleschott's thought is repeated to us in different ways. Biological reductionism is back in vogue. In many ways, this resembles the situation with genes, which recently were seen as the main source of intelligence, aggressiveness, friendliness and almost all behavioral characteristics of a person. But the hype around genes, raised in the media, did not justify itself. The same thing is now happening with neuroscience.
If Andy Warhol were our contemporary, he would draw brains.
Many scientists - including neuroscientists themselves - are extremely skeptical about the loud claims of the popularizers of brain science. Neuroscience can tell a lot about how neurons, glial cells, and synaptic connections work, but it cannot explain the fundamental components of our own experiences. Even the experience of red will differ from person to person in different contexts - not to mention complex feelings and emotions like fear, love, and hate. Let all our experiences and thought processes be encoded in a certain sequence of neural connections. But explaining consciousness by these connections is like explaining a Van Gogh painting by the composition and arrangement of colors on the canvas.
The behavior of a complex whole cannot be explained by the behavior of its parts. This is a fairly simple principle, but for some reason not everyone understands it.
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Even the very idea that thoughts are the result of neural processes is, among other things, the result of complex historical and cultural dynamics. The brain by itself cannot generate a single thought. We are not our brains. We are also our bodies; our relationships with other people; our cultural biases; the language we speak; the texts that we have read; the experience we went through. None of this boils down to schemes for activating neural connections - although, of course, it is expressed in them. The “hard problem of consciousness” - the question of how neural connections generate conscious experience - cannot be solved within the framework of modern neuroscience.
Striking hypothesis
In 1994, Nobel laureate Francis Crick wrote a book about the brain called The Striking Hypothesis. He wrote: “The astonishing hypothesis is that your joys and sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of self and free will are in fact nothing more than a manifestation of the activity of a huge complex of nerve cells and associated molecules.
"As Alice from Lewis Carroll's fairy tales would put it, you are just a bag of neurons."
For neuroscientists, of course, this hypothesis is not surprising. This is just the basic premise with which a scientist approaches his work. Everything except neurons and electrochemical processes is simply not of interest to him. Not because there is nothing but this in nature, but because everything else does not fit into the existing scientific paradigm - and, most importantly, is not required to answer the questions that the scientist is busy with. Within certain limits, such reductionism is useful - in part it is thanks to it that brain science has made such tremendous advances today. But trying to extend the neuroscientific approach to other areas of study can lead to serious misunderstandings.
Brain images compete with classical paintings in popularity today.
Criticism of the expansive approach to the interpretation of neuroscientific discoveries is heard not only from philosophers, sociologists and representatives of the humanities, but also from neuroscientists themselves, who seek to more accurately define the framework of their discipline. The popular idea of mirror neurons as a source of empathy and understanding is now being seriously challenged. The hypothesis of Antonio Damasio about somatic markers as a motivational factor has also been repeatedly criticized by experts.
It is necessary to be very careful in transferring neuroscientific discoveries into politics, moral theory, culture and psychology. You can't just take ideas from neuroscience and apply them uncritically to questions that are of a completely different nature. "The thoroughly commercialized intellectuals of the 21st century are capable of contributing to the bewildering of the people at a higher level," writes contemporary philosopher Thomas Metzinger. Explaining all aspects of human experience by brain function is to contribute to this stupidity. There are three main points to consider when assessing the social value of neuroscience research.
1. There is no "normal" state of the brain. The brain is not only natural, but also a cultural object
You cannot talk about the brain as if it were some archetypal, unchanging substrate, all functions of which are defined from the very beginning and somehow determine our activity. The brain changes as a result of interaction with the outside world. There are no two people with the same brain. Therefore, when a scientist conducts a study using a magnetic resonance imager, he is not scanning the human brain "in general", but the brain of a specific person with a certain personal history.
Neuroscience's claims of universality have been severely shaken by the discovery of neuroplasticity. The structure of the brain not only does not explain the character traits, personal preferences and emotions of a person, but itself needs an explanation. This opens up the ground for the interaction of neuroscience with the humanities and socio-historical disciplines. Neither side of this interaction can claim superiority over the other. The fear of the New Zealand Maori warrior and the fear of the European soldier in the trenches of the First World War are different emotions. The concepts we believe in are superimposed on physiological affects and change them. We think and feel differently from others. Neuroscience has very little to say about why this is so.
Painting by Francisco Goya, superimposed on a spinal cord image.
2. The significance of dividing the brain into functional zones is exaggerated - as is the significance of the differences between "female" and "male" brains
The media now and then are full of headlines like "Scientists have discovered the source of consciousness in the brain", "Scientists have found God in the temporal lobe", "The amygdala is responsible for social life", etc. About the division between the left and right hemispheres as a division between logic and empathy, common sense and creativity did not speak only the lazy. But scientists increasingly doubt that areas of the brain can be clearly specialized in functional belonging. All neurons work in about the same way: the visual cortex, for example, can be reprogrammed to process information from the hearing organs. Touch can become an organ of sight.
Even the most distant regions of the brain interact with each other in a certain way. Remembering is always also a sensation. Reflection is always also an emotion. Today, neuroscientists are increasingly talking not about individual functions, but about the dynamic unity of brain activity. Several areas of the brain are involved in any activity. Functional specialization exists, but its significance is not as great as we are accustomed to believe. Not only the brain is important, but also the whole body: it directly participates in our every thought and emotion.
Differences between the "male" and "female" brains also exist, but it is far from always clear how universal and statistically significant they are. There are probably not so many initial differences. Gender is only one factor here. Gender constructs and social attitudes sometimes matter as much. There are no neurological structures that dictate specific behaviors for men or women. Women, unlike men, are fertile. But whether they use this ability and how they do it is determined more by culture than biology.
3. The brain is not the only source of conscious experience
Of course, this does not mean that consciousness is generated by some mystical spiritual forces. But the brain itself does not generate anything either. Experiments in which the impact on a particular area of the brain causes a certain experience - for example, flashes of light, pleasure, or the desire to grab something with your hand - do not prove that the only source of these experiences is the brain. Through the activation of a specific neural network, a complex chain of memories can be awakened in your mind. But the memory itself appeared in these neurons only due to your interaction with other people and the world around you. The brain is the vehicle, not the source of our experience.
Drawing of the human brain superimposed on the watercolor by Albrecht Durer.
Consciousness is what we do, not what happens inside us. It is more of a dance than digestion or kidney excretion. We are not locked in our own cranium - consciousness goes far beyond its limits. People say they know what time it is if they have a watch with them. In this sense, clocks are one of the components of our consciousness - just like language, social and cultural institutions, technological devices and symbolic systems.
Consciousness does not arise inside the brain, nor is meaning just a component of a sentence. Meaning lives on the surface of the sentence, and consciousness lives on the surface of our physiology, in close contact with the world around us. To quote neuroscientist Robert Burton: "Just like you shouldn't expect to read a great novel by looking at the alphabet, you shouldn't look for signs of complex human behavior at the cellular level."
The "startling hypothesis" which says that human consciousness and behavior is nothing more than a collection of neural processes can today be considered a misunderstanding or a prolonged joke. And it is not only the humanities who assert this. Neuroscientists themselves, as well as representatives of psychology and anthropology, speak about this most convincingly. There is an international research network whose members are now working to develop a critical approach to neuroscientific discoveries. They recognize that brain data can tell a lot about human consciousness and behavior. But they cannot explain everything.