Book Review |
Keeping media in mind
Don DeLillo's novel, White Noise (1984), has a character called Doctor Winnie Richards who, being a cognitive neuroscientist, is likened to ‘some phenomenal subhuman like a yeti or sasquatch’. Her role is to discover the chemical components of a mysterious new designer-pill which the main character's wife is taking in a secret psychopharmacology trial. Winnie eventually discovers that the drug, known as Dylar, is designed to inhibit a neurotransmitter that generates fear of death; whereby DeLillo gives his readers a flavour of what neuroscientists get up to.A sign of the development and rapid expansion of a scientific discipline is its impact on popular culture. White Noise depicts neuroscience, albeit through a fantastically distorted lens, from the vantage point of the mid-1980s as a coming discipline, which of course it was. Just as the invention of the telescope and the discovery of mathematical physics had provided new ways of understanding the universe, so rapid advances in non-invasive brain imaging, together with ever-advancing molecular biology, developmental biology, Artificial Intelligence, pharmacology and genetics were revolutionizing the study of the brain and central nervous system. After a century in the doldrums, neuroscience was, in its own estimation, taking off; and the promise for medicine was as great as the promise for basic neurobiology, psychology and philosophy of mind. The drama of the discipline's bright future was summed up a trifle woodenly in the preface to Eric Kandel (of whom more later) and J. Schwarz's 1985 edition of Principles of Neural Science: ‘One of the last frontiers of science, perhaps its ultimate challenge, is to understand the biological basis of mentation.’ So fast-forward 20 years: and how is the discipline doing in the eyes of popular culture in the mid-first-decade of the 21st century?
Take Tom Wolfe's best-selling 2004 offering, I Am Charlotte Simmons. The novel opens with another cognitive neuroscientist, this time engaged in removing the amygdalas of a group of cats, thus causing unbridled and perverse sexual behaviour in the feline group. The researcher wins a Nobel award for his efforts, and Wolfe goes on to depict a metaphorical version of the laureate's experiments: a world where, by a kind of Dawkinesque memetic influence, the cultural and spiritual amygdalas of an entire generation of college students have been removed in consequence of neuroscientifically informed beliefs. Unbridled hedonism results on the campuses of America, hence free will, literature, culture and civilization are doomed. The message is that passive reception of neuroscientific ideas is even more to be feared than drugs, booze and passive smoking.
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But that is just literary fiction. Hollywood is something else. The ‘Decade of the Brain’ started with Flatliners (1990), a mind-brain extravaganza on near-death experience, and ended with eXistenZ (1999) in which video games are delivered into a player's nervous system via a ‘metaflesh game pod’—a coupling of amphibian nervous systems with technology designed to deliver impulses into a player's ‘bio port’ through a hole drilled into the spinal cord. Since then we have had such movies as A.I: Artificial Intelligence (2001), Resident Evil (2002), and many, many more; but my personal prize for neuroscientific perversity goes to Terminator Two (1991) depicting a cyborg, played with alarming plausibility by Arnold Schwarzenegger programmed to protect the young hero, John Connor. The boy's mother is so impressed with the cyborg's reliability (all in the amazing chip in Arnie's steel head) that she believes ‘it’ to be preferable to any human father that ever lived.
Is neuroscience a victim of its own failure to engage in positive, realistic public understanding of its activities and preoccupations? Or is it only to be expected that fiction and films will exploit and caricature for their own purposes any expanding new area of science? The popular press provides a more realistic, if superficial overview.
Here is the cover story of last October's Reader's Digest: ‘Secrets to a sharper Brain: Ways to make your little grey cells better, faster, smarter ... The best brain sharpener may be a pair of trainers ...’ Tapping ‘neuroscience’ recently into the search engine of a couple of respected broadsheets, the following popped up: ‘God-spot researchers see light in MRI study. Brain scans of nuns have revealed intricate neural circuits that flicker into life when they feel the presence of God.’ And again: ‘Research shows link between acne treatment and depression.’ And: ‘Nose cells may help paralysed to walk again.’ And: ‘Cloning fraud hits research into Alzheimer cure.’ Self-help, medical-breakthroughs, gee-whiz technology, a hint of religion and a whiff of scandal—the news values are not surprising, but the remarkable feature is the multiplicity of reference points; from genetics to diet, exercise to spirituality, intelligence to anxiety and clinical aspects that range from non-invasive scanning to stem cell treatments, to brave new pills. Without much fuss the media are reinforcing the multiplicity of connections that obtain in a field that now claims to embrace psychiatry, psychology, AI, psychoanalysis, neurology, neurosurgery, epidemiology and pharmacology; which hardly exhausts the growing list.
Yet it would be a mistake to think that the sole, or even the principal, public perception of neuroscience is a consequence of journalism and films. What of the promissory notes made to grant award committees and biotech investors? And what of the influence of the marketing divisions of pharmaceutical companies, and their messages to both the media and clinical practitioners? Nor can one ignore the impact of opinions expressed by eager professional expert witnesses in court, appearing for both defence and plaintiffs on issues ranging from mitigation of mens rea to clinical trial misdemeanours.
Crucial and decisive, however, are those expositors—invariably neuroscientists themselves or academics in closely related fields, such as sociology and philosophy—who write accessible popular books that become widely reviewed and extracted in print journalism: names such as Steven Pinker, Raj Persaud, Dan Dennett, Philip LeDoux, Antonio Damasio, Michael Gazzaniga, John Searle, Oliver Sacks, Francis Crick, Gerald Edelman, Susan Greenfield, Stephen Rose spring to mind. These are the ‘big-name’ popular expositors who, from within the wide-ranging ambit of the neurosciences, arguably bear the greatest responsibility for what neuroscience is telling the public about the human self-image and prospects for its amelioration.
A brief history of the emergence of a new genre of popular exposition of neuroscience usefully dates from 1988 with the publication a book entitled Mind Children: the Future of Robot and Human Intelligence by Professor Hans Moravec, at that time director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory of Carnegie Mellon University. Moravec was arguing for an equivalence between machine brains and human brains. He was predicting, moreover, that the machines of our own making would soon outstrip us—precisely the scenario envisaged by the makers of the Terminator movies. The notion that the brain is a kind of computer dates from the invention of the early Turing concepts of 1950s and developments in cybernetics. A culminating expression of computer-brain physicalism was the late David Marr's remarkable book, Vision, which proclaimed that there is nothing exclusively special about biological neurons as essential for intelligence any more than feathers are crucial for aerodynamics. By the mid-1980s the notion had been adopted by a circle of philosophers including Paul Churchland and Pat Churchland whose hallmark book, Neurophilosophy, celebrating the ‘computational brain’, was published in the same year as Moravec's Mind Children. A powerful computational story, moreover, was emerging from psychopharmacology, which proposed that the mind-brain is a kind of chemical software programme that can be corrected by a designer chemical re-run, such as flouxetine hydrochloride. As Roy Fuller one of Prozac's co-inventors put it, giving witness in 1996 at the famous Louisville Prozac court case (featuring Joe Wesbecker, who shot 23 people, including himself, after taking Prozac for a fortnight): ‘Behind every crooked thought there lies a crooked molecule.’
But the computational idea was not having it all its own way. At the end of the 1980s, and into the early 1990s, objections were being raised from broadly two directions. A much-publicized challenge to the brain as computer came initially from mathematical physics in the form of the Emperor's New Mind, by Roger Penrose. Penrose's objection was that there are problems that can be solved by the human mind that cannot be solved either in practice or principle by computers. He was thinking of the mathematician Kurt Gödel's famous proof, which states that no non-trivial axiomatic system can be both complete and consistent. This would prompt Penrose, appealing to those cytoskeleton structures in neurons known as microtubules, to suggest that the human brain is perhaps a kind of quantum machine.
But this by no means pleased a class of expositors that had quite different reasons for objecting to the computational brain. Writers such as J. P. Changeux and Gerald Edelman proposed that the brain works, like evolution itself, by a process of natural selection. Edelman, who called his theory Neural Darwinism, condemned Penrose's theorising as a new form of dualism, a surrogate spook in the machine. He and Changeux were claiming that real brains and minds—developing, living and dying—could only be properly understood in the light of biological evolution rather than computation: brains are selectionist in operation rather than instructionist (not for nothing had Edelman won his own Nobel prize for Medicine or Physiology in 1972 for just such a contribution to immunology).
The end of the eighties marked the end of an era in which the brain had been seen as a black box, so dear to behavioural psychology. It also marked the end of an era, harking back in the West via Rene Descartes to Augustine of Hippo and thence to Plato, of the brain-mind, body-mind, as two separate substances or elements. In 1992, dismayed by the materialist assumptions of current interpretations of the mind-brain relationship, the Nobel laureate Sir John Eccles, one of the great neuroscientists of the mid-century, and a reformed ‘sparker’, published his book, How the Self Controls Its Brain, promoting the idea of the mind as an immaterial entity. Philosophy of mind, in Britain and the United States, had long argued that there was no ghost in the machine but neuroscience was putting paid to substance dualism once and for all and with sound scientific evidence. Eccles's book was not so much a challenge to the body-soul contention as a voice crying in the wilderness. He died two years later.
The Decade of the Brain—the 1990s—now saw an extraordinary proliferation of popular exposition on the self, the mind-brain link, consciousness, freedom of the will, sources of moral behaviour, memory, the neurobiology of emotions, mental illness, aspects of sex and gender and human identity in general, drawing on wide-ranging neuroscientific research across a broad front from genetics to neurophysiology and from AI to psychopharmacology. It was apparent, however, that in terms of qualitative conclusions, the discipline or disciplines of cognitive neuroscience were by no means yielding a united theoretical front. Standing back from the fray it appears that there were, and still are, two broad and distinct approaches.
There is, on the one hand, the tendency to invoke reductionist conclusions, as, for example, in the late Francis Crick's assertion that consciousness is nothing but 40 hertz oscillation. One of the principal problems of this approach, as far as his critics are concerned, is that the phenomenon to be explained—consciousness, for example—is invariably distorted and reduced in order to squeeze it through the needle's eye of a reductionist explanation. All the same, the reductionists have not had it all their own way either. A formidable group of expositors such as Antonio Damasio, Michael Gazzaniga, Susan Greenfield, Stephen Rose and others have done much to provide an antidote to over-weaning reductionism. We see the contention most strongly in the field of neuroscientifically informed philosophy of mind: consider, for example, Daniel C. Dennett's assured tour de force entitled Consciousness Explained, which sees the self and consciousness as an illusion, comparable to the authorial voice that emerges from the multiple drafts of a piece of writing; as opposed to the books and essays of such writers as Colin McGinn and David Chalmers, who are convinced that consciousness neither in practice nor in principle, can ever be explained scientifically because of the insuperable difficulty of encapsulating subjective states in terms of objective descriptions.
The question is: which side of the reductive-holistic divide appears to be winning the argument in public perception? Is society increasingly convinced that we are slaves to the chemical software programme running in our brains? That the self and consciousness, and moral agency, are illusory? That our actions are largely determined? That the neurosciences have licked the complex and mysterious business of what it means to be human? Or have the pluralist multidisciplinary disciplines of neuroscience achieved a deep and open enrichment of the mystery of the human predicament with connections into every sphere of mental activity, in sickness and in health? Have we reached, in short, a final, closed theory of human identity, as prophesied by DeLillo and confirmed by Tom Wolfe? Or do we face an endless set of combining and recombining open theories. In purely popular terms, the debate—the tension—appears to be evenly balanced.
Within the seminar room the clash between reductionist and holistic perspectives are perhaps essential to keep opposing qualitative conclusions in check: in other words, the extremes of the debate aid a positive and authentic mid-point of understanding between heuristic extremes. As for popular exposition, while the popular genre of neuroscience has done much to promote the drama of research and ideas, there has been a tendency for its exponents to be unfair to their rivals’ viewpoints and attainments. This failure to acknowledge the pluralism of qualitative conclusions arising from neuroscience has led, I believe, to a crisis for the non-specialist reader, who is obliged to choose between conflicting, even contradictory proposals. It is difficult enough for the non-scientist to keep abreast of a rapidly advancing science without struggling to decide between the merits of competing theories and opinions. The competition between expositors is often aggressive to the point of eradicating their rivals—Stalinist in style—from their bibliographies.
The time has surely come for a genre of books as generous and celebratory in tone as Sir Charles Sherrington's Man in His Nature, written for an earlier age of neuroscience. Neuroscience is due, once again, for the kind of classical autobiographical, confessional, expositions that have become familiar in other disciplines: for example, the late Max Perutz in molecular biology, the late Peter Medewar in medicine and Freeman Dyson in physics; lives in science that provide a sense of what it is like to conduct a sustained research programme with colleagues over many years: the disappointments, the successes, the patience, the discipline, the everyday pressures; while at the same time indicating how that work makes connections with other fields within and outside the discipline. An example of this is Eric Kandel's autobiography, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of the Mind. Professor Kandel has spent much of his working life at Columbia University, New York City, studying the sea slug Aplysia, focusing on the cellular processes involved in memory and learning and specifically the reflex actions that protect the gills. He discovered that certain stimuli affected the reflex actions for periods of days or even weeks as a result of an increase in neurotransmitter release at synapses linking sensory nerve cells reflexively to muscles. His work has had important relevance for the cellular basis of short and long term memory not only in the Aplysia but also in mammals.
As I waded through Kandel and Schwartz's magisterial textbook twenty years ago while tracking his tireless reductionist (in the best sense) work on the sea-slug, it seemed unlikely that he had it in him to write one day a wide-ranging confessional book. Not only does Kandel give us an enthralling account of his long, patient work on simple nervous systems, against the background of his personal life story, he makes sympathetic connections across the entire universe of mind studies, scientific and philosophical, past and present. Where would one find a comparison between that sea slug and its 2000 brain cells, Kant's a priori knowledge and John Locke's notion of practice making perfect? More surprising yet are Kandel's meditations on psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, which, surprisingly perhaps, he also locates within this new age of neuroscience alongside molecular biology, brain imaging and the wonders of the hippocampus.
Recalling the hours he spent listening to the action potentials in a crayfish brain, he remarks: ‘I was becoming a true psychoanalyst: I was listening to the deep hidden thoughts of my crayfish.’ I acknowledge, of course, that it would take a researcher of the stature of Eric Kandel to get away with such a remark, but I finished Professor Kandel's book feeling that I had been rewarded with an insight into the workings of a wide-ranging developing science that could only have been achieved within the scope of a sensitive and honest autobiographical narrative. Far from narrowing his subject, his subjective, personal perspectives broaden and deepen it. I hope that the success of his account will encourage others to throw their literary hats into the ring.
After two decades in which public understanding of neuroscience has been all too often dominated by jaundiced fantasy, journalistic trivia, reductionist ideology and partisan special pleading, one can only hope that as the discipline continues to mature and expand, it will give birth to a genre of books that celebrate the multifaceted neuroscientific imagination in the manner of Eric Kandel.
Director of the Science and Human Dimension Project
Jesus College
Cambridge CB5 8BL
United Kingdom
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