I had to think about this question a little longer, so here it is: late, sorry

I am my brain.

Now, doesn’t that sound strange? The relationship expressed in this sentence is  that of identity and that of ownership in the same instance. How can I own a brain and be a brain at the same time? More annoyingly, who is it then that owns the brain? If I am my brain, the relationship between me and brain is that of identity and thus, according to ‘Leibniz’s law’, me and my brain must share all properties.

Imagine you’re calling a friend on the phone and ask her to bring your pen to the rendezvous later. You tell her that it’s a blue pen with a red cap that has been chewed on. If she found a pen that was blue and had a red cap but lacked the bite-marks you remember, it could not be your pen. Unless you have really bad memory, but that isn’t the point. Leibniz’s law states that only indiscernible objects can be identical to themselves. That sounds trivial enough, although many philosophers like to argue about how true this principle is. And apparently it does not apply in the realm of quantum physics. Anyway, lets look at the properties of my brain. It is probably greyish-pink, wrinkled and feels like a hardboiled egg. We run into a problem here. Since you have probably never met me in person you obviously wouldn’t know, but please take my word for it: I am not greyish-pink, wrinkled and feel like a hardboiled egg. I just look like any young woman. But that is not ‘me’ either, is it? That would be my body. So apparently, if we follow old Leibniz’s lead, I’m neither my brain, nor my body. For that matter, I’m not even body and brain combined.

If it’s so easy to see that I can’t be my brain, where does this ‘new’ intuition come from? Philosophers love thought experiments to probe their intuitions. Imagine I were to damage an organ, for instance my heart,  in a car accident and a new heart were transplanted into my chest. In this scenario I receive a new organ, no doubt about it. If I were to damage my brain and a donor brain were transplanted into may head, as absurd as this my sound, the intuition is quite different, though. Obviously, this time we think it is the brain donor who receives a new body and we don’t consider me to be the recipient of a new brain. Michael Gazzaniga wrote about what he concluded from a more abstract form of this thought experiment that “this simple fact makes it clear that you are your brain” ( as cited by Vidal. p. 6).

Now, I’m always really careful when things are too obvious. The thought experiment might truly illustrate our intuitions, or those of caucasian male scientists, as experimental philosophers rightly point out, but we don’t know why we have these intuitions. One could hold that our intuitions are the connections we have to some kind of spirit realm or disembodied ideas that reveal the truth in its purity. But I thought the same of ads for anti-acne face scrub as a teen, so lets ditch the unsexy naivety and get down and dirty. Here we’ll meet Fernando Vidal, who in is paper on brainhood presents the idea, that it is not science that has tought us the identity between me and my brain. Vidal coined the term brainhood to describe the “quality of being, rather than having a brain” (p.6). This he claims to be the main feature of the anthropological figure of modernity, the cerebral subject. Plainly stated, we are cerebral subjects because we exhibit brainhood. In the paper I draw from Vidal explains how the property denoted by his neologism is historically rooted and which role it plays in the ‘neurocultural discours’. To get down to the nitty-gritty of his paper already: He claims, that the ideology of brainhood, the idea that we are our brains, “has impelled neuroscientific investigation much more than it resulted from it” (p. 5). Aha, so? Well, scientific investigation does not occur in a conceptual vacuum. In his paper Vidal explains how philosophical Ideas about us and our minds have influenced how research is conducted, financed and interpreted. If you are interested in the historical account in Vidal’s paper and would like to read a great critical response by a fellow blogger, please head on to Stephen T. Caspers’ Blog The Neuro Times. He beautifully illustrates the shortcomings of Vidal’s argumentation without belittling the central claim or  Vidal’s person. Still, I find Vidal’s concept of us as cerebral subjects and the notion of brainhood pertinent and his fear we might be talking about our brains (and ourselves)  in the wrong way valid. I hope for some interesting discussions about this, maybe with Stephen? Anyhow, if the ideology of brainhood influenced how we ask the questions about our selves instead being an answer to our questioning, stronger scepticism is called for. That is just what Paolo Fusar-Poli pointed out in a letter to the editor of Psychiatry Research Neuroimaging, the official publication of the International Society for Neuroimaging in Psychiatry.

He worries that the public does not understand how neuroimaging technology really contributes to research of the mind and is misinformed by journalists and medical opinion leaders. The way the results of studies employing fMRI are presented to the public invite misconceptions about our brains and what neuroscientists really concludes from such studies and result in theories the autor describes as “folk-neuroimaging”. It is commonly believed that fMR images are proof for represented neural activity. However, neuroimaging involves an inference process utilizing statistical calculations and interpretative functions. The image is not a picture of the brain, but a representation and interpretation of the collected data. This common notion amongst people the author calls “neuro-realism”:

Neuro-realism reflects the uncritical way in which a fMRI investigation can be taken as validation or invalidation of our ordinary view of the world. Neuro-realism is, therefore, grounded in the belief that fMRI enables us to capture a ‘visual proof’ of brain activity, despite the enormous complexities of data acquisition and image processing.

Related to this conception is “neuro-essentialism”. The way we talk about the brain implies that we ascribe it properties that persons have.

The concept of ‘neuro-essentialism’ reflects how fMRI research can be depicted as equating subjectivity and personal identity to the brain. In this sense, the brain is used implicitly as a shortcut for more global concepts such as the person, the individual or the self.

A CNN article on a study by famous love-scientist Helen Fisher illustrates this well; the title “Loving with all your… brain”. Another example would be the New York Times article Watching New Love as it Sears the Brain. Though the title is obviously inviting to neuro-essentialism, the author at least mentions the fact that neuroimaging is not a form of mindreading. But also self-help literature like The Brain in Love by Daniel G. Amen M.D. (yes, M.D. as in medical doctor) contribute to public misconceptions. Let me quote from a Los Angeles Times article called Brains in Love- When you’re attracted to someone, is your gray matter talking sense — or just hooked? Scientists take a rational look. Notice how the title implies scientific accuracy… very sad. Here goes:

HER front brain is telling her he’s trouble. Look at the facts, it says. He’s never made a commitment, he drinks too much, he can’t hold down a job. But her middle brain won’t listen. Man, it swoons, he looks great in those jeans, his black hair curls onto his forehead so adorably, and when he drags on a cigarette, he’s so bad he’s good.

Describing experimental setups to laypeople is hard and giving an accurate account of what a specific study implies is even harder. However, it is clear from the following account that the journalist does not even understand what functional magnetic resonance images are herself and does not understand how they figure in the work of scientists.

It was only in 2000 that two London scientists selected 70 people, all in the early sizzle of love, and rolled them into the giant cylinder of a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, or fMRI. The images they got are thought to be science’s first pictures of the brain in love.

The pictures were a revelation, and others have followed, showing that romantic love is a lot like addiction to alcohol or drugs. The brain is playing a trick, necessary for evolution, by associating something that just happened with pleasure and attributing the feeling to that magnificent specimen right before your eyes.

The brain is playing tricks? Even if this is just rhetoric, the goal of such an article should be to educate, which it plainly fails to do. I think this quotation illustrates neuro-essentialism and neuro-realism in the media. But why is that a problem? Why can’t the brain fall in love or trick us into love? The brain does not have intentions or goals. Ti does not have feelings and therefore can not fall in love. People fall in love. The brain is an organ and is only part of a human being.

Attributing properties  of a whole to one of its parts is called a mereological fallacy. This term, introduced by Bennett and Hacker in 2003, should disclose a grave conceptual problem in the way neuroscientists talk about the brain. Taken literally, brainlove doesn’t make any sense. I am not my brain, my brain is a part of me.

Now, since I’ve discussed what we are not, let me broach the issue of what we are. Intuitively I would ask myself whether I can tell what I am by looking at how it feels to be. Or even how it feels to be me. Well, I wouldn’t be the first person to do so, though maybe the first female of mixed race to do so in the world wide web. But, who knows, the net’s been around However, I think Descartes cognito-Argument “I think therefore I am” in an oven was more earthshaking. I’ve mentioned my reservation towards Intuition and I might dedicate a future post to explaining why this is so, however, I want to be introspective for now and see where it goes. Well, it feels like I have a soul. (Again, am I a soul or do I own a soul, tricky.) But since no philosopher or scientist seriously claims to be a cartesian dualist and really thinks of himself as consisting of res extensa (body stuff) and res cogitans (soul stuff) we’ll have to drop that notion. Interestingly though, everyone reading this probably understands what is meant by soul. Not in the cognitive sense of understanding but in the way you can introspect how it feels to be. Somehow, it seems to us as if were souls. If you would like to read a scientifically informed, philosophical account about why we have this naive realistic phenomenology (why we feel like being souls) I  recommend ‘The Ego Tunnel’ by Thomas Metzinger [find the twitter feed in here]. I’ll post a review at the latest end of next week… gotta do some homework at P2P University

References:

Fusar-Poli P., & Broome MR (2007). Love and brain: from mereological fallacy to “folk” neuroimaging. Psychiatry research, 154 (3), 285-6 PMID: 17350234

Vidal, F. (2009). Brainhood, anthropological figure of modernity History of the Human Sciences, 22 (1), 5-36 DOI: 10.1177/0952695108099133

I’m cathing up… here I come

I haven’t read the literature yet. But I read everything my peers have written sofar. Here is a preliminary answers for the first question of this weeks assignment.

Also, for the gadget friendly,you can see the list of reading on Mendeley here. Everyone can subscribe.

Is it appropriate to start talking about a neurocentric age?

Like Mohammed, I believe this can only be determined in retrospect. Strikingly, Generations of humans before us didn’t even know what the brain was for. Aristotle for example thought the brain’s function was to cool the blood. Considering how little was known about the seat of the mind until fairly recently in history, it doesn’t sound wrong to talk about a “neuroaware” age.

neurocentrism

The reason I might think of this age as neurocentric is probably because I love to think about neuroscience, philosophy of mind and philosophy of neuroscience. I am neurocentric. In other words, interpreting the zeitgeist is always biased by the way the interpreter thinks. Could it be that few really interested people project their neurocentrism on others? Maybe the ones curious about the mind and brain are the ones more vocal about their interest.

I always thought that psychology, how the brain works and all related issues interested every human being. But if that were the case everyone would want to study subjects related to brain and mind. Everyone would read literature about these subjects. This is definitely not the case. People know they have a brain and that alcohol, for instance, changes the way they behave because something in the brain changes. Yet, few people really want to know why they have a mind. Or whether neuroscience could ever be a tool to settle this question. So if the criterion is public awareness, I don’t think we live in a neurocentric age.

If the criterion is epistemic, as Alasdair suggests, we would have to know more than we currently do about the brains functioning. The question I would like to raise is how much knowledge is sufficient? How much do we have to know to talk about a neurocentic age? As mentioned before, we never had as much knowledge about the brain as we do now. What constitutes a “detailed and exploitable understanding of neurology” (Alasdair)? Would we have to solve the hard problem of consciousness?  Because it’s not called the hard problem for nothing Compared to Aristotle we know a lot about our brains, so if this is our criterion I do believe we live in a neurocentric age.

Interestingly, biology in general has received a huge boost in the past decades. Since we came to understand the molecular structure of DNA, thereby uniting several subdisciplines of biology and promoting neo-darwinian theories, much has been published about what life is and how it works. Neuroscience, or lets say neurobiology, is also a subdiscipline of biology. The neuro-movement is therefore part of a more general development in the sciences of life. Biology has developed many great tools to discover physiological processes and the brain is just an organ, albeit a really cool one. So within this meta-discipline, neurobiological advances are advances of biology.

Still, this alone does not explain the interdisciplinary programs springing up in so many research institutes. Neurophilosophy and neuroethics, but even neuromaketing, neurolinguistics, neuroesthetics, neurosociology and neurotheology being examples of this development. There lies explanatory power in neuroscience that many other sciences lack. Scientists of different disciplines have found the brain as the seat of the mind a very compelling idea. By applying neuroscientific methods, using neurophysiological and neuroanatomical terminology and making colorful pictures of the brain with expensive machines, they naturalize their theories. Scientists don’t like words like meaning, love and truth, unless they can show how the pretty picture of a brain looks when the “brain’s owner” thinks about these things. The pretty picture is really about something biological happening in the brain and that, thanks to neurophysiology, is something we can describe in words of physics. No soul, no weird platonic ideas, nothing “unnatural” needed.

We live in a neurocentric age because every science investigating what it means to be human needs a neuro-justification for their research. We don’t believe in love, we believe in hormones, pheromones, mirror neurons and other brain-stuff, in other words things you can touch and/or measure. If understanding the mind means understanding the brain, scientists are all in the translating business.

In conclusion, I do think it is appropriate to start talking about a neurocentric age. But only if the term neurocentrism is used inclusively. Do I mean that everyone is curious about their brains? No. Do I mean that we know loads about our brains? Kinda. Do I mean that in explaining the brain we want to explain everything we want to know about human thought, feelings and behaviour? Definetly, yes. Can we? I don’t think so.

Update: The coolest thing just happened. I researched the mereological fallacy to answer the third question of this week’s assignment when I found a paper called “Love and brain: from mereological fallacy to “folk” neuroimaging”. Isn’t that a coincidence that I used love as an example of what scientists try to naturalize through neuro-talk? Crazy, huh?

My apologies for the delay in posting, but after reading what others had written I decided to incorporate an attempt to comment on what others had written rather than just repeat less eloquently points that others have made.

In reference to the first question I think that it is premature to talk about the neuro-centric age, while the study of neuroscience has made great advances in recent times,  we still have not yet developed a level of understanding that does more than scratch the surface of a detailed understanding of the mind. Although I agree that we are developing a fundamental  recognition of the potential importance of neurological issues I do not think that this alone is enough for us to consider it a “neurocentric” age at this time. For us to really talk of “neurocentrism” would need a much more detailed and exploitable understanding of neurology.

That being said, I agree that there has been a fundamental change in the public perception of neurocentric issues, and that public neuroethics has broadly failed to adequately explore this change. When Kevin talks of the need to educate and inform the public of the “true potential” of neurological issues I found myslef nodding in agreement. For me this is the crucial issue that emerges from the development of neuroscience: While Moreno and others highlighted many potential issues with regard to the ethical uses & exploitation of neurological techniques that do indeed resemble “Kafkaseque nightmares” I think that, at least in countries with strong legal frameworks for the protection of rights, such concerns are not likely to progress into reality.  Perhaps this is an overly optimistic reading of the state of the modern world, but it seems to me that the potential pitfalls  are obvious and malicious enough that at the very least they will be identifed and opposed by a vast majority of those who deal with neuroethics. For me the most disturbing ethical concerns raised by neruoscience are not the bioethical ones (question 2) but those of a public policy and public educational character, the bioethical and philosphical concerns of developing a “truth drug” for example concern me less than the way in which we educate and regulate ourselves about the effectiveness of such a drug. What would be tragic in my view is if neurological developments were to become another DNA evidence or another facebook – a tool we accept purely for its practical advantages without real academic consideration of the public perception of those tools as opposed to the reality of their usage.

Whether “ we are our brains” is a question that others are far more qualified than me to answer; I find the question something of a misnomer in that we have been tying ourselves up in existential knots over the nature of human existence since Aristotle & I doubt we are going to stop any time soon. (Incidentally, one thing I realised when reading others comments and this weeks reading is that my knowledge of philosophy is laughably basic, a philosophy crash course would be a great course for the next session of p2pu – until then I am re-reading russell’s “ a brief history of western philosophy” and hoping to offer more insightful comment in the legal sections of the course). Instead what concerns me more is again the practical implications of our decisions. In our reading the discussion of the legal concepts of duress, provocation and diminished responsibility was concerning, although I do not know how american law addresses these controversial and difficult topics; I felt that the discussion of them within the articles was simplistic and focused more on popular perceptions of the concepts than the legal realities than govern them. Neuroscientists must be as aware of developments in legal understanding of these topics as (some) lawyers are sensitive of scientific developments if we are to produce a coherent and reactive response to our understanding of the human condition.

The final question I feel was already more than adequately answered by others and in the reading that was posted, I would recommend interested readers especially read the article by J Illes and S Bird which gives a good overview of the topic.