Books: Patricia S. Churchland's 'The Self as Brain' and 'Brainwashed,' by Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld Aug 4th 2013, 17:24
A journey into the human brain starts with the usual travel decisions: will you opt for a no-frills sightseeing jaunt, a five-star luxury cruise, or trek a little off the beaten track, skipping the usual tourist attractions?
Now that science's newfound land is suddenly navigable, hordes of eager guides are offering up books that range from the basic to the lavishly appointed to the minutely subspecialized. But those who prefer wandering off trail may opt for two new ones, neither by a neuroscientist.
When the philosopher Patricia S. Churchland explains that her book represents "the story of getting accustomed to my brain," she is speaking as both a brain-owning human being and a career humanist. An emerita professor at the University of California, San Diego, she has spent a career probing the physical brain for the self and its moral center. And unlike many humanists who hate the science for the irritating violence it does to centuries of painstaking intellectual labor, she is entranced by the power of the data, and her delight is utterly contagious.
She loses little time in dispatching the archaic notion of the soul, and suggests that near-death visions of heaven simply represent "neural funny business" in a malfunctioning brain.
Can humans still live a moral and spiritual life even without the ideas of soul and heaven? You bet they can. "We may still say that the sun is setting even when we know full well that earth is turning," Professor Churchland points out, and she is off and running.
Where do values come from? Does a "brainstem-limbic system shaped by reward-based learning and problem solving" suffice? Can moral behavior be genuinely moral if the consciousness is not involved? Does the "me" that is you include the many levels of your unconscious? Do you have any free will at all? Is there such a thing as criminal intent? Does criminal behavior prompted by misaligned circuits, aberrant neurotransmitters or tumors in vital areas imply innocence? Should we empty out the prisons?
It is hard to conceive of a better guide to this difficult terrain than the MacArthur-award-winning Ms. Churchland, who knows the science inside out and writes with surpassing clarity, elegance, humor and modesty, punctuating the hard parts with accessible lessons about the brain she learned during a hardscrabble childhood on a Canadian farm.
She also recalls with some chagrin a more recent encounter with a fellow academic: "My very presence brought her to fury, and she hissed: 'You reductionist! How can you think there is nothing but atoms?' " But surely, Ms. Churchland muses, "if reductionism is essentially about explanation, the lament and the lashing out are missing the point." Her typically understated bottom line: "To rail against reality seems to me unproductive."
If Professor Churchland tours the moral brain in a mood of joyous discovery, Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld, traversing much of the same territory, are just plain annoyed. Dr. Satel is a psychiatrist and an occasional contributor to The New York Times, and Dr. Lilienfeld a psychology professor at Emory University; their mission is to debunk the pop neuroscience that keeps making headlines with "facile and overly mechanistic explanations for complicated behaviors."
Their primary target is functional M.R.I. scanning, a technique that has been deployed to localize instinct and emotion to specific brain areas, positing sites for such intangibles as love, hate, fear, political preferences and consumer behavior.
Dr. Satel and Dr. Lilienfeld offer a methodical critique of this oversimplified neuro-nonsense, convincingly arguing that in many ways the M.R.I.'s of today are simply the phrenology heads of yesteryear, laughably primitive attempts to wrangle human character and behavior into tractable form.
Thus launched, they head out to evaluate the contributions of neuroimaging to behaviors more complex and weighty than choosing which S.U.V. to buy, homing in on the age-old questions of blame, responsibility and punishment among criminals, addicts and the criminally insane.
Can brain imaging help sort it all out? Not in their view: when it comes to the legalities of bad behavior, "the capacity of functional brain imaging to mislead currently exceeds its capacity to inform." It doesn't do much better than the old polygraphs for evaluating alibis, they conclude, and utterly fails to explain why some people do unspeakable things.
The "my amygdala made me do it" school of criminal defense was around as early as 1924, they note, when Clarence Darrow undertook to defend Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, the two teenage psychopaths who kidnapped and killed a 14-year-old boy for no reason except to commit a crime. "They killed him because they were made that way," Darrow thundered to the judge, pleading for clemency.
But Dr. Satel and Dr. Lilienfeld are having none of this, arguing that senses of free will, justice, retribution and fair play are all too deeply ingrained in human nature for neuroscience to erase them — at least, as the science now stands. Similarly, Dr. Satel has long argued against calling drug addiction a disease, and she and Dr. Lilienfeld reaffirm that position here, writing that such a conception "threatens to obscure the vast role of personal agency in perpetuating the cycle of use and relapse."
Ah, but what underlies that personal agency? Are there not neural circuits there as well? Dr. Satel and Dr. Lilienfeld's polemic ultimately seems a little abrupt and shortsighted to a reader who has watched a world-class philosopher gaze with eager intensity at the brain and find in it an infinite series of mirrored selves.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: August 4, 2013
The Books column last Tuesday, about two new books on brain science, misstated the type of trial in which Clarence Darrow defended the psychopathic killers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb in 1924, pleading for clemency on the ground that "they were made that way." The trial was before a judge, not a jury.
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