Brain research? Pay it no mind
Mystery of consciousness still outwitting scientists
PHILIP MARCHAND

Scientists who have been trying to understand the brain have recently
tried to measure neural activity of Republicans and Democrats to see
if political affiliations had anything to do with brain chemistry.

The results were inconclusive. (I think the Democrat brains were more
active in the "I feel your pain" part of the limbic system.) What
really caught my eye about a New York Times Magazine article on the
topic was the following statement: "One of the most celebrated
insights of the past 20 years of neuroscience is the discovery —
largely associated with the work of Antonio Damasio — that the
brain's emotional systems are critical to logical decision-making.
People who suffer from damaged or impaired emotional systems can
score well on logic tests but often display markedly irrational
behaviour in everyday life."

I'm sure Damasio has done good work, rooting around the neocortex.
But what does it say for neuroscience that one of its "most
celebrated insights" is something we've known for three or four
millennia?

"Imagination does not breed insanity," G.K. Chesterton wrote around
the beginning of the 20th century. "Exactly what does breed insanity
is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess players do."

Poets deal with emotions as part of their stock in trade, which is
one of the reasons why it's safer to trust a poet than a
mathematician with looking after your children and pets and even your
business affairs.

Cardinal Newman in the 19th century hated what he called paper logic —
the ability to "score well on logic tests." He pointed out that "the
exercise of reason is a living spontaneous energy within us, not an
art," and came up with a great image of the mind as a mountain
climber scaling a rock face. The brain scrambles up with incredible
dexterity — finding a foothold in some obscure memory, reaching out
and grasping a secure handhold by sheer instinct, discovering a ledge
provided by some observed law of human behaviour, and so on.
Afterwards, it's almost impossible to analyze the process by which
the climber made it to the top. But the climber did make it.

"In practical matters, when their minds are really roused, men
commonly are not bad reasoners," Newman pointed out. "Men do not
mistake when their interest is concerned." (He meant women, too, I
think.) The funny thing is, the person who reasons well may not be
able to argue well. Don't ask that person to give you his reasons for
why he has come to a certain conclusion. He can't. He'll hem and haw
and come up with some reason which sounds stupid and illogical. But
his conclusion will be right, anyway.

We do know that the "living spontaneous energy" of right reason
depends on many things, including emotional honesty, moral clarity,
paying attention, using your eyes and ears — but the actual
operations of reason, according to Newman, "baffle investigation."
This, however, hasn't stopped neuroscientists. Year after year, they
come out with books promising to solve the mystery. The whole tone of
their writing is: We've solved the mystery of the spiral nebulae, the
human brain is next. Trust us.

Noted science writer John Horgan wrote a book a few years ago
entitled The Undiscovered Mind, in which he pointed out that the
brain continued to "baffle investigation" despite all the scientific
hype. He started his survey of scientific research with the
psychologists, with their long and instructive history of enriched
baloney. We had the cult of Freud, then the cult of B.F. Skinner,
then the cult of the computer, and now we have the cult of Darwin.
Evolutionary explanations of human behaviour — men don't like to ask
for directions because their genes tell them to beware approaching
strangers — are thick on the ground, and about as enlightening as the
explanations that phrenologists used to give. (Some men are
womanizers because they have a large amative bump on their skulls.)

The bravest of the neuroscientists are trying to tackle the toughest
nut of all, the mystery of consciousness. A scientist named Gerald
Edelman, who won a 1972 Nobel Prize for his work in immunology,
switched to brain studies and has been particularly vocal about his
ambitions.

"My hope is to disenthrall those who believe that the subject of
consciousness is exclusively metaphysical or necessarily mysterious,"
he has proclaimed. This smacks of a philosophical agenda, which does
not inspire confidence — a scientist venturing into the fields of
philosophy and metaphysics is like Tie Domi figure skating. It's not
a pretty sight.

Edelman has come out with a book titled Wider Than The Sky: The
Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness. A review of the book in The
Guardian tries to summarize his theory, which is that consciousness
is an evolutionary process (of course) in which brain cells
form "fleeting coalitions," subsequently "whittled down" by
certain "lower-brain valuing centres" into a "dynamic core, the
particular network of cells that suffice to do the job of
representing the world meaningfully at a particular instant."

I know I should read the book and not merely quote from this review,
but I don't want to read the book. I'm getting a message from a
fleeting coalition of brain cells right this minute, and it says
Edelman's theory is the equivalent of Tie Domi trying to perform a
triple lutz-triple toehold combination.

I could be wrong. Horgan's book, however, suggests I'm right. It's
full of interviews with professors who made brave starts in cognitive
science and then hit a brick wall. A professor named Howard Gardner,
for example, whose 1985 book The Mind's New Science helped to
popularize the field of cognitive science, told Horgan that questions
such as consciousness and free will were "particularly resistant" to
the scientific habit of trying to break down a subject into its most
elemental parts, like neural pathways in the brain. Gardner, Horgan
writes, "contended that psychologists may advance by adopting a more
`literary' style of investigation and discourse. After all,
Shakespeare and Dostoevsky can tell us much or more about the self
than psychologists can."

The human brain is so complex it simply defies the same kind of
analysis that scientists devote to subatomic particles or human
immune systems. "Like neuroscientists, researchers in evolutionary
psychology and artificial intelligence are both bumping up against
the Humpty Dumpty dilemma," Horgan writes. "They can break the mind
into pieces, but they have no idea how to put it back together again."

A friend of mine, who teaches physics at the University of Toronto
and has read a shelf-load of books on cognitive science,
neuroscience, and so on, says to me, "You take a problem such as
human creativity — anything I have ever read on that particular topic
says to me that these scientists have absolutely no idea, not even
the beginning of an idea, how we come up with new ideas, whether as
artists or scientists. We just don't know."

His prognosis is not hopeful: "A lot of general readers have the
impression we've made a lot of progress in this field. There's a
whole plethora of books that promise, `This is the age of
neuroscience, we're finally understanding how the human brain works.'
We can't even understand how a cat's brain works. The fact is, real
discoveries are hard to come by. My own feeling — this is my guess —
is that 5,000 years from now, we still will not have made much
progress in understanding our cognitive processes — how we
conceptualize things, how we become conscious."

No one denies that splendid work on the mechanics of the brain has
been done by scientists. The question is why neuroscience has been so
oversold. My friend has a theory on that.

"I think the reason people want to believe in all of this is that
they have lost religion and the little of religion that remains to
them takes the form of a belief that science will explain things," he
comments.

"My students get very bothered even by the suggestion that some
problems will not be solved. When I talked about this in class, one
of my students was almost crying. She actually said I had removed the
meaning of her life. I thought, get a grip."

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