21st Century Brain
The Sunday Times - Books February 27, 2005
Science: The 21st Century Brain by Steven Rose
REVIEWED BY JOHN CORNWELL
THE 21ST CENTURY BRAIN: Explaining, Mending and Manipulating the Mind
by Steven Rose
In a California courthouse in 1978 the jury in a murder case was
presented with a bizarre item of evidence. Dan White, a former
police officer, had walked into City Hall, San Francisco, and
shot dead mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk. But
White was found guilty of nothing more than involuntary
manslaughter after the jury accepted a plea that he had eaten on
the morning of the incident a large number of “sugar-ice”
Twinkie cakes. The sugar overload affected his brain chemistry,
argued the defence, making an automoton of their client. It
became known as the Twinkie Defence and the relationship between
brain chemistry and responsibility would never be the same
again.
In the 1970s, neuroscience and descriptions of the relationship
between the brain and its chemistry were still, relatively
speaking, in their infancy. The imminent and rapid expansion of
new brain science was to have far-reaching cultural and social
consequences.
How the final decade of the 20th century came to be associated
with a drive to understand the mind/brain relationship forms a
fascinating chapter in the history of western science. Brain
research gathered momentum in the 1980s, propelled by remarkable
breakthroughs in genetics, cell biology, computer-modelling and
non-invasive scanning techniques. At last it was possible for
researchers to explore the brain and central nervous system
without destroying what they probed. As the cold war ended,
neuroscience began to enjoy ever-higher priority as a recipient
of state and corporate support. A crucial impulse came from the
biotech and pharmaceutical industries, whose strategists were
hailing a new age of rationally designed brain drugs, their
profits boosted by cure-alls for everything from pain to
Alzheimer’s. But there were other, wildly hubristic motives. On
January 1, 1990, the House and Senate of the US government
designated the 1990s the “Decade of the Brain”, claiming that
some $350 billion were lost to the American economy each year as
a result of mind/brain-related ills: from sick leave for
depression to gangland shootings. If only scientists could make
a pill to make mad people sane, and a pill to make violent
people serene.
At this mid-point of the first decade of the 21st century a
survey of the first fruits of neuroscience is long overdue, and
there is nobody better than Stephen Rose to take soundings.
Famous for his probing stints on Radio 4’s Moral Maze, Rose has
been a leading player in the neuroscience revolution (working
specifically on memory). He has a subtle mind, a prose style of
great clarity, and a civilised and compassionate approach to
what neuroscience tells us about nature and human nature in
particular.
Rose sets out accessibly the advances in our understanding of
the development, chemistry and global mappings of the brain. He
acknowledges, with qualifications, the gains of new brain
science in the realms of medicine, and in the diagnosis of
single-gene illnesses such as Huntington’s. But he is strongly
critical of the increasing use of mind-altering drugs such as
Ritalin on the young for supposed attention-deficit “disorders”.
He deplores, moreover, the inappropriate use for mild forms of
depression of Prozac and its successor drugs, which alter the
levels of serotonin. He argues eloquently that the more we use
such drugs to “cure” problems rooted in social circumstances the
more we will neglect social solutions. He sees future danger for
a society in which drugs, aided by an increasingly monopolistic
mass media, are used to manipulate and control people on a huge
scale.
At the heart of Rose’s concern is the battle being fought
between philosophers, sociologists and psychologists over
neuroscientific descriptions of human nature. Neuroscience, he
emphasises, has not produced anything like an agreed “theory of
everything” for such profound phenomena as personhood, free
will, emotions, higher-order consciousness and imagination.
There is a polarisation among the theorists, the result of
which, he argues, could have serious implications for our
criminal-justice and mental-health systems.
He sees menace in the smug reductionism of so-called
“neuro-philosophy”, which dismisses traditional views of human
responsibility as mere unscientific “folk psychology”. Rose is
pleading for an understanding of neuroscience and human identity
that invokes not only the complex interaction between our
genetic make-up and environmental influences, but the existence
of authentic moral agency. At the same time he insists on the
importance of our evolutionary and individual histories. Among
the “bad hats” of neuroscience he cites the late Nobel
prizewinner Francis Crick, who liked to say that we are “nothing
but a bunch of neurons”. Crick thought that free will was just a
tiny brain mechanism called “anterior cingulate sulcus” and that
consciousness was no more than a specific rate at which brain
cells oscillate. These radically reductionist approaches, Rose
reports, have resulted in the idea that humans are no more than
predictable, manipulable cyborgs.
Rose’s timely book warns of the self-fulfilling prophecies of
reductionist explanations of human nature for future policy in
mental-health and the criminal-justice system. In order to
behave freely and responsibly, he argues, it is crucial we
believe we are free. We have to grasp the authenticity, scope
and limits of human freedom. The spread of “neurogenetic”
determinism (the idea that everything is fated in our genes and
brain chemistry), he warns, could lead to a state of affairs in
which a Twinkie Defence could be invoked for any and every human
action and circumstance. This is not a matter, as Rose points
out, of merely excusing crimes: it could result in the not too
distant future in our locking up as “dysfunctional” individuals
diagnosed genetically or through brain scans before they have
done anything deemed to be dangerous. “Our ethical
understandings may be enriched by neuroscientific knowledge,” he
asserts, “but not replaced.” Rose insists that only through
confirming our belief in freedom and moral agency can we “manage
the ethical, legal and social aspects of the emerging
neurotechnologies”.
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-1496544,00.html
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