THE 21ST CENTURY BRAIN: Explaining, Mending and Manipulating the Mind
by Steven RoseCape £20 pp344
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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