Words&Dirt

As an amateur neuroscience enthusiast, I’m obligated not only to seek out the best and most recent neuroscientific findings, but also to be wary of how these findings might be abused. Any scientific discipline that can be easily monetized and/or misinterpreted by the popular media will spawn its share of hacks, prophets, and snake oil salesmen, and neuroscience is no exception.

Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld’s Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience is a clever, concise, and balanced analysis of how certain individuals and groups misrepresent the discoveries and practical applications of modern neuroscience. Satel and Lilienfeld’s approach is not to assault neuroscience with a polemic from outside the discipline, but to critique it from within, carefully sorting out supportable claims from insupportable ones. As they see it, the problem with “mindless neuroscience is not neuroscience itself,” but rather how neuroscience is “oversold by the media, some overzealous scientists, and neuroentrepreneurs who tout facile conclusions that reach far beyond what the current evidence warrants” (xiv).

Comfortably situated in the tradition of responsible skepticism, Brainwashed is a terrific example of scientific self-correction. Satel and Lilienfeld take on a host of arenas in which unwarranted transgressions threaten to give neuroscience a bad name: brain imaging, neuromarketing, models of addiction, lie detection, neurolaw, and the problem of moral responsibility. The authors handle each topic adroitly, delimiting the areas where neuroscientific evidence is strong and exposing the ways it can be misunderstood or willfully misused.  The text is accessible and brief, but not at the expense of clarity and nuance.

Brainwashed contains a thorough explanation of exactly why the results of brain imaging studies can be so easily misconstrued: “Scientists cannot ‘read’ specific thoughts with fMRI; they can only tell that brain regions already known to be associated with certain thoughts or feelings have demonstrated an increase in activity” (3). This means not only that collectors of fMRI data could be working with potentially flawed or incomplete assumptions about what kinds of thoughts and feelings are generated by activity in certain brain regions, but also that using fMRI results to make conclusions about subjective experience is an act of interpretation, not direct mind reading.

This does not discredit the validity of fMRI studies, which are hugely informative in many medical and research contexts, but it does place fairly strict limits on our ability to unambiguously link pictures of the brain with their correlating modes of phenomenal experience. “Mental activities do not map neatly onto discrete brain regions,” Satel and Lilienfeld write. “Most neural real estate is zoned for mixed-use development” (11-2). So the problem is not that we are looking at unreliable data when we view a brain scan, but rather that the chances of the image correlating with mental experience that’s at least slightly (or significantly) different than what we think we’re looking at are often high. These facts, which are well known in neuroliterate circles but not always grasped by the general public, are too often glossed over or ignored entirely when funding or consumer wallets hang in the balance.

Satel and Lilienfeld’s most effective general strategy for debunking the modern neurocraze is simply to put it in historical context. Science’s history of genuine discovery and technological progress is matched by an equally robust tradition of overreach:

Some experts talk of neuroscience as if it is the new genetics, that is, just the latest overarching narrative commandeered to explain and predict virtually all human behavior. And before genetic determinism there was the radical behaviorism of B. F. Skinner, who sought to explain human behavior in terms of rewards and punishments. Earlier in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Freudianism posited that people were the products of unconscious conflicts and drives. Each of these movements suggested that the causes of our actions are not what we think they are. Is neurodeterminism poised to become the next grand narrative of human behavior? (xviii-xix)

The hard version of “neurodeterminism” is a tough pill for most to swallow, but the broader neuroscientific perspective––along with the “evolutionary epic” within which it is situated––seems a likely candidate for “the next grand narrative of human behavior.” We have been here before, and likely will be again when the next big scientific breakthrough arrives. This background knowledge indicates that we ought to cultivate the promise of neuroscience while also avoiding the fallacies of the past. Hailing neuroscience as a “final” or “complete” method of analysis will create more confusion than enlightenment. (I won’t deny that it might one day be possible for neuroscience to yield highly reliable or even comprehensive predictions of human behavior, but that assertion is neither currently testable nor relevant when addressing contemporary issues that require immediate attention.)

In many ways, I think neuroscience’s recent popularity is a very positive development. Neuroscience has conferred on humanity many tools for both practical and imaginative forms of self-understanding. My discovery of neuroscience played no small part in reshaping my identity during the latter part of my undergraduate education, and the field continues to influence my ideas about who I am and how I should interact with the world. It’s certainly a more efficacious and empirically responsible narrative than most religious, mythological, or metaphysical explanations of human behavior. I do not suspect Satel and Lilienfeld would disagree with any of this; they want to save neuroscience from itself, to preserve its respectability by taking measured accounts of precisely when and how it can be useful. Every grand human story needs informed curmudgeons to poke holes and sniff out misapplications.

The final chapter of Brainwashed, “The Future of Blame,” provides a useful overview of the current research regarding free will and moral responsibility taking place in the field of moral psychology. Having recently read Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s Moral Psychology, Vol. 4, which takes up these issues in great detail, I was pleased to find that Satel and Lilienfeld’s summary of the literature is accurate and even-handed. They understand well the fundamental tension between the assertion that neurodeterminism obviates blame and our “intuitions about fairness and justice [that] are so deeply rooted in evolution, psychology, and culture that new neuroscientific revelations are unlikely to dislodge them easily” (146). While they admit that neuroscience is a useful tool for understanding deliberation and possibly reshaping the justice system, they rightfully point out that it is only one filter among others through which we should funnel our theories of justice and our conclusions about how to best mete it out.

Satel and Lilienfeld’s final message is a call for improved neuroliteracy moving forward:

Crucial lessons in neuroliteracy must also inculcate the importance of distinguishing the questions that neuroscience is equipped to answer from those that it is not. The job of neuroscience is to elucidate the brain mechanisms associated with mental phenomena, and when technical prowess is applied to the questions it can usefully address, the prospects for conceptual breakthroughs and clinical advances are bountiful. Asking the wrong questions of the brain, however, is at best a dead end and at worst a misappropriation of the mantle of science. (152)

I couldn’t agree more.

Rating: 8/10