Brainy brain structures

By Thomas Marti, September 2012

Brain research is currently booming and has become the new faith. Wherever the prophets of this new revelation appear – on television, in lecture halls, in books or newspaper interviews – they can expect a large audience and a community of believers. But is what they reveal to us tenable?

If previously it was God who guided our destiny in wisdom, it is now apparently the brain which thinks, acts and creates the world for us. 

It is of course true that the neurosciences have achieved considerable advances in recent years. The connection between cognitive and physiological processes in the nervous system, for example, can be described with a great deal more precision than previously by using imaging techniques (such as functional magnetic resonance tomography). These techniques allow us to watch the activity of the brain in real time. When a test person in the laboratory is given a certain task – reading a text, looking at a picture or perhaps solving a sum – we can see simultaneously on a screen the areas of the brain in which metabolic activity changes. The knowledge that individual areas of the brain develop through active and repeated activity or atrophy if neglected is also relatively recent.

This is because the synaptic connections between the neurons are not simply given but form and reform depending on what is being done. All of our actions leave organic traces in the body and change our physical organs.

A look in the mirror

Despite intensive research, our knowledge of the functional architecture of the brain remains patchy. Thus we are still rather far from understanding how the numerous brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, epilepsy, schizophrenia or autism arise. They still leave us quite helpless. Many basic questions still do not have an answer. The most basic and at the same time ultimate question of neurology is: how can the physical nervous system form the basis for human consciousness? There have been many attempts to answer this question.

The most common argument is to say that our image of the world is a simulation of the brain and not reality at all. This dogma has one problem: how can we know that the brain is a “tool to interpret the world” when the basis for that is, in turn, no more than the “tool to interpret the world” of the brain researcher? The brain researcher assumes a consciousness in himself which he deems, through his own research, to be a pure construct. That is a peculiar, because ultimately circular, undertaking which is like the attempt to see the reverse side of the mirror by looking into it.

The most puzzling problem

People were convinced for a long time that many higher functions (such as language) were hierarchically organised in the brain; at the top of the functional pyramid were the so-called functional centres to which the other functions were subordinate. More recently, neuroscience has had to admit that this was wrong: the brain is not ordered hierarchically, particularly in its more complex abilities, but distributively. Wolf Sin­ger, one of the leading neurophysiologists, calls this the most puzzling problem currently occupying neuroscience. He writes: “The brain presents itself as an extremely distributively organised system ... it is totally unclear how such a system with its parallel structure is able to create a coherent perceptual world and to behave in an overall purposeful way. We describe this fascinating riddle as the binding problem and know that without solving it we cannot formulate a unified brain theory.”

An issue of cognition is associated with the “binding problem” which ultimately poses the question as to how the whole can be understood from the sum of its parts. It is clear that the analytical scientific thinking which dominates brain research and has produced information about many important details is not sufficient for reaching a holistic understanding of the brain. This cognitive problem has also so far been the reason for the failure to answer the question how the brain is linked with human consciousness.

Our frog brain and us

According to current epistemological principles of modern science, researchers must endeavour not to interfere as subjects and strive for the greatest possible objectivity. As researchers assume that “consciousness” is something purely subjective, they concentrate on the observable object and study the nervous system in the same way as other natural objects. Gerhard Roth, also a popular author and brain researcher like Wolf Sin­ger and Manfred Spitzer, sought out the “simplest brain that can be found in vertebrates”, namely that of frogs and salamanders.

Recourse to such simple animals not only solves many ethical and practical problems but also has the advantage that it is easier to maintain objectivity than in experiments with humans. Ultimately there is, nevertheless, an interest in transferring the results to humans in order to answer the question how it is possible that something like “consciousness” can arise: how does it happen that the brain enables me to address myself as “I”, experience myself as “a whole”, develop feelings, want things and see the world as something integrated, holistic, connected?

Roth has simple answers to such questions. His simple answers are possible because for the sake of convenience he assumes that human beings can be reduced to their brains and thus become comparable with frogs and salamanders. Because if there is no fundamental difference in the structure of the brain in humans and frogs and the difference is merely one of degree, then it is simple to accept that all the epistemological and ethical problems we are called upon to solve as human beings are only the product of a massively enhanced frog brain.

If frogs had more complex brains than they actually do, they would also say “I” to themselves. The consequence of such a reduction is that our experience of self is only a delusion of the brain, and only as a result of this delusion are we capable of having ideas of love, freedom or a just society. From the perspective of the brain researcher everything that we humans consciously live and experience is a world of illusion which is not even recognisable as such. What we experience as “consciousness” is nothing more than naive belief as far as Roth is concerned. Only brain research, the argument goes, is able to enlighten us about true reality and throw light into our inherently dark existence. What we call existence is the physiological and chemical state of our brain.

Nothing beats our brain

Such a view has far-reaching consequences. Can we be responsible at all for our actions? Brain researcher Gerhard Roth also has an answer to such questions: “The conscious, thinking and intentional self is not responsible in a moral sense for what the brain does – even if this brain ‘perfidiously’ gives the self such an illusion. The self ... does not decide anything.... If, therefore, responsibility is linked to personal, moral culpability, as is the case under German criminal law, then we cannot be subjectively responsible because no one can be culpable of something which he did not do and could not have done.”

The consequences of such a view are highly problematical. Roth recommends that society should change the behaviour of difficult individuals through “reward and the threat of punishment (i.e. deterrence), through praise and admonition”, and in individual cases to clarify the extent to which, in the opinion of the brain researcher, “education is pointless”.

Roth estimates the number of those whose brain makes them “incorrigible” at about eight percent. Many brain researchers have recently become authorities on lifestyle and educational questions.

It is hoped that brain research will tell us about the “proper” way of learning and its prerequisites and will show us what a “school for life” (Spitzer) should realistically look like. Furthermore, many brain researchers like to comment publicly on questions concerning religion and ethics teaching, television, the relationship between church and state, our relationship with Islam, the purpose of life and its values and about the meaning of the personality in education. But most of these views do not originate in brain research at all but come from their experience as fathers or university lecturers. They are obtained from psychology, social research or simply everyday experience.

If have not so far come across a single conclusion in brain research in a narrower scientific sense which would, for example, make our schools more human-centred.

On the contrary, I see a focus on neuronal structures and the physical processes to be observed in that context. Such insights can be important for understanding learning processes, but should not make us believe that in reality we are not teaching children but brains. That would be a fatal reversion to an offensive biological determinism which reduces human beings to pure creatures of nature in order to exploit them for social purposes. That is why we would do well to approach the conclusions of brains researchers, at best, with critical caution.

Such conclusions might be the ideological figments of the researchers’ brains.


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