A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind: What Neuroscience Can and Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves
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What if our soundest, most reasonable judgments are beyond our control?
Despite 2500 years of contemplation by the world's greatest minds and the more recent phenomenal advances in basic neuroscience, neither neuroscientists nor philosophers have a decent understanding of what the mind is or how it works. The gap between what the brain does and the mind experiences remains uncharted territory. Nevertheless, with powerful new tools such as the fMRI scan, neuroscience has become the de facto mode of explanation of behavior. Neuroscientists tell us why we prefer Coke to Pepsi, and the media trumpets headlines such as "Possible site of free will found in brain." Or: "Bad behavior down to genes, not poor parenting."
Robert Burton believes that while some neuroscience observations are real advances, others are overreaching, unwarranted, wrong-headed, self-serving, or just plain ridiculous, and often with the potential for catastrophic personal and social consequences. In A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind, he brings together clinical observations, practical thought experiments, personal anecdotes, and cutting-edge neuroscience to decipher what neuroscience can tell us - and where it falls woefully short. At the same time, he offers a new vision of how to think about what the mind might be and how it works.
A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind is a critical, startling, and expansive journey into the mysteries of the brain and what makes us human.
Robert A Burton
Robert Burton, M.D. graduated from Yale University and University of California at San Francisco medical school, where he also completed his neurology residency. At age 33, he was appointed chief of the Division of Neurology at Mt. Zion-UCSF Hospital, where he subsequently became Associate Chief of the Department of Neurosciences. His non-neurology writing career includes three critically acclaimed novels. He lives in Sausalito, California.
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Reviews for A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind
8 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Wonderful discussion of neuroscience research. A valuable resource for understanding what is reported as fact, but really isn't.
Book preview
A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind - Robert A Burton
Introduction
A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man’s mind can get both provocation and privacy.
—attributed to Edward P. Morgan¹
Each of us has a pretty good sense of what a mind is. It’s that indescribably vague, palpable, yet invisible something
just behind the forehead that is responsible for our thoughts. Beyond that, all bets are off. Some say it is simply the software for the brain, or what the brain does. Others have a more cosmic view of a mind without boundaries, or a nonmaterial essence that transcends and survives the death of the body. For most of us, it is both the measure of the man and the tool whereby we make this measurement. In turn the value of this judgment depends on how we believe that our mind works—how much of our thought and behavior is dictated by underlying biological predispositions and involuntary unconscious brain activity and how much is within our conscious control.
The consequences of this determination are enormous at both a personal and a global level. From attributing motivation and assigning personal responsibility, to assessing the threat of a nuclear attack by North Korea or Iran, we are constantly being asked to read our minds and the minds of others. And yet, we have no idea what a mind actually is. Despite 2,500 years of contemplation and the more recent phenomenal advances in basic neuroscience, the gap between what the brain does and what the mind experiences remains uncharted territory. Though many scientists would like to believe that this gap can be fully bridged with further scientific advances, they are mistaken.
Science is the only method we have for establishing the factual basis of what the mind might be. But how do you adequately investigate something that can’t be measured? Understanding how the brain works is great for describing biological functions, but still leaves us guessing as to what is being consciously experienced. Looking at the most detailed brain scans won’t capture what we feel when we experience love or despair any more than examining the individual pixels in a Chuck Close painting will give you an overall sense of the painting. (To underscore how little we really know about the mind, we need only realize that some prominent philosophers still seriously debate whether or not the mind even plays a role in our behavior.)
Nevertheless, with powerful new imaging techniques such as the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan, cognitive science has become the de facto mode of explanation of behavior, rushing into the vacuum created by the failure of previous psychological and philosophical theories to fulfill their initial promise. Neuroscience is now seen as the preeminent model of the mind and the creator and guardian of our cultural mythology. It has garnered the ultimate status of a becoming a prefix. A new language is emerging: neuro-economics, neuro-aesthetics, neuro-theology, neuro-innovation, neuro-linguistics, neuro-marketing, neuro-networking. Philosophers commonly cite neurological case studies as evidence for their theories. Market crashes are explained by fMRIs. Neuroscientists tell us why we prefer Coke to Pepsi.
Such advances have been seductive to the academic community and the general public. What once were privately acknowledged among neurologists as metaphysical musings are increasingly being offered and seen as scientifically based facts. Like a child handed a new toy, the scientific community isn’t likely to proceed with caution.²
The race is on; the holy grail of science (and much of philosophy of mind) is to explain how a brain creates a mind. But the lack of rock-solid initial assumptions and consensus opinion as to what the mind is
has resulted in a disjointed flurry of often unsupportable or contradictory behavioral observations. Try opening a newspaper or magazine without being confronted with yet another neuroscience tidbit being offered as an explanation of our behavior. Every day I see the most complex aspects of human behavior reduced to incomprehensible sound bites. For example, consider the number of dubious assumptions and logical inconsistencies necessary to come up with the recent headline in one of my favorite popular science magazines: Possible Site of Free Will Found in Brain.
³ Or this British newspaper headline: Bad Behavior Down to Genes, Not Poor Parenting.
⁴ While some observations are real advances, others are overreaching, unwarranted, wrong-headed, self-serving, or just plain ridiculous.
If this were merely of academic concern, I wouldn’t bother with this book. What alarms me is that a lack of clear understanding of what we can and cannot say about the mind and the commonly held belief in the unlimited powers of science are a potent recipe for potential catastrophe. Those old enough will recall when psychoanalysis was touted as hard science and schizophrenia was attributed to an overbearing mother (the so-called schizophrenogenic mother). How about the immense suffering caused by those psychologists who uncritically conjured up the recovered memory syndrome without having a clear understanding of how memory works? Or the Nobel laureate António Egas Moniz’s advancement of frontal lobotomies because patients were easier to manage? Entire families were devastated by ideas that, at the time, seemed to make sense. Only in hindsight was the folly apparent.
And yet, like moths drawn to the flame, or amnesiacs who forget the lessons of history, brain scientists are repeating these same mistakes. Though it is easy to explain away their often unwarranted claims about the mind as arising from arrogance, greed, ignorance, or other psychological quirks,
this book will pursue a more basic premise: our brains possess involuntary mechanisms that make unbiased thought impossible yet create the illusion that we are rational creatures capable of fully understanding the mind created by these same mechanisms.
Our brains have evolved piecemeal; contradiction, inconsistency, and paradox are built into our cognitive machinery. We are hardwired to experience unjustified feelings about ourselves, our thoughts, and our actions; we possess an irrepressible curiosity and desire to understand how the world works; we have developed an uncanny ability to see patterns whether or not they exist outside of our perceptions. Combine these traits with intrinsic cognitive constraints and you have the backdrop for modern-day neuroscience.
For me, the first step of any scientific inquiry should be a frank and open acknowledgment of the limitations of human thought, yet the recent spate of books and articles underscoring our inherent irrationality has done little to curb the excesses arising from a seemingly unshakable belief in pure reason. For neuroscientists and philosophers, as with the rest of us, the visceral feeling of knowing you are right is far more convincing than the thought that we have limits to our powers of reason.
Such prominent neuroscientists as Antonio Damasio confidently proclaim that the explanation of consciousness is around the corner.⁵ Philosopher Daniel Dennett has said, I know of no reason to expect that a brain couldn’t understand its own methods of functioning. Just because the brain is complex, with 100 million cells and a quadrillion synaptic connections, that doesn’t mean we can’t figure out what is going on within it.
⁶ Others like the late Nobel laureate Francis Crick are convinced that the brain and the mind are the same, and that we can use our minds to make this determination. Such grand predictions are likely to escalate as more enter the increasingly popular and competitive field of neuroscience. (In 2009, more than one thousand grad students received a Ph.D. in neuroscience, with many more Ph.D.’s granted in allied specialities such as psychology, adding to the tens of thousands already in the field.)
We are at a turning point in the history of self-understanding. Whether offering an fMRI scan as evidence of consciousness, claiming that we can use brain waves to read minds and detect lies, or positing that specific genes cause specific behaviors, neuroscience is in the process of redefining human nature. Science is trial and error; sorting out the good from the bad science takes time. Nevertheless, in this ever-more-speedy environment where information passes as wisdom and the need for public recognition often trumps caution and confirmation, snap scientific observations are increasingly the norm—often with laughable when not outright tragic consequences. What’s sorely needed is a long-term method of contemplating the relationship between the brain and the mind that will not be made obsolete by the next study or observation. If 2,500 years haven’t given us a coherent view of the mind, it’s about time that we consider alternative possibilities.
To put the arc of this book into perspective, imagine that you are eager to begin a research project, but don’t have access to a necessary state-of-the-art microscope. You arrange to borrow one from a friend who owns a pawnshop for high-tech equipment. You have no idea who previously owned the microscope, what condition it is in, or whether or not to trust your friend’s word that it works fine.
Like any first-rate scientist beginning an investigation, you would first check out the microscope’s lenses to be sure there were no smudges, defects, or peculiarities that might create optical illusions or in any way distort the images. After all, the accuracy of your research will always be limited by the quality of your tools.
Traditionally when we think of scientific tools, we think of machinery and methods of inquiry. It is up to the scientist to ascertain that the equipment is flawless, the methodology is unimpeachable, and the results are transparent and reproducible. But this way of thinking about science overlooks the basic limitation of scientific inquiry: it is our minds that dream up the questions and seek out the answers. If the mind generates our investigations of itself, wouldn’t it make sense to understand the potential limits of this tool in the same way we would look for flaws in the optics of a microscope?
My overriding goal in writing this book is to challenge some basic assumptions that permeate the field of brain study—from hard-core neuroscience to experimental cognitive science to the more theoretical arguments posed by philosophy of mind. Though experimental cognitive science and more basic neuroscience are often viewed as separate disciplines operating at different levels of investigation (clinical versus basic science), I will be lumping them together as overlapping methods for thinking about the mind. For simplicity, I will refer to the entire field as neuroscience. The book will draw from a number of scientific studies, but will also rely on personal thought experiments and experiences as well as clinical examples and even literary observations. The book is best read as a late-night meditation. Rather than promising answers to age-old questions about the mind, it is my goal to challenge the underlying assumptions that drive these questions. In the end, this is a book questioning the nature of the questions about the mind that we seem compelled to ask yet are scientifically unable to answer.
I’m not suggesting that these are necessarily the only or the best set of interpretations or approaches to the major problems of the mind. Given my argument that bias and irrationality are often unavoidable aspects of any line of reasoning, it’s likely there are flaws in my logic and reading of the works of others. Fortunately, it isn’t necessary that every observation be unassailable. If any of what I’m suggesting rings true, that is enough. My goal isn’t to present one-stop answers, but rather to highlight potential pitfalls and impasses and to provoke an increased awareness of how inherently difficult the study of the mind will always be. Recognition of where the lenses of our primary tool of investigation are inherently blurred allows us to factor in these distortions. If a tool is incapable of making certain observations, so be it. At the risk of an excess of cynicism, it seems to me that if I have a compelling reason to believe that I can’t fly, I would be better off returning my wax wings to the scientists who sold them to me than opening the window and jumping to the wrong conclusion.
Though this book will offer a number of criticisms of modern neuroscience, it is not intended as an indictment of the field or of individual scientists. I have the greatest admiration for the central role neuroscience and neuroscientists play in improving both our daily lives and our self-understanding. There is no alternative to the scientific method for studying the physical world. Many of my arguments will be supported by evidence from basic and cognitive science.
To date, there has been a great deal of public and academic criticism about specific technologies such as fMRI. An fMRI can detect an increase in blood flow to an active brain region. It can give a dynamic picture of changing degrees of brain activation while performing a task—either a thought or an action. But an fMRI can’t provide a direct measure of neuronal activity. Still, my primary goal is not to look at methodological difficulties that may be overcome in the future.⁷ My interest is in pointing out essential limitations that are unlikely to yield to future technological advances. To this end, I will focus on the limits of what neuroscience can investigate and what it can properly conclude. Also, I am not arguing against speculation; after all, this entire book, though drawing on scientific evidence, is purely speculative. And, in the end, that will be the overarching theme of this book. Scientific method, if properly employed, can produce a wealth of useful information. However, any application of this data to explain the mind will always be a personal vision, not a scientific fact.
1 • The Shape of Your Mind
It’s unbelievable how much you don’t know about the game you’ve been playing all your life.
—attributed to Branch Rickey¹
All complex biological systems—which include you and me—use sensory feedback to monitor their environment. We are made aware of the external world through senses such as sight and sound; we know our interior physical world through internally generated feelings such as hunger and thirst. As the vast majority of thought originates outside of consciousness, it seems reasonable that we would also have evolved a sensory system for informing the conscious mind what cognitive activity is going on subconsciously. Without a method for being aware of this activity, it is hard to imagine what role the conscious mind would have, or even if there would be such a thing as a mind.
If we were cars, our minds would have LED displays telling us what is going on under the hood. But being subtle creatures rather than machines, we have a far more sophisticated system for monitoring subliminal brain activity. Instead of a mental dashboard full of flashing lights, we have evolved an array of cognitive feelings. For simplicity, I’ve used the phrase cognitive feelings
to refer to those mental phenomena that aren’t normally categorized as emotions or moods, but rather are the type of feeling we associate with thinking. These include such diverse mental states as a sense of knowing, causation, agency, and intention.
To be meaningful, these feelings must bear some relationship to the cognitive activity they are announcing. Just as the feeling of thirst must trigger the desire for drinking fluids, an awareness of a subliminal mental calculation must feel something like a calculation. And here’s the rub. Thirst and hunger are readily accepted as arising from our bodies, but feelings about our involuntarily generated subconscious thoughts often feel like deliberate actions of the conscious mind.
Take an example from the world of visual perception. Imagine yourself at a local football game. You are focused on the game and oblivious of the surrounding faces of spectators. Then, while you are shifting your gaze to look at the scoreboard, your visual system subliminally detects a face in the crowd that it recognizes as your old friend Sam. Your visual cortex compares the incoming image of the face with previously stored memories of Sam’s face and calculates the probability that the face is Sam’s. If the likelihood is high enough, the brain sends the image of the face up into consciousness along with a separate feeling of recognition. You feel as though you consciously assessed the face and determined it was Sam. Depending upon the strength of this feeling of recognition, you will also sense the degree of likelihood that this facial recognition is correct. This might range from a feeling of merely maybe
or it could be, but on the other hand…
to a sense of utter certainty.
A visual input of a face, though not initially making any conscious impression, has triggered two separate unconscious brain activities. One is exclusively mechanical and without any associated feeling tone—the comparison of Sam’s face with all other faces previously stored in memory. The other is purely subjective sensation—the feeling of recognition. The two arrive in consciousness as a unit—the visual perception of Sam’s face and the simultaneous feeling that it is indeed Sam. Even though this process occurs outside of awareness, we feel it is the result of the act of conscious recognition. Such lower-level brain activities are experienced at a higher level as voluntary acts.
Because we know the brain is superb at subliminal pattern recognition, we find it relatively easy to concede that recognition doesn’t take place consciously, despite how it might feel. But there are a host of mental sensations that are so intimately linked with our conception of conscious thought that the idea of them not being under our conscious control seems far-fetched.
In my previous book, On Being Certain, I introduced the concept of involuntary mental sensations—spontaneously occurring feelings about our thoughts that are experienced as aspects of conscious thought. Though we feel that they are the result of conscious rumination and represent rational conclusions, they are no more deliberate than feelings of love or anger. My focus was on feelings of knowing, certainty, and conviction—feelings about the quality of our thoughts that range from vague hunches and gut feelings to utter conviction and a profound aha.
I now realize that feelings of knowing are a small part of a larger mental sensory system that includes the sense of self, the sense of choice, control over one’s thoughts and actions, feelings of justice and fairness, and even how we determine causation. Collectively, these involuntary sensations make up much of the experience of having a mind. In addition, they profoundly influence how we conceptualize what a mind is.
It is vitally important to realize that the cognitive aspect of thought—the calculation—has no feeling tone. Our entire experience of these calculations comes via separate feelings that accompany them into consciousness. For example, though contrary to personal experience, there is no way to objectively determine the origin of a thought. When an idea occurs to me
or feels as though it popped into my head,
I tend to label it as arising from the unconscious. On the other hand, if I have the feeling of directly thinking a thought, I am likely to conclude that it is the result of conscious deliberation. The distinction between conscious and unconscious thought is nothing more than our experience of involuntary mental sensations.
This separation between thought (the silent mental calculation) and feelings about thoughts is central to any inquiry into what the mind might be. We know the mind only through our experience; it isn’t something that can be pinned on a specimen board, weighed or measured, poked or prodded. Seeing how our sense of a mind arises from the messy and often hard-to-describe interaction of disparate involuntary sensations is a necessary first step toward any understanding of what the mind can say about itself.
Our Brains, Ourselves
A car cuts you off on the freeway and you get enraged; you honk, flip the driver the finger, fume, and carry on about this brutish lack of manners being a surefire indication of civilization’s impending demise. Your spouse, for the thousandth time, urges you to learn a little self-control. Of course, dear, you halfheartedly agree, your mind oscillating between further thoughts of revenge and the painful recognition that you have just acted like a two-year-old.
You quickly drum up a bevy of seemingly reasonable explanations—a stressful day, a poor night’s sleep, the new anti-hypertensive medication you started a couple weeks ago, long-standing control issues and unresolved childhood slights, your growing apprehension over your declining IRA account. On the other hand, your father had a hair trigger and was prone to seemingly unprovoked tirades and furies. Perhaps you inherited some angry strands of tightly wound DNA. If only there was a straightforward method for self-examination. But your mind reels at the seemingly infinite combination of possibilities, as though the very concept of self-awareness is an overrated myth, a low-probability rubber crutch for the emotionally desperate.
Nevertheless, you have to start somewhere. Though changing your genes is presently out of the question, perhaps you can address your financial concerns. Back at home, you review your IRA portfolio. Your best friend, a financial wizard, gives you a thousand reasons why stock prices are at a generational low and insists that you should buy, buy, buy.
His arguments are persuasive. You boot up your online broker and poise your finger over the Buy button; but, as though controlled by invisible forces, you have a complete change of heart
and sell everything. You are puzzled by your behavior. It is as though you have lost control of yourself.
Later that night, flipping through a popular psychology magazine, you read that fMRI studies have shown that the brain region for controlling hand movements is activated before you are aware of making a decision to move your hand. Brain wave (EEG) studies confirm the finding. This can’t be, you think. You try a simple lab experiment. You think about moving your hand but don’t make the final decision to move it; your hand rests quietly in your lap, awaiting instructions. You then consciously decide to wiggle your fingers. You exert some effort, and, not surprisingly, your fingers wiggle on