NEURO the New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind by Rose & Rached

NEURO the New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind by Rose & Rached 

 

What kind of beings do we think we are? This may seem a philosophical question. In part it is, but it is far from abstract. It is at the core of the philosophies we live by. It goes to the heart of how we bring up our children, run our schools, organize our social policies, manage economic affairs, treat those who commit crimes or whom we deem mentally ill, and perhaps even how we value beauty in art and life. It bears on the ways we understand our own feelings and desires, narrate our biographies, think about our futures, and formulate our ethics. Are we spiritual creatures, inhabited by an immaterial soul? Are we driven by instincts and passions that must be trained and civilized by discipline and the inculcation of habits? Are we unique among the animals, blessed or cursed with minds, language, consciousness, and conscience? Are we psychological persons, inhabited by a deep, interior psyche that is shaped by experience, symbols and signs, meaning and culture? Is our very nature as human beings shaped by the structure and functions of our brains? Over the past half century, some have come to believe that the last of these answers is the truest—that our brains hold the key to whom we are. They suggest that developments in the sciences of the brain are, at last, beginning to map the processes that make our humanity possible—as individuals, as societies, and as a species. These references to the brain do not efface all the other answers that contemporary culture gives to the question of who we are. But it seems that these other ways of thinking of ourselves—of our psychological lives, our habitual activities, our social relations, our ethical values and commitments, our perceptions of others—are being reshaped. They must now be grounded in one organ of our bodies—that spongy mass of the human brain, encapsulated by the skull, which weighs about three pounds in an adult and makes up about 2% of his or her body weight. This ‘materialist’ belief has taken a very material form. There has been a rapid growth in investment of money and human effort in neurobiological research, a remarkable increase in the numbers of papers published in neuroscience journals, a spate of books about the brain for lay readers, and many well-publicized claims that key aspects of human affairs can and should be governed in the light of neuroscientific....

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