[ExI] LA Times: Misreading the mind

[PJ Manney]

Jonah Lehrer, author of "Proust Was a Neuroscientist", attacks
reductionism in neuroscience.  If we want to understand consciousness,
he says, reductionism is only the first step.  The rest of the messy
endeavor is far more complex and we must embrace the messy complexity.

PJ

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-lehrer20jan20,0,1700536.story?coll=la-opinion-center

>From the Los Angeles Times
Misreading the mind
If neuroscientists want to understand the mystery of consciousness,
they'll need new methods.
By Jonah Lehrer

January 20, 2008

Since its inception in the early 20th century, neuroscience has taught
us a tremendous amount about the brain.

Our sensations have been reduced to a set of specific circuits. The
mind has been imaged as it thinks about itself, with every thought
traced back to its cortical source. The most ineffable of emotions
have been translated into the terms of chemistry, so that the feeling
of love is just a little too much dopamine. Fear is an excited
amygdala. Even our sense of consciousness is explained away with
references to some obscure property of the frontal cortex. It turns
out that there is nothing inherently mysterious about those 3 pounds
of wrinkled flesh inside the skull. There is no ghost in the machine.

The success of modern neuroscience represents the triumph of a method:
reductionism. The premise of reductionism is that the best way to
solve a complex problem -- and the brain is the most complicated
object in the known universe -- is to study its most basic parts. The
mind, in other words, is just a particular trick of matter, reducible
to the callous laws of physics.

But the reductionist method, although undeniably successful, has very
real limitations. Not everything benefits from being broken down into
tiny pieces. Look, for example, at a Beethoven symphony. If the music
is reduced to wavelengths of vibrating air -- the simple sum of its
physics -- we actually understand less about the music. The intangible
beauty, the visceral emotion, the entire reason we listen in the first
place -- all is lost when the sound is reduced into its most elemental
details. In other words, reductionism can leave out a lot of reality.

The mind is like music. While neuroscience accurately describes our
brain in terms of its material facts -- we are nothing but a loom of
electricity and enzymes -- this isn't how we experience the world. Our
consciousness, at least when felt from the inside, feels like more
than the sum of its cells. The truth of the matter is that we feel
like the ghost, not like the machine.

If neuroscience is going to solve its grandest questions, such as the
mystery of consciousness, it needs to adopt new methods that are able
to construct complex representations of the mind that aren't built
from the bottom up. Sometimes, the whole is best understood in terms
of the whole. William James, as usual, realized this first. The eight
chapters that begin his 1890 textbook, "The Principles of Psychology,"
describe the mind in the conventional third-person terms of the
experimental psychologist. Everything changes, however, with Chapter
9. James starts this section, "The Stream of Thought," with a warning:
"We now begin our study of the mind from within."

With that single sentence, James tried to shift the subject of
psychology. He disavowed any scientific method that tried to dissect
the mind into a set of elemental units, be it sensations or synapses.
Modern science, however, didn't follow James' lead. In the years after
his textbook was published, a "New Psychology" was born, and this
rigorous science had no use for Jamesian vagueness. Measurement was
now in vogue. Psychologists were busy trying to calculate all sorts of
inane things, such as the time it takes for a single sensation to
travel from your finger to your head. By quantifying our
consciousness, they hoped to make the mind fit for science.
Unfortunately, this meant that the mind was defined in very narrow
terms. The study of experience was banished from the laboratory.

But it's time to bring experience back. Neuroscience has effectively
investigated the sound waves, but it has missed the music. Although
reductionism has its uses -- it is, for instance, absolutely crucial
for helping us develop new pharmaceutical treatments for mental
illnesses -- its limitations are too significant to allow us to answer
our biggest questions. As the novelist Richard Powers wrote, "If we
knew the world only through synapses, how could we know the synapse?"

The question, of course, is how neuroscience can get beyond
reductionism. Science rightfully adheres to a strict methodology,
relying on experimental data and testability, but this method could
benefit from an additional set of inputs. Artists, for instance, have
studied the world of experience for centuries. They describe the mind
from the inside, expressing our first-person perspective in prose,
poetry and paint. Although a work of art obviously isn't a substitute
for a scientific experiment -- Proust isn't going to invent Prozac --
the artist can help scientists better understand what, exactly, they
are trying to reduce in the first place. Before you break something
apart, it helps to know how it hangs together.

Virginia Woolf, for example, famously declared that the task of the
novelist is to "examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary
day ... [tracing] the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in
appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the
consciousness."

In other words, she wanted to describe the mind from the inside, to
distill the details of our psychological experience into prose. That's
why her novels have endured: because they feel true. And they feel
true because they capture a layer of reality that reductionism cannot.
As Noam Chomsky said, "It is quite possible -- overwhelmingly
probable, one might guess -- that we will always learn more about
human life and personality from novels than from scientific
psychology." In this sense, the arts are an incredibly rich data set,
providing neuroscience with a glimpse behind its blind spots.

Some of the most exciting endeavors in neuroscience right now are
trying to move beyond reductionism. The Blue Brain Project, for
example, a collaboration between the École Polytechnique Fédérale in
Lausanne, Switzerland, and IBM, is in the process of constructing a
biologically accurate model of the brain that can be used to simulate
experience on a supercomputer. Henry Markram, the leader of the
project, recently told me that he's convinced "reductionism peaked
five years ago." While Markram is quick to add that the reductionism
program isn't complete -- "There is still so much that we don't know
about the brain," he says -- he's trying to solve a harder problem,
which is figuring out how all these cellular details connect together.
"The Blue Brain Project" he says, "is about showing people the whole."
In other words, Markram wants to hear the music.

One day, we'll look back at the history of neuroscience and realize
that reductionism was just the first phase. Each year, tens of
thousands of neuroscience papers are published in scientific journals.
The field is introduced to countless new acronyms, pathways and
proteins. At a certain point, however, all of this detail starts to
have diminishing returns. After all, the real paradox of the brain is
why it feels like more than the sum of its parts. How does our pale
gray matter become the Technicolor cinema of consciousness? What
transforms the water of the brain into the wine of the mind? Where
does the self come from?

Reductionism can't answer these questions. According to the facts of
neuroscience, your head contains 100 billion electrical cells, but not
one of them is you, or knows you or cares about you. In fact, you
don't even exist. You are simply an elaborate cognitive illusion, an
"epiphenomenon" of the cortex. Our mystery is denied.

Obviously, this scientific solution isn't very satisfying. It confines
neuroscience to an immaculate abstraction, unable to reduce the only
reality we will ever know. Unless our science moves beyond
reductionism and grapples instead with the messiness of subjective
experience -- what James called a "science of the soul" -- its facts
will grow increasingly remote. The wonder of the brain is that it can
be described in so many ways: We are such stuff as dreams are made on,
but we are also just stuff. What we need is a science that can
encompass both sides of our being.

Jonah Lehrer, an editor at large for Seed magazine, is the author of
"Proust Was a Neuroscientist."