Copyright © Hilary Rose and Steven Rose 2016
The right of Hilary Rose and Steven Rose to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2016 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8931-9
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8932-6 (pb)
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Rose, Hilary, 1935- author. | Rose, Steven P. R. (Steven Peter Russell), 1938-author.
Title: Can neuroscience change our minds? / Hilary Rose, Steven Rose.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015046128 (print) | LCCN 2016003260 (ebook) | ISBN 9780745689319 (hbk) | ISBN 9780745689326 (pbk) | ISBN 9780745689340 (Mobi) | ISBN 9780745689357 (Epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Neurosciences. | Brain.
Classification: LCC QP356 .R57 2016 (print) | LCC QP356 (ebook) | DDC 612.8–dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015046128
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We wish to acknowledge the generous help our readers, Simon Gibbs, Maureen McNeil, Helen Roberts and Vince Walsh, have given us. That they come from the very different but very relevant disciplines of educational psychology, women's and cultural studies, medical sociology and human neuroscience has critically nourished our intellectual and political project of bringing the claims of neuroeducation into public scrutiny and debate. We have enjoyed debating the neurosciences and the theoretical frames through which they can be viewed with Steven's younger brother, the sociologist Nikolas Rose – especially over good food and wine. At Polity, Jonathan Skerrett, our perceptive editor, has been a pleasure to work with, as have indeed his colleagues. Apologies to those whose work we have drawn on but in this short book have had no space to acknowledge.
How to understand the ever-proliferating neuro-prefix, attached to everything from new academic disciplines – neuroeconomics, neuromarketing, neuroethics, neuroaesthetics, neuropsychoanalysis – to the marketing of neuro-eticals such as the soda drinks NeuroBliss, NeuroPassion etc.? Neuro occupies more and more space within mainstream science; neuro research papers dominate the leading journals, Science and Nature. Specialist journals proliferate. Neuro books, from the academic to the popular, stream from the presses. One publishing house alone, the venerable Oxford University Press, has no less than 1,200 neuro titles in its list. They range from handbooks on the wiring patterns of the brain through philosophical reflections on the relations between brain, mind and consciousness, to self-help texts on brain optimization. Unsurprisingly, the press has not been left out of this neuro-feeding frenzy; one research study mapped the steady rise of newspaper articles on the brain in the UK's top three broadsheets and the top three tabloids between 2000 and 2010.1 The flow only slackened in 2008, when that year's near-cataclysmic banking crash briefly drove neuro from the pages. Brain optimization and brain pathologies, ranging from eating disorders to dementia, drew most of the journalists' interest. Neuro has gone into orbit and neuromania is all too often the order of the day.
Can neuroscience really change our minds? As a neuroscientist and a sociologist who share the view that neuroscience is dramatically increasing our understanding of the brain and also that science and society shape each other – that is, they are co-produced2 – we have written this book together to unpick the hope from the hype of these neuro-prefixes, arising, as they do, as part of today's neoliberal political economy. The hopes that the neurosciences offer equal, even surpass, those of genomics at the time of the launch of the Human Genome Project in 1990, but with one crucial difference. Then one of the world's leading molecular biologists, James Watson, claimed that ‘our fate lay in our genes’, thus only geneticists could offer hope through their molecular biology, their genetic manipulation and their bespoke drugs, and could save us from our destiny.3 The imaginary that they depicted left those outside the community of molecular biology as passive, waiting rescue. Despite the ideology of reductionism they share, the neurosciences' imaginary is radically different, claiming that their knowledge can empower us to remake our brains, and hence our minds and our very selves. Personal effort, guided by the neurosciences, can overcome the injuries of poverty and inequality. Plasticity, a property of the brain central to neuroscientific thinking for half a century, has become a quasi-magical term within public-policy discourse, offering an entirely new solution to problems of child development and poor educational performance, and heralded as the new elixir by the self-help manuals.
So is the answer to the question in the title of this book a simple ‘yes’? As we will show in the chapters that follow, things aren't quite that simple.
For neuroscientists, the brain is the last biological frontier. It is seen as the repository of learning, thinking, deciding, acting, feeling angry, afraid, loving, remembering, forgetting, even consciousness4 itself. Well funded, with €6 billion for just two Euro-American mega-projects, bolstered by an astonishing array of new technologies from the atomic to the systemic, and with research papers tumbling out in a seemingly inexhaustible torrent, it was almost inevitable that for most neuroscientists all doubts would vanish: the mind is the brain, the brain the mind. With this, the philosophical debate of centuries is simply bypassed.
Not everyone goes along with this, although an increasing corporatism in universities is hostile to dissent, and controversial ideas that might stir thought are unwelcome. With research money in short supply, only a handful of neuroscientists are willing to stick their heads above the parapet. More audible are the grumbles from psychiatry, although individuals who have vigorously entered public debate have encountered problems. British psychiatrist David Healy found his appointment to a senior position in a Canadian university blocked, following pressure from a pharmaceutical company, the efficacy of whose drug he had questioned.5 Philosophers are freer from the constraints of needing substantial research grants, and many, John Searle, Raymond Tallis and Mary Midgley among them, have mounted a vigorous public defence of the mind.
Scholars working in science and technology studies – for the most part sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers and historians – have observed the fusion of science and technology in genomics, informatics and the neurosciences, and renamed them technosciences. Genomics would be impossible without high-throughput sequencers, and neuroscience without its imagers, and neither without mega-powerful computers.6 The technosciences and today's neoliberal political economy are not separate entities: they are co-produced; the demands of the political economy shape the development of the technosciences, while in turn genomics and the neurosciences are powerful sources of innovation and hence provide the economic growth on which capitalism depends. What this structural account leaves out, however, is the agency of humans, both the technoscientists studying and manipulating life itself – from plants to animals, including the human animal – and the audiences and users of these new knowledges and technologies. The neuroscientists offer compelling imaginaries of how this new knowledge will help midwife new and hitherto undreamed of societies, while more mundanely their new understanding offers possibilities of manipulating the brain – from therapeutic interventions to new military neurotechnologies.
As so often with new technologies, humans modify their use for purposes other than were intended; as, for example, with the telephone, intended to make business more efficient but hijacked to facilitate social communication, call the family or speak to friends. The neurosciences offer similar possibilities. Anthropologist Rayna Rapp's ethnographic study7 describes the experience of children and young adults going through hi-tech procedures to diagnose neurological problems, such as those of dyslexia or Asperger's syndrome. She observed that some, particularly young adults with a common diagnosis, came together as biosocial groups, not in opposition to neuroscience but seizing it as a resource to support their claim to a different, not deficit, brain identity. Their emphasis on diversity not deficit has found support from among the neuroscientific and clinical communities, and together they are building a new concept of neurodiversity. No longer are normal and abnormal brains set against each other; instead neurodiversity locates the neurotypical as one (albeit the most numerous) among many different brains.
This biosocial concept of neurodiversity offers more open ways to think about identity. By contrast, others, such as the philosophers Fernando Ortega and Francisco Vidal, argue that we live in a neuroculture, and thus conceptualize the brain as the centre of the self, as ‘brainhood’.8 Such theories of individual self-making exclude biosociality and hence the possibility of a shared construction of neuro-identity – a philosophical move which tends to reinforce the reductionist ideology of neuroscience, so clearly expressed in the titles of Jean-Pierre Changeux's book Neuronal Man or Joseph LeDoux's Synaptic Self. Such titles ignore Rapp's reminder that ‘A child surrounds this brain.’ Can brainhood make space for an identity of resistance?
Since the mid-1970s the social rights embedded in the welfare states of Western Europe have been steadily eroded, a process dramatically accelerated by the near meltdown of the banking system. (The US trajectory has been rather different, never having had a welfare state on the European model – think of Obama's ongoing battle to secure access to health care for the poor.) Europe now follows the US and welfare is increasingly targeted towards the poorest by means-testing, even though research has long demonstrated that it is expensive to administer, humiliating to the recipients, and often misses those in greatest need. In Britain, even the right of free access to the treasured NHS is under systematic attack, beginning with the denial of health care to refugees.
In economics, it's been goodbye Keynesianism and hello to Chicagoan, or neo-classical, economics, with its reliance on complex algorithms and huge computing power. This latter, beginning as a distinctly marginal approach, rapidly increased its influence as cracks began to appear in the long post-1945 boom, with confidence in the welfare state fast fading. Today, despite the 2008 crash, which triggered a brief turn to Keynesianism, Chicagoan economics rises like the phoenix from what has unquestionably been ashes for most. The market remains fetishized as the guarantor of efficiency, innovation, economic growth and wealth creation, despite the challenge of the Occupy movement with its attack on the banking system and the obscene wealth of the 1 per cent.
Within this intensely marketized economy, social cohesion is weakened and collectivity fast replaced by the culture of what the political scientist C. B. Macpherson termed ‘possessive individualism’. What then might be expected of the sciences co-produced with neoliberalism? When, in 1975, biologist E. O. Wilson published his foundational text, Sociobiology, its message was in accord with Macpherson's thesis. Sociobiology offers to explain why we – that is, humans – are what we are and do what we do. It draws on animal studies, genetics and evolutionary theory to argue that societies are indeed aggregates of selfish individuals, whose telos is the propagation of their genes into succeeding generations. By the 1990s, sociobiology, rebranded as evolutionary psychology, was offering a fully fledged account of human nature as universal, fixed in the distant past of the Pleistocene, and persisting ever since, across all societies and despite 200,000 years of social, cultural and technological change. Its conception of this genetically driven universal human nature is hierarchical, individualistic, competitive and patriarchal. In the world as conceived by evolutionary psychology, collectivity within a group – be it nation or state – is possible only insofar as it is genetically advantageous to the individual. Evolutionary psychology thus ideologically positioned itself against the welfare state, with its ideology of cooperation and universal social care.9 As Wilson put it, humans might possibly create a fairer, more equal society, but only at the cost of losing efficiency.
The co-production of evolutionary psychology's theoretical apparatus and the ideology of neoliberalism is all too evident. But while it commanded substantial media space, it took little more than a pittance from the life-science budgets. The big money was increasingly in the biomedical technosciences, above all genomics and the neurosciences, seen as not merely wealth creators through innovation, but also as elegantly tailored to neoliberalism's shift from the collective to the individual. Neuroscience's preoccupation with the workings of the individual brain, even when the owner of that brain is engaged in intensely social interaction, and its reduction of persons to collections of neurons (nerve cells) and synapses (the junctions between them) is thus in accord with this focus on the individual, each ‘neuro-self’ responsible for their own well-being, sustained through the promises of personalized medical care.
In the chapters that follow, focusing mainly on the UK, we examine the ways in which, within this neoliberalism, neuroscience is being called upon to shape social and educational policy, targeting the deprived and the unemployed, who are blamed for what is described as poor parenting and thus limiting the ‘mental capital’ and aspirations of their children (Chapter 3), while offering the prospect of rational neuroscience-based education to enhance and optimize the brains of the young (Chapter 4). But, first, we ask how, from the dreams of an infant science half a century ago, neuroscience rose to its current pre-eminence (Chapters 1 and 2).