distinction between MRI’s medical applications and its use in waffle about the neural basis of poor investment decisions and the like.
Brain-imaging helps oncologists track the success of different treatments in halting the spread of brain tumours. MRI can show the rate at which dementia is progressing. It can be used to assess the extent of damage caused by a stroke and to predict the likely recovery of brain and body function. I would probably not be able to walk but for MRI. Thanks to the magnetic resonance imaging machine at London’s Royal Free Hospital, surgeons could tell at a glance that they needed to perform an emergency discectomy and laminectomy on my spine. The Registrar told me there was a two per cent chance that I would emerge from surgery doubly incontinent, in a wheelchair and in unbearable agony for the rest of my life. Sign here. But thanks to the skill and expertise of the surgeons, and thanks to magnetic resonance imaging showing them exactly where to go and what to do when they got there, I am back on my feet.
None of the medical applications just mentioned involve voxels, those 3D pixels made from crunched numbers. The voxel is a monument to the confusion of mythology with science. The wonderful medical uses of MRI lend credibility to all the mythologising.
It’s only twenty-five years since brain-imaging got going. You might think the novelty of brain-imaging would make us less prone to mythologise the brain, but in fact it makes us more so. We have been mythologising the heart long enough to know when we are doing it. We don’t confuse love hearts for real ones. With brains it is different.
We mythologise the brain by stashing philosophical stowaways in the uncomplaining hideouts of the nucleus accumbens and ventromedial striatum. These philosophical stowaways include for example, the revival of out and out predestinarianism that you find in We Are Our Brains, the 2015 international bestseller by renowned Dutch neuroscience researcher Dick Swaab:
our levels of aggression and stress are set before birth for the rest of our lives.
I don’t know about you but I was feeling pretty laid-back until I read that. Let us examine some of the other way out claims made in We Are Our Brains.
2. ON RAFTS ACROSS THE SEA OF OKHOTSK
We Are Our Brains is written by a man with a grudge against humanity on account of being called Dick Swaab. Dick Swaab argues that people from Japan and Papua New Guinea struggle to tell the difference between fear and surprise:
Japanese and New Guineans find it difficult to distinguish between a face expressing fear and a face expressing surprise.
A thought experiment seems in order.
Let’s say, Yoko Ono is having her annual business meeting with Paul McCartney to settle the Beatles estate. If, during the course of that meeting, she finds herself struggling to decipher what exactly Paul McCartney’s facial expression might possibly mean, then she is no different from the rest of us, who have shared her perplexity ever since that day about a dozen years ago, when McCartney went into his plastic surgeon’s and said: ‘I’m tired of expressing lots of different emotions, can you give me just a rictus of mild surprise and vague curiosity?’
‘Sure,’ replied the surgeon. ‘Do you want a hint of disingenuousness with that?’
‘I don’t think that’ll be necessary do you?’
Paul McCartney seems to get by pretty well with just the one emotion on his face. In live performance, however, he concedes that the rictus of mild surprise and vague curiosity has changed the emotional register of the songs. As he told one interviewer:
If you take a song like ‘Eleanor Rigby’, when we did it with Beatles it was always very much a song about pity and compassion. Now, when I perform ‘Eleanor Rigby’ live, it’s much more a song about mild surprise and vague curiosity. Sort of, ‘Ooh, I wonder where all those lonely people came from all of a sudden?’
The argument that the Japanese cannot tell fear from surprise contradicts one of the central tenets of human evolutionary biology. ‘I have endeavoured to show in considerable detail,’ wrote Darwin in The Expression of the Emotions In Man and Animals:
that all the chief expressions exhibited by man are the same throughout the world. This fact is interesting, as it affords a new argument in favour of the several races being descended from a single parent-stock, which must have been almost completely human in structure, and to a large extent in mind, before the period at which the races diverged from each other.
Everything significant about our species was already well in place 35,000 years ago when Paleolithic sailors rafted across the Sea of Okhotsk to become the first humans to make landfall on the Japanese archipelago. If Dick Swaab is going to take a sledgehammer to the Darwinian principle that all people everywhere express emotions in pretty much the same way, then we might reasonably expect him to provide some evidence. I mean, that’s a mainstay of human biology. But Dick Swaab produces no evidence to support his claim. None. In fact, the atrocious allegation that the entire Japanese nation suffers from a sort of autism is made in a book which offers no sources or footnotes at all.
The New Guineans are also supposed to be unable to do what is child’s play for Africans, Europeans and continental Asians, and tell fear from surprise. And Dick Swaab has worked out why. It’s because: ‘linguistic and cultural environments … determine … how facial expressions are interpreted’.
Over 800 different languages are spoken in Papua New Guinea and West Papua, and they not even from the same language families. The Ternate spoken in West Papua is from a different language family to the Austronesian and Papuan languages spoken in Port Moresby. Nowhere else on earth exhibits such linguistic diversity. Nowhere else on earth, therefore, is it less likely that a common language could create a shared inability to read facial expressions. Dick Swaab literally could not have chosen a worse example from the face of the earth than ‘New Guineans’ to support his argument. But Dick Swaab is on a roll. Don’t stop him now:
When surveying a scene, Chinese individuals, unlike Americans, don’t focus on a single object at a time but look at it in relation to its surroundings.
Last time I looked, the United States of America was a new-ish political state created from every race and nation on earth. According to the US Census Bureau, more than a fifth of the population, over sixty million people, speak a language other than English in the home. Americans are not a biological entity. They are not a linguistic one either. There is no specifically American way of seeing, just as there is no Chinese way of seeing. The Chinese people are not a Terracotta Army all facing one way, all seeing everything holistically the whole time. When NASA astronaut Mae Jemison, of mixed East-Asian and African-American descent, looked out of the Space Shuttle Endeavour’s window did she see the big picture or the small?
In her memoir Find Where The Wind Goes, Mae Jemison wrote that ‘science provides an understanding of a universal experience’.* What is so terribly damaging about Dick Swaab’s parascience is precisely its denial of the universality of human experience.
* Mae Jemison, Find Where The Wind Goes: Moments From My Life, 2001.
A defining characteristic of many brain science books is a macho and rather sadistic nihilism. In The Brain: The Story Of You, Professor David Eagleman lords it over us puny mortals:
What if I told you that the world around you is an illusion, an elaborate show put on by your brain? … If you could see reality as it really is you would be shocked by its colourless, odourless, tasteless silence.
I actually had to do a book festival debate with this guy. He was representing science, progress and the light of reason, and I was there for balance. At one point he turned to me and said : ‘What if I told you that in the real world sound doesn’t actually exist?’ To which I replied: ‘Pardon?’