The Undiscovered Mind: How the Human Brain Defies Replication, Medication, and Explanation - Hardcover

Horgan, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684850753 ISBN 13: 9780684850757

Publisher: Free Press, 1999

Synopsis

In his acclaimed book The End of Science, John Horgan ignited a firestorm of controversy about the limits of knowledge in a wide range of sciences. Now in The Undiscovered Mind he focuses on the single most important scientific enterprise of all -- the effort to understand the human mind -- and exposes a world of minor and doubtful achievement. The science of the mind has irresistible allure because it is about us, not atoms or electricity or planets. For this reason Horgan foresees that, unlike physics or cosmology or biology, it is the one science that will forever demand our attention, that ultimately can have no end. Only recently has the mind become science's busiest line of inquiry. As the Decade of the Brain proclaimed by President Bush draws to a close, a huge research industry has built up around attempts to medicate, replicate, and finally explain the human brain. Scientists hope to solve the riddle of consciousness, to vanquish mental illness, and even to reinvent human nature. Horgan scrutinizes this trend as he takes us inside laboratories, hospitals, and universities to meet neuroscientists, Freudian analysts, electroshock therapists, behavioral geneticists, evolutionary psychologists, artificial intelligence engineers, and philosophers of consciousness. He looks into the persistent explanatory gap between mind and body that Socrates pondered and shows that it has not been bridged. He investigates what he calls the Humpty Dumpty dilemma, the fact that neuroscientists can break the brain and mind into pieces but cannot put the pieces back together again. He presents evidence that the placebo effect is the primary ingredient of psychotherapy, Prozac, and other treatments for mental disorders. We visit with the robot Cog at MIT, whose most human achievement is that he unnervingly watches his visitors move around the room -- Star Trek's Commander Data would find him very dull company. As Horgan shows, the mystery of human consciousness, of why and how we think, remains so impregnable that to expect the attempts of scientific method and technology to penetrate it anytime soon is absurd. Full of fascinating interviews and research, The Undiscovered Mind is a blistering critical tour of every facet of "mind-science." Horgan concludes by destroying the myth of the "scientific savior" and by laying bare the dangers posed by our desire for a final theory of the mind. Nevertheless, he still has the curiosity to try on a Visual/Auditory Relaxation and Sedation contraption with goggles and headphones when offered the opportunity of an "altered state" at a consciousness conference in Tucson. The final "search for an epiphany" is vintage Horgan, both delightfully witty and arrestingly profound. Horgan is one of the most influential journalists in the United States today. His vision of mind-science will continue to infuriate many inside and outside the scientific establishment. It will raise sometimes difficult and even painful questions for those who have benefited from mind science's products -- whether Prozac, or psychoanalysis, or simply more challenging chess-playing software. But these questions are at the heart of the most popular science being done now. This is a shrewd, entertaining, aud necessary book about the universe's ultimate enigma: the undiscovered mind.

About this title

About the Author

John Horgan is a freelance writer and author of The End of Science, a U.S. best-seller that has been translated into ten languages. His awards include the Science Journalism Award of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1992 and 1994) and the National Association of Science Writers Science-in-Society Award 1993). He has written for the New York Times, London Times, Washington Post, New Republic, Slate, Discover, The Sciences, and other publications in the United States and Europe. He was a staff writer at Scientific American from 1986 to 1997 and at IEEE Spectrum from 1983 to 1986. He graduated from Columbia University's School of Journalism in 1983. He lives in Garrison, New York, with his wife, Suzie Gilbert, a childrens' book author, and their two children.

Reviews

With a gadfly's stinging sense of human limitations, Horgan, author of the controversial and bestselling The End of Science, turns a quizzical eye to the claims of contemporary scientists, psychologists, philosophers and medical researchers who, through mind and brain science, hope to explain rationally human consciousness and behavior. His extraordinarily provocative and wide-ranging treatise moves from an analysis of modern social science's belief in the subjectivity of all research to a near apologia for Freud's profound skepticism of the scientific method, to an exposure of the reductionist claims of evolutionists, genetic theorists, psychopharmacology and cybernetics. During his rollicking stroll though the varied creeds that compose the terrain of consciousness studies, Horgan both educates and entertains. He employs anecdotes drawn from quirky personal encounters with leaders of consciousness theory, including Frederick Crews, an anti-Freudian who arrives at one meeting "dressed like an executioner"; Steven Hyman, the self-described "equal opportunity sceptic" who's the director of the National Institute of Medical Health; Peter Kramer, author of Listening to Prozac; and Harold Sackheim, a specialist in electroshock therapy. These anecdotes are complemented by Horgan's own erudition, which is considerable. Here is a writer equally at home with the canonical assertions of literary critic Harold Bloom and language philosopher Noam Chomsky's critique of Locke's epistemology and its subsequent behaviorist adherents. Horgan's light but never shallow journalistic style keeps his skepticism from descending into grim cynicism, and he concludes on an optimistic note: we are, he contends, capable of epiphanies that transcend the bonds of mere scientific method. How true, for readers of this contrarian, challenging book may themselves experience an epiphany as Horgan celebrates what he sees as the fundamental mystery of consciousness, of life, of the universe itself. Agent, John Brockman. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Are the sciences that might explain the human mindneuroscience, psychology, psychiatrystill in their infancy? Or have we reached some fundamental scientific limit to our understanding of the human brain and how it works? More essentially, do we really know any hard scientific truths about the brain and mind or do we just hold a series of shifting beliefs suited to the age in which we live? Journalist Horgan (previously a senior writer at Scientific American) looked at some similar ground in The End of Science (not reviewed), where he argued that for particle physics, cosmology, and evolutionary biology, scientists may have reached the end of what there is to discover. On the other hand, he postulates here, the scientific disciplines attempting to explain the human mind have hardly made a start. We can't explain the most complex questionconsciousness; we don't know ``what processes in the brain allow us to see, hear, learn, remember, reason, emote, decide, act,'' nor why so many of us [are] afflicted with mental disorders such as depression and schizophrenia.'' Nor do we know how effective treatments are for these disorders. Horgan has many more questions than answers, but on some points he's quite clear, and his arguments are instinctively appealing. ``Theories of human nature never really die, they just go in and out of fashion.'' Hence ``phrenology is reincarnated as cognitive modularism. Sociobiology mutates into evolutionary psychology,'' and so on. Horgan pays particular attention to psychiatric issues, first and foremost its treatment modalities. His feeling is that current treatments are not ``truer or better'' than past haphazard attempts to help the mentally illthey're just different, for our era. Horgan doesn't come across as bashing the relevant professions or rabble-rousing for the fun of it; in fact, he lists in order the help he would seek if affected by a serious depression. Rather, he raises some tough, provocative questions. Thought-provoking, and an overall useful exercise. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Extending the thesis touted in his End of Science (1996) that science will encounter limits to its discoveries, journalist Horgan addresses problems in neuroscience. Compounding them are the "fractiousness" of its investigators, among whose internecine factions Horgan gallivants in his trips to mind-science's research institutes and conferences. Populated by talk therapists, drug therapists, behavior geneticists, evolutionary psychologists, and psychiatrists, the field makes small advances in understanding the human mind, but Horgan questions whether they will ever add up to a genuine understanding of what occurs in our noggins. He explains how roadblocks like the "binding problem" (how the brain integrates disparate inputs into a single perception), or the "explanatory gap" (the suspicion that a physiological description of the brain is insufficient to explain consciousness) are as immovable as ever. Psychotherapy is another mental arena of which Horgan is skeptical. Their advocates and debunkers fight each other vigorously, while Horgan presents their arguments in an informative fashion that will engage those curious about the state of research into the subcranial world. Gilbert Taylor

Horgan (The End of Science), an award-winning science journalist, decries the ambiguous and often contradictory nature of the "mind sciences" in his latest work. His skepticism encompasses the study of consciousness ("arguably the most intractable and impractical problem"), the effectiveness of psychological or physiological therapies for mental disorders (characterized by the "Dodo hypothesis" where "all of the therapies [seem] to be equally effective or equally ineffective"), and the misguided efforts of the artificial intelligence community to mimic human reasoning and decision-making. While many scientists have at least considered that the brain may never be capable of understanding itself, Horgan makes that possibility the central tenet of his book. By sifting through a glut of paradigms and ambiguous research findings, and listening to some of the key players in the field, Horgan reveals a disturbing lack of rigor in the disciplines and a "fractiousness of mind-science [that] sets it apart from other fields." Written in a style that will engage the general reader, this book will undoubtedly raise the hackles of the scientific community and provoke some very interesting dialog. For academic and public libraries.ALaurie Bartolini, Illinois State Lib., Springfield
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One: Neuroscience's Explanatory Gap

By 1979 Freudian psychology was treated as only an interesting historical note. The fashionable new frontier was the clinical study of the central nervous system....Today the new savants probe and probe and slice and slice and project their slides and regard Freud's mental constructs, his "libidos," "Oedipal complexes," and the rest, as quaint quackeries of yore, along the lines of Mesmer's "animal magnetism."
-- Tom Wolfe, In Our Time

In Phaedo Plato described the last hours of Socrates, who had been imprisoned and sentenced to death by Athenian authorities. Socrates told friends who had assembled in the prison why he had accepted his death sentence rather than fleeing. At one point, Socrates ridiculed the notion that his behavior could be explained in physical terms. Someone who held such a belief, Socrates speculated, would claim that

as the bones are lifted at their joints by the contraction or relaxation of the muscles, I am able to bend my limbs, and that is why I am sitting here in a curved posture...and he would have a similar explanation of my talking to you, which he would attribute to sound, and air, and hearing...forgetting to mention the true cause, which is, that the Athenians have thought fit to condemn me, and accordingly I have thought it better and more right to remain here and undergo my sentence.

This is the oldest allusion I know of to what some modern philosophers call the explanatory gap. The term was coined by Joseph Levine, a philosopher at North Carolina State University. In "Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap," published in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly in 1983, Levine addressed the puzzling inability of physiological theories to account for psychological phenomena. Levine's main focus was on consciousness, or "qualia," our subjective sensations of the world. But the explanatory gap could also refer to mental functions such as perception, memory, reasoning, and emotion -- and to human behavior.

The field that seems most likely to close the explanatory gap is neuroscience, the study of the brain. When Plato wrote Phaedo, no one even knew that the brain is the seat of mental functioning. (Aristotle's observation that chickens often continue running after being decapitated led him to rule out the brain as the body's control center.) Today neuroscientists are probing the links between the brain and the mind with an ever more potent array of tools. They can watch the entire brain in action with positron emission tomography and magnetic resonance imaging. They can monitor the minute electrical impulses passing between individual nerve cells with microelectrodes. They can trace the effects of specific genes and neurotransmitters on the brain's functioning. Investigators hope that eventually neuroscience will do for mind-science what molecular biology did for evolutionary biology, placing it on a firm empirical foundation that leads to powerful new insights and applications.

Neuroscience is certainly a growth industry. Membership in the Society for Neuroscience, based in Washington, D.C., soared from 500 in 1970, the year it was founded, to over 25,000 in 1998. Neuroscience journals have proliferated, as has coverage of the topic in premier general-interest journals such as Science and Nature. When Nature launched a new periodical, Nature Neuroscience, in 1998, it proclaimed that neuroscience "is one of the most vigorous and fast growing areas of biology. Not only is understanding the brain one of the great scientific challenges of our time, it also has profound implications for society, ranging from the basis of memory to the causes of Alzheimer's disease to the origins of emotions, personality and even consciousness itself." Neuroscience is clearly advancing; it is getting somewhere. But where?

I once asked Gerald Fischbach, the head of Harvard's Department of Neuroscience and a former president of the Society for Neuroscience, to name what he considered to be the most important accomplishment of his field. He smiled at the naiveté of the question. Neuroscience is a vast enterprise, he pointed out, which ranges from studies of molecules that facilitate neural transmission to magnetic resonance imaging of whole-brain activity. It is impossible, Fischbach added, to single out any particular finding, or even a set of findings, emerging from neuroscience. The field's most striking characteristic is its production of such an enormous and still-growing number of discoveries. Researchers keep finding new types of brain cells, or neurons; neurotransmitters, the chemicals by which neurons communicate with each other; neural receptors, the lumps of protein on the surface of neurons into which neurotransmitters fit; and neurotrophic factors, chemicals that guide the growth of the brain from the embryonic stage into adulthood.

Not long ago, Fischbach elaborated, researchers believed there was only one receptor for the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which controls muscle functioning; now at least ten different receptors have been identified. Experiments have turned up at least fifteen receptors for the so-called GABA (gamma-amino butyric acid) neurotransmitter, which inhibits neural activity. Research into neurotrophic factors is also "exploding," Fischbach said. Researchers had learned that neurotrophic factors continue to shape the brain not only in utero and during infancy but throughout our life span. Unfortunately, neuroscientists had not determined how to fit all these findings into a coherent framework. "We're not close to having a unified view of human mental life," Fischbach said.

Fischbach was spotlighting one of his field's most paradoxical features. Although reductionist is often used as a derogatory term, science is reductionist by definition. As the philosopher Daniel Dennett once put it, "Leaving something out is not a feature of failed explanations, but of successful explanations." Science at its best isolates a common element underlying many seemingly disparate phenomena. Newton discovered that the tendency of objects to fall to the ground, the swelling and ebbing of seas, and the motion of the moon and planets through space could all be explained by a single force, gravity. Modern physicists have demonstrated that all matter consists basically of two types of particles, quarks and electrons. Darwin showed that all the diverse species on earth were created through a single process, evolution. In the last half-century, Francis Crick, James Watson, and other molecular biologists revealed that all organisms share essentially the same DNA-based method of transmitting genetic information to their offspring. Neuroscientists, in contrast, have yet to achieve their reductionist epiphany. Instead of finding a great unifying insight, they just keep uncovering more and more complexity. Neuroscience's progress is really a kind of anti-progress. As researchers learn more about the brain, it becomes increasingly difficult to imagine how all the disparate data can be organized into a cohesive, coherent whole.

The Humpty Dumpty Dilemma

In 1990, the Society for Neuroscience persuaded the U.S. Congress to designate the 1990s the Decade of the Brain. The goal of the proclamation was both to celebrate the achievements of neuroscience and to support efforts to understand mental disorders such as schizophrenia and manic depression (also known as bipolar illness). One neuroscientist who opposed the idea was Torsten Wiesel, who won a Nobel prize in 1981 and went on to become president of Rockefeller University in New York. (He stepped down to return to research at the end of 1998.) Born and raised in Sweden, Wiesel is a soft-spoken, reticent man, but w

Edition details

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684850753
• ISBN 13: 9780684850757
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336