The Seductive Brain
The Fundamental Limitations of Neuroscience
The brain has always been a very alluring subject for scientists and philosophers alike. How does this small, 1.3kg ball of meat make us who we are? And how does it differentiate us from the other animals that we share this planet with?
The brain is a collection of billions of neurons, all packed into one intensely dense material which generates our language, stores our memories, makes us feel things and lets us think about the world around us.
But is that really true?
I asked my Instagram followers if everything that is psychological can one day be explained by neuroscience and the response was fairly straightforward. Nearly 70% of my followers think that neuroscience is the ultimate destination of everything psychology. Whether it is our thoughts, emotions, experiences or our perceptions, everything, is ultimately stored in the brain and will be found there itself.
But I disagree. And this issue is my case for this disagreement.
The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience
Ever since neuroimaging techniques such as MRI and fMRI were created, humankind has been fascinated by the working brain. These new technologies have given us an insight into how this dense collection of neurons makes things happen.
But this fascination goes deeper than just a scientific curiosity. Psychologists have found that we are more satisfied with explanations for psychological phenomena if there is a neurological ‘explanation’ attached with it. In an experiment, they found that laymen rate bad explanations of mental experiences as more satisfying if it has some neurological side to it, instead of when it doesn’t.
It doesn’t matter whether this neurological explanation makes sense or not. It could be something as stupid as “the temporal lobe is considered vital to nanoneural regeneration” but as long as we include the brain in our explanations, we are more satisfied.
These psychologists named this phenomenon the ‘seductive allure of neuroscience’, it is the irrational belief that a psychological phenomenon is ‘real’ or more ‘scientific’ only when it has neuroevidence attached to it.
Don’t we do that when it comes to clinical depression as well? We try to convince people that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain even though the evidence on that is really sketchy. There is this fear among many psychologists that if we don’t find a neurological basis for this illness, then the illness might not be real at all.
Fundamental Limits of Neuroscience
Neuroscience is an up and coming branch in the field of psychology and if you ask an average graduate student, it is quite possible that they will think it is where the future of the field lies but there are some very basic limitations that come with studying the brain to understand psychological phenomena.
Imagine you see a cloud in the sky and want to understand how it works. You will zoom in as much as possible to the constituent elements of the cloud and find little water molecules. At this point, you will realize that the cloud is made up of lots of water molecules. You will try and study these molecules, see how they behave in different situations, how they interact with the other molecules in the cloud BUT these molecules will not tell what the shape of the cloud is or it will not tell you the color of the cloud.
In neuroscience, we end up doing something similar.
We try to reduce each psychological phenomena to its elements (only the elements which have a physical, neural basis) but in doing this we miss out on the emergent behaviour that is a result of the collective function of the brain.
Knowing which part of the brain is responsible for memory will not help us understand the process of memory storage and retrieval.
Knowing which parts of the brain are responsible for sensations will not help us understand how or why we experience consciousness.
Moreover, the biggest drawback of any neurological explanation is the small sample size used by labs in order to publish papers. Numerous popular neurological truisms are based on the study of a very small group of people and the subsequent generalization of these findings to the WHOLE OF HUMANITY.
We know we cannot be doing that. Even psychologists don’t have that kind of audacity.
It is no wonder that neuroscience is going through its own replication and reproducibility crisis right now.
Neuroscience is a new and exciting branch of psychology that might offer us a lot of insight into how the human brain works but it might not answer everything we want it to.
The attraction toward the brain is a seductive one, and understandably so but it is important that we make sure we don’t lose sight of rationality in trying to find the answer to everything in the brain itself.
And that is it for this week! It had been a long week for me as I recovered from COVID. The symptoms were not too bad but it has left me with some extreme weakness since. I hope I don’t get caught in the game of long COVID. I will keep my fingers crossed for that.
How has the first month of 2022 been for you?
You can let me know by replying to this email :)
Lol, I hardly knew of psychology as a discipline when I trained as a neuroscientist in grad school and even later. Now I find that psychology has the most fascinating problems and look to it as a fount of ideas. I agree that the brain is not the be all end all of mental phenomena. Most neuroscientists acknowledge that certain mental phenomena like consciousness are really hard to explain in a reductionist way. Some believe we may have to invent a new kind of physics to explain it! Yet, you have to agree that certain serious psychiatric conditions like schizophrenia or dementia definitely have a neural component. I have just launched my newsletter where I plan to look closely at "self-awareness". Hope to see some of you there. Its just the very dawn of this fascinating journey and all disciplines like psychology, neuroscience, philosophy perhaps even spirituality will play a major role before we are done. I liked this entry of yours, Cheers
This is a very interesting article. The title itself catches the eye of the reader. I always had a similar question and reading this article was helpful indeed. Thankyou so much for sharing.
And as you asked , first month of 2022 has been eh regular.
Take care and stay healthy :)