Neuromania – Or Where Did the Person Go?

What has your brain ever done for you? Let’s face it. The brain is an organ like the heart or the liver. Sure, it’s a fiendishly complex organ. It is probably the most important one for controlling bodily functions. But you cannot exist without the lungs or a kidney, either. Without doubt the hormones that influence moods are triggered by activities in the brain. Yet whether you regard heightened heart rate and general physiological arousal as excitement or terror depends on what sense you make of what ever is triggering that reaction.

Is it you or your ‘brain’ that ‘makes sense’? Put another way – How can a brain do anything without the rest of the body. Even more importantly, can a brain do anything if it is not part of a living person? Of course, anything that you or I experience will have some correlate in the cortex. I am quite happy to accept recent claims from neuroscientists that memories are somehow stored as circuits in parts of the brain.  Searching the connections or lack of them between myriads of neurons feels much like my sensation of trying to find the name for something I thought I knew. Yet it is me searching for that name. It is me who knows I used to know it and should be able to remember it. What does it help to dismiss my agony or concern as something the brain is doing?  Why dismiss me, with all my quirks and ambitions, virtues and vices, history, and embedded culture and friendships as the action of my brain, rather than trying to understand me as a person.

It was the erudite and engaging, very experienced medic and neuroscientist Raymond Tallis who coined the term ‘neuromania’ for all this in his book, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity, to describe the rash of assignments of the prefix ‘neuro’ so inappropriately to so many areas of human knowledge. He delved deeply into the illogicality of implying the cells and neurons are thinking or feeling. However, he published his lengthy critique almost a decade ago. Since then, neuromania has become even more widespread.

The sad fact is that there do not seem to be many psychologists publicly comment on topics of general interest. Anyone introducing a topic that once would have been in a first-year undergraduate psychology class now calls themselves a neuroscientist. This can be explaining humor, or fear, criminality or genius. What is described would have just been called introductory psychology a few years ago but without any profound insights drawn from studies of the brain these ‘experts’ claim that what they are describing is neuroscience. Indeed, that label gives them the authority to comment on psychological phenomena even though they have never studied psychological as such but just picked up a few ideas from other commentators.

This epidemic has thrown up no end of neuro neologisms- neurogeography, neuroarchitecture, neurocriminology, even neurosociology. In some cases, the slightly watered down term ‘cogntive science’ is used but it still implies that analysis of what the brain us doing rather than the person rules the day. A typical example from the Journal of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science is, “In order for causal thinking to extend beyond space and time, mental simulations are required that predict the effects of actions.” Expressing something so banal as a profound insight! A phenomenologist would just ask’ how do you know what will happen?’

When I started as an academic psychologist those of us working in a strongly empirical, scientific tradition called ourselves experimental psychologists. With the recognition that what people understood and experienced had to be considered, not just their behavior, we started calling ourselves cognitive psychologists. But this has morphed into neuroscience although the same theories and methods typically are utilized.

Of course, there have been huge breakthroughs in understanding neural processes. The relationships between our brains and our experiences and actions have great value especially when dealing with brain dysfunctions. But the fact that certain parts of the brain light up when we think, feel or do something does more to elucidate that than understanding out how a car engine works by determining which bits heat hop when you put your foot on the accelerator.