The View From 1776

For a century and a half, secularists have labored to discredit the age-old perception that our universe and we in it are the creations of an omnipotent Divine Mind outside the universe and ante-dating it.

Every effort to explain the origin of life itself as a purely materialistic, chance phenomenon has come a cropper.  Ditto repeated attempts to demonstrate that highly organized DNA and RNA in the simplest known life forms, intricately balanced systems for controlling cell growth and self reproduction, could have occurred by chance from purely materialistic conditions.  Ditto the effort to discredit the universal experience of the human soul as something outside the physical nature of the brain.

The following book review from the Wall Street Journal deals with yet another feckless attempt to exalt the human mind over the Mind of God.

The Mind in the Mirror
Neuroscience can explain many brain functions, but not the mystery of consciousness

By RAYMOND TALLIS
The subtitle of V.S. Ramachandran’s latest book prompts a question: Why should “A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human” be of particular interest? The answer is obvious if you believe, as so many do, that humans are essentially their brains. When a brain scientist speaks, we should pay attention, for “What makes us human” then boils down to what makes our brains special, compared with those of other highly evolved creatures.

The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human
By V.S. Ramachandran 
(Norton, 384 pages, $16.95)

Dr. Ramachandran and many others, including prominent philosophers like Daniel Dennett and Patricia and Paul Churchland, promise that neuroscience will help us understand not only the mechanism of brain functions (such as those that coordinate movement or underpin speech) but also key features of human consciousness. As of yet, though, we have no neural explanation of even the most basic properties of consciousness, such as the unity of self, how it is rooted in an explicit past and explicit future, how experience is owned and referred to a self, and how we are, or feel that we are, voluntary agents. Neuroscience, in short, has no way of accommodating everyday first-person being.

Dr. Ramachandran first came to international prominence for his fascinating work on visual illusions and on amputees with phantom-limb sensations, described in his BBC Reith Lectures “The Emerging Mind.” The present book summarizes his research and purports to advance our understanding of how we humans come to be so profoundly different from our nearest animal kin. He approaches this quest indirectly, however, through the investigation of some extraordinary patients. We meet Victor, an amputee who experiences sensations in his missing hand when his face is touched; Steven, a 6-year-old autistic boy with an astonishing capacity for drawing; and Ali, whose self-awareness is so profoundly disturbed that he believes he has ceased to exist. People with synaesthesia—who taste colors, see sounds and hear shapes—rub shoulders in his laboratory with tragic individuals who are tormented by the feeling that their limbs are not their own and thus beg for them to be removed.

Dr. Ramachandran’s research into these and other cases casts some light on the underlying brain abnormalities. For example, Victor, who feels sensations in his phantom limb when his face is touched, appears to have a reorganized cerebral cortex. As a result, touching his face not only activates the brain’s “face map” but also its “hand map,” which has been starved of signals. Brain scans likewise suggest that synaesthesia may result from cross- wiring between the neural circuits that register different modalities of perception, such as color and sound.

So far, so good, though Dr. Ramachandran has recounted much of this material previously in books like “Phantoms in the Brain.” The trouble begins when the neuro logist turns philosopher and tries to use these insights to get closer to “what makes us human.” He suggests that such cross-wiring underpins both humans’ ability to enjoy metaphors and artists’ capacity to create novel connections—an assertion that has scarcely any research to back it up. (What little has been done depends on laughably simplistic models of how metaphors and creativity really work.) Likewise, his explanation of how we became speaking animals has scarcely a toe-hold on empirical data.

Dr. Ramachandran’s way with brain research is particularly evident in his extended discussion of mirror neurons, the current darlings of pop neuroscience, which he describes as “the key players in our transcendence of apehood.” Mirror neurons were first observed in Macaque monkeys by Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues in the 1990s. They noted that some motor neurons fired not only when the monkey performed an action but also when it watched another monkey performing the same action. Soon mirror neurons were being invoked to explain everything from acquiring motor skill to imagining other people’s intentions, feeling empathy, and exhibiting an aesthetic sense. Dr. Ramachandran takes this even further: Mirror neurons, he claims, are the key to many modes of distinctively human communication and they are the reason we are “the one and only species that veritably lives and breathes culture.”

Dr. Ramachandran believes that a dysfunctional mirror-neuron system explains autism, a condition in which the sense of self and of others as selves is seriously impaired, resulting in severely reduced social skills. He and his colleagues suggest there is a close match between the functions ascribed to mirror neurons and those that are dysfunctional in autism. His catchily named “Broken Mirror” theory of autism has attracted attention far beyond the scientific community, and he is clearly excited by the therapeutic possibilities suggested by it—such as the use of biofeedback to control brain activity and of certain drugs that enhance empathy. He even claims that his research provides “conclusive evidence that the hypothesis is correct.” But careful studies of brain activity by Ilan Dinstein of New York University have shown that the putative mirror neurons in autistic subjects behave normally. This and other rigorous studies of brain activity seem to some to leave Dr. Ramachandran’s hypothesis for dead. Of this there is not a whisper.

Here, as elsewhere, the intellectual audit trail connecting the neuroscience to the things he claims to explain is fragile. For a start, mirror neurons have been observed not just in monkeys and humans but also in swamp sparrows, enabling them to learn to sing the songs they hear. They are admirable birds, but their cultural achievements are modest. Moreover, the existence in humans of a distinct mirror neuron system with properties such as “mind-reading” is still contested. At any rate, the claim that mirror neurons are a “specialized circuitry for social cognition” in humans is a death-defying leap beyond the humble “Monkey see, Monkey do” function they were first observed to have. The very name “mirror neurons” invites confusion. A mirror, after all, replicates something that could be consciously experienced, but a mirror is not itself conscious of the images that it hosts. Indeed, mirror images don’t count as images in the absence of someone looking into the mirror. Dr. Ramachandran’s theory requires mirror neurons to be both the mirror image and the basis of that “someone.”

Yet extracting the sense of self from mirror neurons is far from the most ambitious of Dr. Ramachandran’s projects. A few years ago, when he was sitting at the entrance to an Indian temple, he was struck by a flash of inspiration that revealed the “nine universal laws of aesthetics.” He thinks that these laws, which include “contrast,” “isolation,” “orderliness” and “symmetry,” could be the key to how the “human brain responds to beauty.”

An evolutionary spin turns these banal ideas about “those elemental forces in the brain that govern our aesthetic impulses” into implausible ones: It seems unlikely that “brain preferences” “shaped by evolution” (such as the need to discern a predator partially hidden by foliage) would tell us anything about a preference for Henri Matisse over Norman Rockwell or vice versa. Is my enjoyment of Picasso really illuminated, as Dr. Ramachandran claims, by ethologist Niko Tinbergen’s demonstration that gull chicks prefer fake maternal beaks with too many stripes to the real thing? The author’s writing on neuroaesthetics, in which brain science figures rather intermittently, reveals how little the “tell-tale brain” tells us about ourselves.

Dr. Ramachandran’s claim that “your brain . . . turns its view back on itself to generate your sense of self-awareness” would not feel like an explanation to a questioning 12-year-old. Instead, the illusion of explanation is generated by relentless personification of the brain and bits of the brain. Dr. Ramachandran speaks of “a neuron effectively reading the other’s intention” and, as a result, “understand[ing] a ritualized gesture.” If you personify the brain it is easy to “brainify” the person. But no real explanatory work gets done. Of course, Dr. Ramachandran’s use of transferred epithets to describe brain activity is not a linguistic vice unique to him; indeed, it is pandemic in neuro-talk.

Until we clear up the ground-floor aspects of human consciousness—in particular, first-person being—claims to advance our understanding of its higher levels, and of the grand edifice of civilization, by peering into intra cranial darkness will not withstand even the most cursory examination. Why should anyone imagine that studying an organ many hundreds of thousands of years old would give insights into complex, historically and culturally influenced matters of artistic taste? While it is incontrovertible that a brain in some sort of working order is necessary for everything from the most primitive tingle to the most exquisitely constructed sense of self, that is the beginning, not the end, of the story. To look for humanity and society and civilization in the isolated brain is rather like listening to an acorn in the hope of hearing the sound of the wind through an oak wood.

It is disappointing that Dr. Rama chandran is serially unfaithful to the initial vision he presents, of humans as a species that “transcends apehood to the same degree by which life transcends mundane chemistry and physics.” “The Tell-Tale Brain,” though it is engagingly written and often fascinating, reminds us how little cause we have to privilege what the neuro scientists tell us about what makes us human over the testimony of novelists, poets, social workers or philosophers.

—Dr. Tallis is emeritus professor of geriatric medicine at the University
of Manchester. His book “Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity” will be published later this year.