In Our Time - The Brain and Consciousness

Episode Date: November 19, 1998

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how our increased knowledge of the functioning of the brain and the mechanisms of memory in the 20th century has changed our feelings about our own natures, and our approach to the behaviour and treatment of others.Many questions have been thrown up this century by our growing knowledge about how the brain and the mind function. How easy is it to establish the relationship between the two, and what light can this relationship throw on our understanding of our own and others natures? With Steven Rose, Professor of Biology and Director of the Brain and Behaviour Research Group, Open University, Dan Robinson, Distinguished Research Professor, Georgetown University and visiting lecturer in Philosophy and Senior Member of Linacre College, Oxford University.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, as the century progresses, so our knowledge of the function of the brain has accelerated, promising to change our view of our own nature

and our approach to the behaviour and treatment of others. With me, to discuss this are Stephen Rose, Professor of Biology and Director of the... Brain and Behaviour Research Group at the Open University, where he researches the cellular and molecular mechanisms of memory. He's the author of 15 books, including The Chemistry of Life and the Making of Memory, and he's most recently edited a collection of essays on the new sciences of the mind called From Brains to Consciousness. And Dan Robinson, who's distinguished research professor at Georgetown University

and occasional visiting lecturer in philosophy at Oxford University. His books include an intellectual history of psychology, wild beasts and idle humours, the insanity defence from antiquity to the present. Last month he edited a series of essays on the mind, and this evening he's taking part in a debate at the London School of Economics on our brains computers. Stephen Rose, could you give us a thumbnail update on, as it were, the latest lines of engagement in the brain-mind debate?

Well, we're coming to the end of what the Americans call the decade of the brain. It's an extraordinary time to be alive as a neuroscientist because there's a flood of data coming in, everything from the molecular to the brain imaging in terms of the way that brains function. And I think that more and more neuroscientists are becoming sufficiently confident or arrogant that they will be able to explain everything,

not just from memory, but even to consciousness, in terms of brain processes. And where does the mind come in that? I think there are a lot of neuroscientists who are, if you like, completely hard-wired reductionists in the sense they will eliminate the mind. from discussion entirely.

And yet and yet, I really feel there are great problems about this and what we lack, despite the enormous quantity of data that's coming in and the excitement of laboratory work and so on, we really don't have a very good theory, even of the brain, let alone of the mind. And I think a lot of the very deep philosophical and moral questions are as alive now as they were 100 or 1,000 years ago, despite the neurosciences. You've called the brain the most complex structure in the universe. in a sense, how do we know that?

Well, that's, of course, the paradox of studying brains and minds with our own brains and minds. But it is in the sense that you're dealing with a structure which has got something over 100 billion cells, something over probably 100 trillion different potential connection points, interactions between them. And that leaves you with a permutation, which is more than all the potential particles

that they are known to be by cosmology in the universe. And that's a formidable... It's touched the growth of that sort of statistic, doesn't it? Yes, I mean, it blows the mind, blows the brain, I suspect. What it does give you is some indication of the extraordinary capacity and intricacy of what neuroscientists are trying to study at the moment, and the difficulty of doing so. Dan Robinson, approaches to the study of the mind and the brain have traditionally taken the form of the dualist versus the materialist approach. Can you tell us briefly the distinction between these two ways of thinking, and where do you stand on this?

Well, the distinction is what in philosophy is called an ontological distinction. The question really is to account for the actual constituents of the universe, how many kinds of stuff do you have to propose? A materialist, monist argues that all of reality finally is reducible to matter, or at least to something physical. And a dualist thinks that when you add up all the things that are material or physical, there's still something left over, which can be called the mental or the spiritual. I think Professor Rose's comment about a certain arrogance taking over in the brain sciences is quite apt.

If you want to sample a controversial claim, namely that consciousness, mental life, perception, learning and memory all depend upon the brain, that controversial claim was made by the Hippocratic physicians in ancient Greece. Gaul, who had as much to do with launching what today we would call the brain sciences with his very controversial claim, insisted that there were four incontestable truths, namely that everything about us mental is based on the brain and like, and Gaul is the father of phrenology. He's the fellow who would have you judge the moral and intellectual dimensions of life by feeling bumps on the head.

So my own position is, I said to my wife once that I would hope my epitaph would be he died without a theory. I think this is work in progress. It's marvelously interesting. The technology almost beggars the imagination. No one who did graduate work in neuropsychology when I did imagine that you could actually look at the intact human brain in operation and see changes in its functional performance.

Can you specify that just a little for our listeners? Well, when I was doing my graduate work in neuropsychology, if you wanted to know something about the human brain, you either had to wait for a post-mortem, or you used a very, very crude technique like electroencephalography, or you use something very state-of-the-art, which in the old days we used to call average evoked responses, and if you were lucky, you could get a nice, clean record of what the brain does

when you repeat clicks or flashes of like that sort of thing. Today, of course, with functional MRIs and PET scans and the like, it's possible to have people solving problems, memorizing lists, being in various emotional states, and actually see specific systems within the brain activated as these events go on. So the technology here, as Stephen Rose points out, we don't have a good theory of an integrated theory of brain function. The technology has greatly outstripped our theoretical resources, and I think much of the work remains to be done there. Can we talk a little bit about the mind and brain, that the brain, this strange porridge in the skull, is something going to be examining, examine and examine and examine.

But examination doesn't tell us really what the mind and consciousness is. Could you just tell a little about this, Stephen? Yes. I mean, firstly, I think that, I mean, my position, which is, I think, different from Dan's is I am a thoroughgoing materialist. Though I wouldn't say I was a reductive materialist, I don't actually think we can eliminate the language of mind, although I think that when we're talking about mind processes and we're talking about brain or biological processes, we're talking about the same thing but using different sorts of languages. And the problem for me is always to try to understand what I would call the translation rules between the language of brain and language of mind. Having said that, of course, I think it's also important to remember that mind isn't just in the brain,

and that is the way that we think, the way that we behave, the way that our emotions come, are also because brains are in bodies, and bodies are full of hormones, they're full of interactions with the brain. And, of course, both brain and body are open systems. We're constantly in interaction with the world around us. So what constitutes, if you like, our mind, our thinking, our consciousness, isn't just the shape and connections of what's going on in the brain at any given moment. but they themselves are influenced by our past history, by our history as a human species,

by our history as, as it were, a society, and by our present cultural state, and of course by our own personal development. So it's a sort of not, my view is a sort of non-determinist view in which, in order to understand where we are now, we have to understand both our past history and history of the interactions

of brains and minds with the rest of the world. What about you? What's your view on this duality, Dan Robinson? I think Stephen's position, I'd be inclined to call it a kind of, realist materialism, that really nothing is gained. If you ask that character who rides the clap of omnibus, you know, that metaphysically challenged person

who's always found on the clap of omnibus, if he has a Cheltenham and Gloucester mortgage, how the terms of that will change just in case he becomes a materialist or dualist or a limitivist, well, the fellow looking at the eye and say, it doesn't make any difference to me. The problems I went to bed with last night I get up with this morning,

whatever theory we have about mind-brain relations. I think the right way to go is to take the large projection of human life in culture, the aesthetic and moral and political and institutional projections of human mind, and then ask whether it's plausible to try to account for all of this solely in terms of brain function. I give you one illustration. The recently concluded neural science meetings in California featured some papers on functional MRIs while listening to different genres of music. The short script is this,

and I hope everyone listening to Radio 4 hears me loud and clear. Mozart makes you smarter. Now, not only do I want to plug Mozart, which I think is always a good and virtuous thing to do, but the point I want to make, builds on the point Stephen made. We are cultural creatures. The brain is an incredibly plastic organ.

It is shaped by daily experience. and lifetime experiences. The ancient Greek world had as a maxim, Polis Andra Dadasca, man is shaped by the polis. The political and cultural and moral dimensions of our lives finally determined

the functional characteristics of that organ. A developed neural science will not ignore these things. It will recognize the need to approach these with proper reverence and respect. Otherwise, we're simply saying

that the brain is necessary if we're not going to walk with a limp or if the left eyelid isn't going to droop. No one, including Descartes, ever doubted that sort of thing. Given the huge advantage which you outlined into the science, let's call it, the neurological ways, the technical ways of looking at the brain and examining the brain and the galloping interest and conviction about these sort of results that Stephen outlined

at the top of the programme, what place is there for philosophy? Your turn. Yes. Of course, twice in ancient Rome. the philosophers were exiled, I think on the quite legitimate grounds that they constituted a threat to the civic life. I think the place of philosophy is the place of criticism in general. Scientists at their best are philosophers in that they're challenging the core assumptions that guide research and theory. Philosophy, I think, has certain formal contributions to make. These are largely logical contributions, analytical contributions.

I think philosophy is also the repository of that very large chapter of the human experience that does include the moral, the dispositional, the intentional, the interpersonal. The brain sciences, of course, must come to grips with what it is that defines our human nature. And I say philosophy, along with the humanities at large, is more or less the keeper of the text. Then there are very specific contributions that philosophy has to make. philosophy of mind has well worked out analytical resources to test the sorts of claims likely to come from the developed brain sciences. The more clear cut of my colleague would probably say that philosophy is a discipline, a way

of understanding the world, which has steadily been driven back by the advances of science, so that it, as it were, remains in very small terrains where science has little purchase at the moment, of course, mind-brain issues are there. and in many, many areas, whether you're dealing with issues of morality, whether you're dealing with issues of the way the world is, you need either the social sciences or you need the biological and the physical sciences. I have some sympathy with this point of view. I do think, however, that philosophers have a role, particularly in this area,

have a role in trying to help us clear up muddled thinking. And I think about the relationships between mind language and brain language, there is an awful lot of muddled thinking, and I think that is a help for us. And I think also if you look at the way in which philosophers like Mary Midgely, who was on this program a couple of weeks ago, for example, can cut through a lot of, I think, the very dubious thinking that comes out of the sciences at the moment.

I think that's a great contribution that remains to be made. Can I turn to what could be in some way a test case? I mean, can you, Stephen Rose, tell us how our increased understanding of their brain has been used or misused in the analysis of criminal behaviour or insane, behaviour because Dan Robinson's written about the inside dimension. Can we just spend a few minutes discussing that? I think there are two or three things that are happening at the moment. The more that the brain sciences and the more that genetic sciences advance,

the more we know about the relationship between events going on in our body, events going on in our brain and our actions, okay. The classical issue in debates about criminal responsibility was, as I understand it, is not a criminologist, to try to decide whether a person was in men, RENZRA in sound mind when they performed a particular act that was defined as criminal. And there was a very clear-cut distinction then made between mental activities, thinking, causes, rationality and so on, and organic brain dysfunction. If you've got a brain lesion, which meant that you couldn't help but do X or Y or Z,

then this was a claim for diminished responsibility in a criminal case. Now, what's happening at the moment, of course, is that we are seeing a surge of claims made that there are, for example, genetic determinants of criminal behaviour. There are genes for quotes behaving in a particular sort of way. There are brain processes associated with behaving in a particular sort of way with being violent or, quote, psychopathic or whatever else it is. Now, I'm pretty dubious about the claims. You're passionate against that, actually, from your writing.

I'm certainly, I certainly don't believe many of the claims that have been made in this particular context. but let's put the criticism of those claims apart for one moment, and let's assume, as I have to do as a neuroscientist, that we are going to end up with some sort of a description of the brain, which is a more reasonable description of being able to account for how people behave at particular moments. I think that there's no doubt that the classical men's rare type of legal argument cannot withstand those advances in neurosciences,

and a lot of philosophers and psychologists and forensic psychologists have been wrestling with that problem at the moment. So if someone says, as is the case in a diminished responsibility case in the moment, that I shot person X because I had a gene which predisposed me or a set of neurotransmitters in my brain which predisposed me to violence, how do we actually deal with that? And I think there are very real problems there. I've come rather gloomily to the conclusion that however much we advance in the neurosciences,

to argue simply that we want to medicalize, quotes criminal behavior, taking it out of the realm of the social and back into the realm of medicine is probably a mistake. And basically the law probably knows better than what it's doing in this context and the brain scientists. John Robinson, you've written brightly about this. Well, I think the culture of law has resources that are very often underestimated until one actually comes to study the history of it. There's a fair amount of high-tech Calvinism that's going on within genetic science and the brain sciences.

Medieval philosophers were quick to note that there are many things that incline us in a certain direction without determining us in that direction. Clearly, a radical determinism would not alter our sense of law. It would essentially eliminate at the courtroom would become a clinic.

It's important to understand the insanity defense has been on the books throughout the recorded history of Western law. The homicide law of Draco distinguishes between intended unintended criminal acts. The furiosus, the chap likely to squander the family resources because of a manic state,

has a custodian appointed to him as early as Rome's 12 tables. So there's long been a recognition that there are conditions of body and spirit, conditions of character that might be mitigating. The only way the brain sciences, I think, could radically change our conceptions here would be by establishing a rigorous psychological determinism of the sort both Stephen and I would resist. I don't see that coming along, and I'm also quite fearful.

Psychiatry having done its business in the courtroom, I'm quite fearful that the application of seemingly more scientific neuropsychology and neural science conjectures will further erode that juridical sense. That really is the glue of civic life. I want to be clear. that what we define as, quotes, a criminal act is a socially defined act

and that the same biological processes could take place in someone who was behaving in a way which was defined or not defined as criminal. Take a recent case in this country. Take Private Lee Clegg, for example, who was a soldier on duty on a guardperson in Northern Ireland, Joyriders went past, he picks up his rifle and he shoots one of the Joyriders

a young woman dead. He's tried and found guilty of murder. later the case is quashed and he's now back in the army he's a lance corporal and the case is being retried at the moment. Now the same processes are going on in his brain when he picks up this particular rifle and shoots the young woman and the same activities are there,

the same genes are there, the same neurotransmitters and so on. And yet in one case it's being defined as a criminal act, a serious criminal act, in the other it's not. And I think that poses the dilemma that I think we have to face when we're trying to understand the relationship between brain processes as a materialist myself and the way in which society interprets them. Yes, I think this is really quite on target.

The understanding of an action as a criminal action carries with it so much cultural and contextual baggage that it would be impossible to specify an act as criminal simply by recording the events going on in the nervous system. The events going on in the nervous system are just morally and juridically neutral. They take on a certain meaning when they're correlated. with something that a given culture has already decided to be criminal or unwanted. And when you're talking in one of your books, Stephen, about talking about a gene for violence being quite meaningless because there's a violence of people in armies,

there's a violence of people to each other, there's domestic violence, there's violence which is open to several interpretations like that of Private Clegg, and so it goes on and on. Can I just turn now, because there's such a lot to say, and we're zipping through, but so can I turn to the business of drugs because the use of drugs and local anaesthetics in the brain and so and so forth, that has led to all sorts of views on what the brain is. And the idea of using drugs on the brain pre-disposes us to having a view of the brain.

We can do this by just jabbing in a drug, it will change that. Now, can you say what you think of the way drugs are being used to, as it were, manipulate the way, even in small things like aspirin, and big things, manipulate the way our brains and minds work at the moment, and what your view of it is? I think we have a very real problem here, and that is that one of the things that the advances in the brain sciences and pharmacology have given us is a range of ways of altering the way

in which we as individuals respond to the world around us. And clearly there are, I find it very puzzling, the way in which distinctions are made between what is, as it were, legally acceptable, what is illegal, ecstasy is illegal, Viagra you can have on prescription only. Alcohol we can buy over the counter. And yet in a sense, all these are drugs which affect the brain. What really does concern me about this is the ways in which,

and it comes back to the ways in which we are more and more, despite the best efforts of people like Dan, looking to biology and looking to genetics and neuroscience, to explain the way in which the world is. And I think one of the clearest cut examples of this comes not so much from Britain, although it's coming here too, but it's certainly prevalent in the States. And that is the way that, for example, in the States there is a phenomenon now

in which something like 10% of all young American children, mainly boys, Adrian 8 and 13, are being diagnosed on the basis of being naughty at home or the poor learners at school, suffering from a brain dysfunction, attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder. And instead of looking for solutions which might relate to the teaching, to the class, to the society, to the parents, Instead, the children have said they have a brain dysfunction

and you treat that with a drug. And the drug is called Ritalin. There's something like 40,000 prescriptions a year now being issued for Ritalin in Britain. And this is a way, if you like, of transferring the problem from the social context in which the child is embedded into the child itself. And that seems to me to be deeply, deeply problematic. And it's something which is going to continue because whatever we say,

pharmacology is going to get more and more sophisticated at tweaking the neurotransmitters and manipulative and manipulating the ways in which we respond to the world. And we're not very good at thinking about the implications of that yet. Where does that leave your philosophy, Dan Robinson? Well, I would like to say something about attention deficit syndrome, one of our national epidemics. We usually have two or three at a time in the States.

The fellow I was at school with called me up last year because his grandson was diagnosed as having attention deficit syndrome. And before putting him on Rital and his father thought he might want to check with me, I asked if the boy had any interest as his father did in sports, oh, yes. Was he particularly interested in football? Oh, yes. Does he stay glued to the set while the game is on? Oh, yes. I said next question. Yeah, it's very, very easy to take complex social problems

and reduce them to a form that admits of some kind of pharmacologic therapy. I'm very worried that we're going in that direction. I fear that one reason we're going in that direction is that the... the brain sciences do tend to oversell themselves. It's one thing for brain scientists to get together and wrestle with questions of determinism. Once the official press is that everything we are and will be is determined by pathways in the nervous system, it's a very small step for a family to say must be something wrong with Billy's pathway. And this is something I think the scientific community has to guard the rest of us against.

It's a slippery slope. it isn't long before we start homogenizing ourselves and solving all sorts of social problems by writing prescriptions. Does this bring us to the notion of the selfish gene, Stephen Rosen, the idea which has been made extremely, been very effectively put forward by Richard Dawkins, among others, and taken up and used and elaborated, and entered into the thinking of a great number of people. What is your, you are not happy with that as an idea.

It seems to me that Dan Robinson was pointing us in that direction. Well, he is indeed. I'm not happy with the idea partly because genes cannot be selfish. Genes, which are bits of DNA, have a part to play in the orchestra of the cell, an important part in the orchestra of the cell. And there's a lot of technical argument about what genes are doing, what's happening in the cell,

what's happening in the nature of the organism as it develops and changes. and the idea that there's a direct line between a gene, or even a theoretical gene and a bit of behaviour, is not the way that brains and not the way that people work. It ignores history, it ignores development and so on. And it ignores this about ontogenesis, the interplay between the genes and the organisms and the organisms and society.

It's more than just interplay. I mean, the nature of a development, the selfish gene argument is a sort of preformationism. Everything, all our behaviours and everything else is locked into the gene, and all that's happening is the unrolling of a program so these bits of DNA can replicate themselves, if they could replicate themselves. The sort of Hegel meets Mendel when you think of it.

They indeed do so. I think we've got to get beyond that, but without getting into the complicated evolutionary arguments about the role of the gene at the moment, let me say what I think we need to transcend in the context of this discussion, and that is the idea that we can partition behavior into nature, a bit which is given by our gene,

which is original sin, pre-formationism or whatever, and a bit which is given quotes by nurture by the environment. That is a stupid dichotomy. Brains as they develop, organisms as they develop, are constantly in interplay. They're constantly becoming, transforming themselves. And in order to understand how brains function, to come back to what Dan was saying earlier

about the plasticity of the brain, we have to understand not nature versus nurture, but what I would call specificity, the ways in which the brain has to wire up during development in order, for example, that we can go on seeing. our eyes can record to our visual cortex what's going on. And plasticity, the way the brain changes during experience.

Now, the genes that we have, the cellular mechanisms we have, are essential for that. But they're not, as it were, reducible to that. The specificity plasticity is what we have to understand and understanding the development of the brain and our behaviour. There was a very informing debate in print in the previous century between Huxley and Matthew Arnold. Matthew Arnold found himself thumbing origin of species and discovering, quote,

our ancestor was a hairy quadruped with pointed ears and a tail, probably arboreal and habit, close quote. Arnold said this is very possibly true and in any case, how could I dispute the point? He said, but regarding this poor chap, this hairy quadruped with pointed ears and a tail, there must have been something in him

that inclined him to Greek. Well, can I finish on that in a way? By asking you, sort of bowling a googly really, Dan, Descartes believed that what distinguished the human mind from other species was that humans have souls. Is there any place for a soul in your philosophy? I think Descartes is one of the most easily libeled philosophers ever.

He made a distinction between extended things like the table we're sitting at and thinking things which he regarded himself as being. And on the basis of his capacity to comprehend abstract propositions that could not exist anywhere in the material realm, he concluded that there must be something about this thinking thing that transcends the merely physical. Descartes was probably as radical a physiological psychologist as there would be until well into this century.

Now, as far as whether there's anything in my philosophy that leaves room for a soul, I can only say I hope so. And I would say, paraphrasing Laplace, sire, Lord Bragg, I have no room for that hypothesis. No room at all. Do you think that you're finally, very briefly, I mean this is one answer, that we've only got about 15 seconds. You think your sciences or your thought systems, philosophy and neuroscience,

are going to come together or diverges? Stephen wrote a wonderful forward to Genesis, which I read last night, and as I said before we went on today, the idea of a radical materialist introducing Genesis seems so apt that I'm confident about the future. What can I say? In the beginning, you can say. Stephen Rose and Dan Rommison.

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