The Domain of Neuroscience
Most people throughout history have not known that water is H20 and that is fine. If one thinks that water is ultimately not made of atoms or a key metaphysical element that opposes fire, that does not prevent one from drinking it, sailing on it, purifying it, or freezing it. The scientific fact of the chemical formula is knowledge of the way things truly are (we think right now), but only rarely is it empowering or useful. If you were asked to compete in a boat building competition against someone who believed erroneously that water is irreducible, your superior knowledge of water would be little help, even if you could still feel a little superior. Chemistry is relevant, but boat-building is only on the outskirts of its subject-matter. Extracting hydrogen via electrolysis would be a different story, as would devising chemical coatings for your boat assuming that bad beliefs about one area of chemistry necessarily create others. In most cases, scientific knowledge is just knowledge, not power.
In the last few decades, celebrity scientists and people who read scientists’ books have informed us that humanity has reached a new age of self-understanding, because we have finally discovered the mechanics of the mind. As Astrology is to Astronomy, so all previous ideas and sciences of psychology, behavior, and thought are to Neuroscience. The workings of the divided Platonic soul or the Freudian subconscious have been replaced by the simple and elemental interactions between axons and dendrites. Neuroscience is gradually asserting itself as the king of all human sciences, the ultimate reference point for anyone who wants to make an argument about how people talk, think, or socialize.
Neuroscience’s new place of power has been an opportunity for a flood of information and explanations, reassessing each field of human endeavor and updating it according to the insights of the revolution. This comes first from scientists, but increasingly from business leaders and consultants, academics, and a variety of professionals in a position to give exhortative advice. Searching for books one can take nearly any area of life, append the phrase “and the brain,” and find that there is wide demand for this new knowledge. “Exercise and the brain,” “reading and the brain,” “business and the brain,” “love and the brain.” The promise of such books is that the new knowledge will give us new power, that these old areas of activity will be enhanced incredibly by recent discoveries. But such promises are mistaken.
The insights gained from applied neuroscience claim to be both tied inherently to the new field and to provide unique advantages over previous paradigms of knowledge, but most fail both criteria. To choose one example, Simon Sinek’s highly popular book on leadership “Leaders Eat Last” features a somewhat lengthy description of the neurochemical facts which shape business organizations. He goes through serotonin, which is responsible for the pride we feel; endorphins, the source of stress and a runner’s high; oxytocin, which comes from strong trusted bonds and keep us healthy; and dopamine, which provides immediate drive and pleasure, but does not last. He concludes that the key role of the leader is to balance these:
“When dopamine is the primary driver, we may achieve a lot but we will feel lonely and unfulfilled no matter how rich or powerful we get. We live lives of quick hits, in search of the next rush. Dopamine simply does not help us create things that are built to last. When we live in a hippie commune, the oxytocin gushing, but without any specific measurable goals or ambition, we can deny ourselves those intense feelings of accomplishment. No matter how loved we may feel, we may still feel like failures. The goal, again, is balance.”
The basic thesis can be rephrased as “people need trusted environments, but also concrete measurable goals and rewards and the goal of a leader is to balance these two.” Knowledge of the specific nature of dopamine and oxytocin does not actually support this thesis, and they could easily be deleted or substituted with different systems of knowledge. The supposed new fact is that dopamine highs are transitory, but this is not new at all — writers have been urging caution on short term pleasures for all of recorded history. The fact that people need trusted environments does not belong to neuroscience. The fact that people need trusted environments is an observed result from the actual practice of business and empirical psychology (both of which are extremely prone to erroneous conclusions) and oxytocin is merely one small part of a hypothesized causal mechanism for this. This insight is not even dependent on scientific understanding, and has been practiced and articulated in plenty of pre-scientific societies. There is no reason why a medieval leadership consultant could not have written the same advice, but instead of grounding it in neuroscience, grounding it in the need to balance the various humors of one’s subordinates.
The appeal to neuroscience for insights into leadership is only a smuggling of conclusions from other forms of knowledge into a more reliable and prestigious science. If Simon Sinek was called to lead an army against the forces of Julius Caesar or Zhu Yuanzhang, his superior knowledge of neuroscience would provide no decisive advantage over his supposedly ignorant opponents. The book is in fact good and useful, but Sinek’s ideas are not new and are not derived from neuroscience.
Neuroscience is a useful science, and its advancement may one day produce the insights its partisans already claim. Certain procedures in neurosurgery and drugs in psychopharmacology come directly from the discovery of the reductive structures which regulate the brain, proving the science as both valuable and at least in some sense true. Many actual neuroscientists are humble, attacking both narrow questions of chemical mechanisms and the broader philosophical issues tangled in their field with proper scientific caution. It is an important source of pure and practical knowledge now, and will likely produce far more in the future.
But why exactly does neuroscience venture so far off now into areas where it has no real epistemological warrant? Like many sciences before it, neuroscience’s use as a source of authority is more immediately valuable than its actual conclusions. Simon Sinek would easily be defeated by Caesar and Zhu, but there are so many people in the world today who are convinced enough by the power of science and superiority of cutting edge methods that they might be convinced to back the consultant. As a system of argument, it outcompetes its competitors in the current landscape because of this shiny appeal of new, scientific knowledge. A personality-specialist proposing to change your business based on neuroscience will win a deal over fellow consultants who base their methods on Freudian principles, or, even worse, on principles they’ve just made themselves.
This economic and practical niche for an authoritative science of humanity has not only brought neuroscience to areas it doesn’t belong, but has affected the public perception of the science, and perhaps the research program itself. The most public and acclaimed results of neuroscience known by laymen are that certain chemical neurotransmitters are associated with each emotion (dopamine with pleasure, serotonin with sadness) and that the brain is divided into neat brain-areas, each responsible for a different cognitive function. This has allowed us to have discussions of behavior (social media is dopamine fueled) and the differences between people (left-brained vs right-brained), and even motivated further research (fMRI brain scans revealing the areas are always popular), but according to some internal discussions among neuroscientists, none of these ideas truly withstand scrutiny.
The brain has 86 billion neurons and the reactions between these are not single but determined by the interaction of the countless combinations of 40 different neurotransmitters: reduction is an extremely hard tasks regardless of how tempting it is. Emotions are simply too complex to link to single chemicals and there are no clear boundaries in the brain which define specific regions. Variance among individuals has created innumerable problems for fMRI studies which claim to clearly identify these.
But the research must be made to fit the niche. In the latter half of the 19th century, there was a full authoritative science of brain areas in the form of Phrenology, thankfully debunked by the scientific community. Neuroscience, much stronger in its resistance to scrutiny, can now fill this role. Simple unicausal explanations of emotions for behavior was an appeal both of Freudian psychology, dominant and authoritative in various intellectual cultures in the 20th century, and for the science of humors popular throughout the Medieval mediterranean. The balance of neurotransmitters has come to fill the void. These is a constant demand for science which will allow people to claim authority in discussions about the nature of humanity even though no science has been able to deliver this in a rigorous way. Neuroscience as it stands today is not the final revolution, but merely another power grab, forced into that role by the next generation of opportunists.
Neuroscience has the best and most advanced scientific claim to reality of any previous paradigm and it is unfortunate that it is being made to play the same roles as its ambitious but ultimately faulty predecessors. The real truths of human nature - moral behavior, personality types, social interaction - are still locked outside of neuroscience’s proper grasp. For now we need to let neuroscience mature in its proper areas. For the interesting questions of humanity, we need to settle for the messy disappointing process of drawing lessons from history, as well as limited but large empirical studies. It will be harder to stake new claims in such an old and slow field, but at least we will have a chance of moving closer to the truth and to the practical benefits we still have yet to reach.