Brain Theory – The Great Myth Of Our Time

 

There is perhaps no greater insult to a man than the assertion that everything he is, every fiber of his being, every idea he has ever had, and everything he has ever felt, is really just an elaborate chemistry experiment taking place between his ears. The very idea is an insult. And yet otherwise rational human beings are gravitating toward this absurdity in ever growing numbers. That it is an absurdity, and not a proven scientific fact, should be obvious to anyone who hasn’t surrendered their right of empirical observation to the self-elected congress of wishful thinking currently presiding over the field of neuroscience. If you actually listen to what they are saying, there is only one thing on which everyone involved can agree: no one has any workable idea how to put the theory into practice. To borrow the words of William Shakespeare, it’s “a lot of ado about nothing”.

This inconvenient little factoid is not broadly advertised, and understandably so. When it comes to public perception, sometimes a campaign of silence is the best way to let a myth proliferate. What we do see is a lot of touching enthusiasm, most of it spoon-fed to us in popular media, about the latest “breakthrough” in cognitive science. These frequent soundbites all follow the same pattern. Some experiment conducted at the university of wherever suggesting that people whose names begin with the letter D are more likely to become dentists than astronauts because their brains demand it, or how mice prefer wine to water if you speak French to them. The two constants that probably escape most people listening to these “advances” are the words think and believe. As in “scientists think they may have….” or “it is now widely believed that this could change the way we look at…”.

It is true that the scientific process often begins with a hypothesis. This is then followed by an indefinite period of research aimed at proving or disproving it. The difference here is that the assumptions made about the brain have all but cast the second part of the experiment aside. In any other field this would be considered the height of folly. But the brain lobby is proving uniquely adept at overcoming its own lack of honest success. So much so that while the rest of us where scratching our heads, an entire field of medicine has cropped up around the speculation about gray matter.

Don’t believe me? Try this paragraph. I found it on the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ website:

How do they work? [antidepressants]
“We don’t know for certain, but we think that antidepressants work by increasing the activity of certain chemicals work in our brains called neurotransmitters. They pass signals from one brain cell to another. The chemicals most involved in depression are thought to be Serotonin and Noradrenaline.”

Or how about this one from the website of the British National Health Service:
How antidepressants work

“It is thought antidepressants work by increasing levels of a group of chemicals in the brain called neurotransmitters. Certain neurotransmitters, such as serotonin and noradrenaline, can improve mood and emotion, although this process is not fully understood.

Increasing levels of neurotransmitters can also disrupt pain signals sent by nerves, which may explain why some antidepressants can help relieve long-term pain.”

You can spend all day looking at the official answers to this question, but they won’t change. Yet by 2018, the market for antidepressants in the United States will reach 13.4 billion dollars despite growing evidence they are no more effective in the treatment of mental illness than placebos.

So the question begs: if there is no real proof that the brain is the source of human cognizance and behavior, both favorable and not, why are we being led to believe it anyway. Personally, I can think of about 13.4 billion reasons the industry might want you to swallow the company line.

The next time you see another cheerleading exercise on the five o’clock news about the latest breakthrough in the understanding of human behavior you might want to make a point of finding out where the money for the project came from. Following the money is often a good way of getting to the root of certain human behavior, and it will get you there a lot quicker than a brain scan.