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A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind: What Neuroscience Can and Cannot Tell Us About OurselvesBy Robert Burton M.D.
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What if our soundest, most reasonable judgments are beyond our control?
Despite 2500 years of contemplation by the world's greatest minds and the more recent phenomenal advances in basic neuroscience, neither neuroscientists nor philosophers have a decent understanding of what the mind is or how it works. The gap between what the brain does and the mind experiences remains uncharted territory. Nevertheless, with powerful new tools such as the fMRI scan, neuroscience has become the de facto mode of explanation of behavior. Neuroscientists tell us why we prefer Coke to Pepsi, and the media trumpets headlines such as "Possible site of free will found in brain." Or: "Bad behavior down to genes, not poor parenting."
Robert Burton believes that while some neuroscience observations are real advances, others are overreaching, unwarranted, wrong-headed, self-serving, or just plain ridiculous, and often with the potential for catastrophic personal and social consequences. In A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind, he brings together clinical observations, practical thought experiments, personal anecdotes, and cutting-edge neuroscience to decipher what neuroscience can tell us – and where it falls woefully short. At the same time, he offers a new vision of how to think about what the mind might be and how it works.
A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind is a critical, startling, and expansive journey into the mysteries of the brain and what makes us human.
- Sales Rank: #520970 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-04-23
- Released on: 2013-04-23
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
Praise for A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind:
“Robert Burton's Skeptics Guide provides a thoughtful meditation on the mismeasure of mind. With a rich tapestry of neurological case studies, allusions to film and literature, compelling personal stories, and challenging thought experiments, Burton descibes the abundant philosophical and scientific challenges to the belief that we know — or even that we can know — our own minds.” --Daniel Simons, New York Times bestselling co-author of The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us
"There is no bigger challenge to our self-understanding than the exploding field of neuroscience, but if we are to benefit from its discoveries, we must learn how to think about them in the right way. And at the moment, we don't. Thus far, neuroscience research has been oversold by scientists themselves and overhyped by journalists. We have to do better. In A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind, Robert Burton does a beautiful job explaining what modern neuroscience has to offer, and just as important, what it doesn't, and probably can't have to offer. A careful reading of this well-written book will go a long way toward enabling us to draw the right lessons from what neuroscience has to offer."
--Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice and Practical Wisdom
“Burton questions the fundamental assumptions of his field – with A Skeptics Guide to the Mind, he takes on the very foundations of cognitive science, leading readers to valuable insights in the process.”
--Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems
"This engaging book captures the strengths and limitations of modern neuroscience in unlocking the secrets of mind and brain. It stands alone. In a style that joins academic writing, case histories, and narrative, Burton brings the reader to the many places where person and identity, self and society, health and disease, and, most pointedly, where scientist and social responsibility meet." –Judy Illes, author of the Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics and Professor of Neurology and Canada Research Chair in Neuroethics at the University of British Columbia
“In recent years, there's been a lot of neurotrash infecting everything from economics, business and ethics to romance, gastronomy and parenting. At last, Robert Burton, with the knowledge and wisdom to tackle the subject head-on, dares to separate nonsense from wisdom. With the delicacy of a philosopher and the real life expertise of a physician, he dares to show us how much we've learned but also how much we have to discover. This is one of the most elegant combinations of science and life I've come across for a long time.”--Margaret Heffernan, author of Willful Blindness
“Popular media is awash in an endless deluge of neuroscience findings—particularly those that imply neuroscience is the new arbiter of “truth” for everything from why we like certain colors to whether someone is lying on the witness stand. Readers on the receiving end of neuro-mania are left confused about what to believe, which is why Robert Burton’s A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind: What Neuroscience Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves is such a valuable addition to the library of anyone interested in cognitive science. Burton cuts through the clutter and incisively reveals what the current state of neuroscience is truly capable of telling us about ourselves. It’s a top-tier contribution from one of the leading minds in the field.” --David DiSalvo, author of What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite
“Neuroscientific high jinks of the best sort. A salutary reminder that we only understand 10% of our brains.”--Nick Humphrey, author of Soul Dust, The Magic of Consciousness, and Emeritus Professor of Psychology, London School of Economics
About the Author
Robert Burton, MD is a physician, journalist, and author. A graduate of Yale University and University of California at San Francisco medical school, he was formerly chief of the Division of Neurology at Mt. Zion-UCSF Hospital and Associate Chief of the Department of Neurosciences. Burton’s work has appeared in Salon and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others, and he frequently is invited to speak about the brain, the mind, neuroscience, and philosophy of science. The author of On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not and three critically acclaimed novels, he lives in Sausalito, California.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1 • The Shape of Your Mind
It’s unbelievable how much you don’t know about the game you’ve been playing all your life.
—attributed to Branch Rickey1
All complex biological systems—which include you and me—use sensory feedback to monitor their environment. We are made aware of the external world through senses such as sight and sound; we know our interior physical world through internally generated feelings such as hunger and thirst. As the vast majority of thought originates outside of consciousness, it seems reasonable that we would also have evolved a sensory system for informing the conscious mind what cognitive activity is going on subconsciously. Without a method for being aware of this activity, it is hard to imagine what role the conscious mind would have, or even if there would be such a thing as a mind.
If we were cars, our minds would have LED displays telling us what is going on under the hood. But being subtle creatures rather than machines, we have a far more sophisticated system for monitoring subliminal brain activity. Instead of a mental dashboard full of flashing lights, we have evolved an array of cognitive feelings. For simplicity, I’ve used the phrase “cognitive feelings” to refer to those mental phenomena that aren’t normally categorized as emotions or moods, but rather are the type of feeling we associate with thinking. These include such diverse mental states as a sense of knowing, causation, agency, and intention.
To be meaningful, these feelings must bear some relationship to the cognitive activity they are announcing. Just as the feeling of thirst must trigger the desire for drinking fluids, an awareness of a subliminal mental calculation must feel something like a calculation. And here’s the rub. Thirst and hunger are readily accepted as arising from our bodies, but feelings about our involuntarily generated subconscious thoughts often feel like deliberate actions of the conscious mind.
Take an example from the world of visual perception. Imagine yourself at a local football game. You are focused on the game and oblivious of the surrounding faces of spectators. Then, while you are shifting your gaze to look at the scoreboard, your visual system subliminally detects a face in the crowd that it recognizes as your old friend Sam. Your visual cortex compares the incoming image of the face with previously stored memories of Sam’s face and calculates the probability that the face is Sam’s. If the likelihood is high enough, the brain sends the image of the face up into consciousness along with a separate feeling of recognition. You feel as though you consciously assessed the face and determined it was Sam. Depending upon the strength of this feeling of recognition, you will also sense the degree of likelihood that this facial recognition is correct. This might range from a feeling of merely “maybe” or “it could be, but on the other hand…” to a sense of utter certainty.
A visual input of a face, though not initially making any conscious impression, has triggered two separate unconscious brain activities. One is exclusively mechanical and without any associated feeling tone—the comparison of Sam’s face with all other faces previously stored in memory. The other is purely subjective sensation—the feeling of recognition. The two arrive in consciousness as a unit—the visual perception of Sam’s face and the simultaneous feeling that it is indeed Sam. Even though this process occurs outside of awareness, we feel it is the result of the act of conscious recognition. Such lower-level brain activities are experienced at a higher level as voluntary acts.
Because we know the brain is superb at subliminal pattern recognition, we find it relatively easy to concede that recognition doesn’t take place consciously, despite how it might feel. But there are a host of mental sensations that are so intimately linked with our conception of conscious thought that the idea of them not being under our conscious control seems far-fetched.
In my previous book, On Being Certain, I introduced the concept of involuntary mental sensations—spontaneously occurring feelings about our thoughts that are experienced as aspects of conscious thought. Though we feel that they are the result of conscious rumination and represent rational conclusions, they are no more deliberate than feelings of love or anger. My focus was on feelings of knowing, certainty, and conviction—feelings about the quality of our thoughts that range from vague hunches and gut feelings to utter conviction and a profound “aha.”
I now realize that feelings of knowing are a small part of a larger mental sensory system that includes the sense of self, the sense of choice, control over one’s thoughts and actions, feelings of justice and fairness, and even how we determine causation. Collectively, these involuntary sensations make up much of the experience of having a mind. In addition, they profoundly influence how we conceptualize what a mind “is.”
It is vitally important to realize that the cognitive aspect of thought—the calculation—has no feeling tone. Our entire experience of these calculations comes via separate feelings that accompany them into consciousness. For example, though contrary to personal experience, there is no way to objectively determine the origin of a thought. When an idea “occurs to me” or feels as though it “popped into my head,” I tend to label it as arising from the unconscious. On the other hand, if I have the feeling of directly thinking a thought, I am likely to conclude that it is the result of conscious deliberation. The distinction between conscious and unconscious thought is nothing more than our experience of involuntary mental sensations.
This separation between thought (the silent mental calculation) and feelings about thoughts is central to any inquiry into what the mind might be. We know the mind only through our experience; it isn’t something that can be pinned on a specimen board, weighed or measured, poked or prodded. Seeing how our sense of a mind arises from the messy and often hard-to-descibe interaction of disparate involuntary sensations is a necessary first step toward any understanding of what the mind can say about itself.
Our Brains, Ourselves
A car cuts you off on the freeway and you get enraged; you honk, flip the driver the finger, fume, and carry on about this brutish lack of manners being a surefire indication of civilization’s impending demise. Your spouse, for the thousandth time, urges you to learn a little self-control. Of course, dear, you halfheartedly agree, your mind oscillating between further thoughts of revenge and the painful recognition that you have just acted like a two-year-old.
You quickly drum up a bevy of seemingly reasonable explanations—a stressful day, a poor night’s sleep, the new anti-hypertensive medication you started a couple weeks ago, long-standing control issues and unresolved childhood slights, your growing apprehension over your declining IRA account. On the other hand, your father had a hair trigger and was prone to seemingly unprovoked tirades and furies. Perhaps you inherited some angry strands of tightly wound DNA. If only there was a straightforward method for self-examination. But your mind reels at the seemingly infinite combination of possibilities, as though the very concept of self-awareness is an overrated myth, a low-probability rubber crutch for the emotionally desperate.
Nevertheless, you have to start somewhere. Though changing your genes is presently out of the question, perhaps you can address your financial concerns. Back at home, you review your IRA portfolio. Your best friend, a financial wizard, gives you a thousand reasons why stock prices are at a generational low and insists that you should “buy, buy, buy.” His arguments are persuasive. You boot up your online broker and poise your finger over the Buy button; but, as though controlled by invisible forces, you have a complete “change of heart” and sell everything. You are puzzled by your behavior. It is as though you have lost control of yourself.
Later that night, flipping through a popular psychology magazine, you read that fMRI studies have shown that the brain region for controlling hand movements is activated before you are aware of making a decision to move your hand. Brain wave (EEG) studies confirm the finding. This can’t be, you think. You try a simple lab experiment. You think about moving your hand but don’t make the final decision to move it; your hand rests quietly in your lap, awaiting instructions. You then consciously decide to wiggle your fingers. You exert some effort, and, not surprisingly, your fingers wiggle on command.
But if the fMRI and EEG studies are correct, your experience of wiggling your fingers voluntarily is nothing more than a comforting illusion foisted on you by an unconscious with its own agenda. Only after the fact did your subconscious let “you” know what it had already decided and acted upon. Looking down at your hand as though it has a mind of its own, you wonder who exactly made the decision. “Who am I?” you ask yourself, at the same time wondering who is doing the asking and who is expected to answer.
To come up with anything remotely resembling a tentative answer to what the mind might be and do, we first need some working understanding of the placeholder for the mind—the self. A mind isn’t an impersonal organ like a liver or a spleen; it is an integral aspect of a self, a part of what makes us an individual as opposed to an object. It’s the center of our being, the main control panel for our thoughts and actions. The self’s central function—creating thoughts and actions—is commonly what we mean when we talk of a mind. Evoluti...
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