After the Book Club’s very lively discussion last month about The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West, we are now looking at our individual sense of identity. Are you just your brain’s software? This may not be the first time you’ve pondered (and possibly rejected) the idea. Here’s a good opportunity to consider or revisit the notion. At the same time, we’ll have a more general discussion of the concept of self. The book we’re using this month is
The Synaptic Self, by Joseph LeDoux
Thought, feeling, action, states of readiness for action, as well as their modulation or repression – all this mental activity occurs through firing electrical and chemical signals among neurons, or nerve cells, in particular patterns. (Synapses are minute spaces between neurons where most of the signals take place.)
So goes the belief of most neuroscientists today. It is based on a few decades of stunning advances in identifying systems of neural circuits whose activity is correlated with particular perceptions and responses to those perceptions. The paths of signals from one neuron to another are often strengthened as they occur, so that they are more likely to recur in the same patterns. This is a mechanism of learning even though it exists, not for learning per se, but to carry out specific functions such as seeing, recognizing and running away from the grad student in a lab coat.
The research has included electrically or chemically stimulating different kinds of nerve tissue in vitro, in laboratory animals, and to a limited extent, in people. Functional MRI, and other tools can also help establish where in the brain activity is going on. Generally, the only opportunity to deal with human subjects is when they appear as patients with mental disorders.
Most neuroscientists today believe that alterations in synaptic connectivity underlie learning, and that memory is the stabilization and maintenance of these changes over time. However, most of it is not conscious.
LeDoux emphasizes the distinction between consciousness and the self. He has only a general direction of a vague idea of what something like consciousness might be. However, he makes a good case for including more than our conscious memory, thought and emotion when considering what our selves are. Most of our mental activities, including cognitive, emotional, and motivational or volitional activity, are not held in consciousness, but make up who we are. This is obvious on ordinary self-reflection, but made all the more striking as he reminds us that Alzheimer’s patients still retain their individual personality traits and habits well after their memory has gone.
In some studies, we are able to use ordinary explicit teaching, done on a normal level between human beings,to reflect what are believed to be certain patterns of synapse firing. Even some amnesia victims who can’t remember their experiences from one hour to the next are capable of learning at some preconscious levels, as demonstrated by being able to play a game they don’t remember being taught, but playing it correctly because they absorbed the rules and retained them at an unconscious level.
Chemicals participate in synaptic transmission, but it is the pattern of transmission in circuits, more than the particular chemicals involved or the intrinsic charisteristics of the cells, that seem to determine the mental state. Your synapses or, more precisely, the patterns of transmission, are your self, LeDoux says.
For a long time, patients have used drugs, from morphine (even when little was understood about its mechanism) to Prozac (when only a little more was understood about its mechanism). Their functions seem to be altering chemical conditions at the synapses. As you read the details of the research; e.g., about “blocking calcium receptors” on the nerve cells, it might occur to you that to make it finer-grained they would have to get down to the sub-atomic level. However, only a few simple processes have really been elucidated.
LeDoux believes there are no useful non-material explanations for mental functions, and looking at synaptic patterns is presented here as the most fruitful direction of research. From this perspective, the mind is somewhat like a software program and its products except that, among other things, our own actions and interaction with our environment can modify the programs themselves. They can even modify the “computer” (the brain).
I suspect in the future we will be impressed with this period of progress in neuroscience and we will also be struck by how much more sophisticated we will have become since then.
DISCUSSION
For scientist and non-scientist alike, what do we make of this? That is really what we can discuss January 17th. You don’t needspecific knowledge of the book to participate.
How does the picture presented above fit in with your own sense of self, and your beliefs about other people? Is it exciting and interesting? Does it seem too superficial to be worthwhile? Does it provide any new insights for you? Does it tend to confirm or undermine how you already think about your self, your mind and its changes?
There are also the questions about how the information can be applied. I tend to think all such knowledge is useful even if it doesn’t yet provide what I want, such as a pill to increase learning and memory, or an injection that will overcome my need to sleep at night. While the latter is nowhere in sight, this book suggests that the former may be in our own futures.
LeDoux’s book also contains a paragraph that I found disturbing:
“. . . it might be possible some day to have trauma victims recall their trauma in the presence of some drug or other brain alteration that reduces the stranglehold of the memory on the person’s psyche. After we proposed this, though, a therapist made a very good point. What would it mean to a Holocaust survivor, for example, to lose such memories after having lived for many years and having developed an identity based in part on them? This is a very important concern, and touches on the deep ethical issues that scientific discoveries can raise.”
Did I say I found it ‘disturbing’? Consider that an understatement. I thought of what seemed to me the arrogance of the scientist, and the morbid vested interest the therapist might have in the patient’s traumatized ‘Identity’. There was no reference to the patient as an interested party who might choose to reduce her own suffering and develop her identity without it. It’s probably not stretching the imagination to worry about whether some schools of therapy would discourage it. Fortunately, I think they would not prevail very often.
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Le Doux is Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science at New YorkUniversity’s Center for Neural Science.
The Secular Humanist Society of New York’s Book Club will meet from 6:30-8:00 PM, Thursday, January 17th in the community room of the Muhlenberg Public Library, 209 W. 23rd Street (at 7th Ave.). Convenient to subway stations, PATH trains, etc. See SHSNY.org.
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The wild party animals known as the SHSNY Book Club have a delightful book for February 26th, The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul, edited by Douglas R. Hofstader and Daniel C. Dennett. With more varied approaches than the LeDoux book, it includes the following selections that we will discuss: Introduction; The Princess Ineffabelle (science fiction story by the great Stanslaw Lem); Where Am I? (by Dennett); The Seventh Sally, or, How Trurl’s Own Perfection Led to No Good (also by Lem);Minds, Brains and Programs ( by John. R. Searle), and the Reflections on this section (by Hofstadter); and the classic What Is It Like to Be a Bat? by Thomas Nagel. N.B. This event departs from our usual Thursday scheduling and will be held on a Tuesday.
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The well-known author Susan Jacoby will be with us on March 20th to discuss her new book, The Age of American Unreason. Fundamentalist religion is only one of the many subjects covered in this book examining the anti-rationalist and anti-intellectual American trends of the past four decades. The location has yet to be determined.
The Book Club Meetingsare also book swaps. Bring your old dust-catchers, take someone else’s. Any remains we donate to the library.
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