The Mind and the Brain by Jeffrey Schwartz and Sharon Begley, Regan/HarperCollins, $27.50/拢18.99, ISBN 0060393556 Reviewed by Itiel Dror
IS OUR essence as humans a collection of neurons, or is it a mind that does not exist in space and time? A fairy tale provides a good illustration of the latter: the story of Pinocchio. The wooden puppet is only an object. Regardless of how the carpenter constructs it, it is inanimate. It becomes animate when the fairy provides it with the 鈥渕agic powder of mind鈥�. Only then does Pinocchio have a mental life and all that it entails from feelings to psychosomatic phenomena, such as his nose growing when he lies. In contrast, if we take the first view 鈥� that we鈥檙e just a collection of physical neurons 鈥� then minds must 鈥渆merge鈥� and they can even be created through physical constructions. Here, the telling tale is Mary Shelley鈥檚 story of Frankenstein鈥檚 monster.
An age-old question lies behind both approaches to the relationship between the mind and the brain: the mind/body problem. Have the recent advances in science and technology provided new ideas and insights to this basic question about the mind and the essence of humans? Jeffrey Schwartz, a professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, attempts to answer this very question in The Mind and the Brain. Underlying this discussion is an even more fundamental question: can empirical research resolve (or at least provide insight into) philosophical debates?
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Both the Pinocchio (dualism) and Frankenstein (materialism, reductionism) views of the mind pose complex quandaries. If you support the dualistic views, then problems arise as to how the mind and the brain interface with one another (among other problems, many described in philosopher Gilbert Ryle鈥檚 The Concept of Mind, University of Chicago Press, 2000). If you support the materialistic, reductionist view, then problems arise in explaining mental phenomena and free will. Many answers have been suggested to address these issues.
So I was disappointed to discover that Schwartz merely provides a 鈥渘ew cover to an old book鈥� rather then using new research and technology to provide new ideas and insights into this age-old problem. He opts to continue with the traditional ideas and framework of dualism, but replaces Descartes鈥檚 notion that the pineal gland in the brain is the site of interaction between mind and body with modern neuroscientific research.
Could new technologies help resolve such difficulties? Computers can provide a new way to view the mind altogether without falling into the old reductionist/dualist dichotomy whereby the mind is either merely the physical brain or exists regardless of the brain. Computers have given rise to a new model for the brain-mind, in which the brain can be conceptualised as hardware and the mind as the software. This computer-inspired view avoids many of the pitfalls of reductionism and dualism.
With amazing advances in neuroscience, and technologies such as PET and fMRI that allow us to scan the brain and see it working, we must try to come up with innovative ways to view the mind and its relation to the brain. Stephen Kosslyn and Olivier Koenig鈥檚 Wet Mind (Free Press, 1995) is an example of such an attempt. Rather than returning to old dualism (or materialism), we have to create new conceptualisations of the mind.