STEVEN Rose is scathing about attempts to explain the mind’s ills in terms of genes, as though they were just like one of the rare one-gene diseases. He equally abhors simple-minded accounts of how experiences happen. In The 21st-Century Brain he goes so far as to assert that to “interpret a particular pattern of neural activity as representing my experience of seeing a red bus…you need my entire neuronal and hormonal life history”.
I respond to this as I did to many of Edward Wilson’s proposals in Consilience: why? To answer that would be an interesting research programme – because the oft-presumed answer that a snapshot will do the trick is no more certain to be right than is Rose’s determined holism.
This similarity is ironic because Rose, director of the brain and biology research group at the UK’s Open University, has devoted a significant part of his career to opposing Wilson. Like Consilience, though, The 21st-Century Brain is consciously a late-career book. The first half summarises and updates Rose’s thinking on what having a brain and being a mind is about. It is written clearly, if readers are prepared to learn many terms as they go. His description of what happens to a brain (and the mind that inhabits it) with ageing cannot but be poignant. His warnings against the fashion for medicalising discontent and ability alike, with a pill for every skill, are necessary.
Advertisement
Rose roots these warnings in Marxism, and thus attracts hostility and disbelief that one can do science while holding an ideology. I should note, therefore, that I am not his co-conspirator: I regard Marx as just another bourgeois economist.
No one needs an ideology to insist, as Rose does, on looking at social context. In examining “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder” or “oppositional defiant disorder”, for example, it is important to ask not just what happens to the neutotransmitter dopamine or why the drug Ritalin has an effect, but “attention to what?” and “defiance of what?” And why would the genes that allegedly cause those disorders be expressed so much more often in the US than elsewhere? If anything is ideological, it is the refusal to ask such glaring questions.
Even if you disagree with every word in The 21st-Century Brain, including “but”, if you are interested in brains or having a mind you must read it – precisely for the ifs and buts in it.
The 21st-Century Brain: Explaining, mending and manipulating the mind
Jonathan Cape
