The Neuromancer and other Neuroscience Fictionby Ian R Thorpe

In the early nineteen-nineties a graduate student at Massachusetts Institute of

Technology (MIT) David Poeppel discovered an astonishing thing. He was studying

the neurophysiological basis of speech perception, and a new technique had just come

into vogue, called positron emission tomography (PET). About half a dozen PET

Does anybopdy imagine a brain really looks like this (http://www.capersonalinjurycaselawnotes.com/uploads/image/PET%20scan.jpg)

studies of speech perception had been published, all in top journals, and David tried

to synthesize them, essentially by comparing which parts of the brain were said to be

active during the processing of speech in each of the studies.

Poeppel was amazed to find that there was virtually no agreement. Every study

had been carried out with great scientific precision, the scope and objectives

documented, the nature of the tests specified and the observations and statistical

analysis to be carried out defined. The results and conclusions had been subjected to

peer review and published with hyperbolic claims about breakthroughs in

neuroscience. Each study had been subjected to critical analysis and found valid but

collectively they were so inconsistent they seemed to offer no coherent conclusion. It

was like six different witnesses not just describing a crime in six different ways but

six people describing six different crimes.

Poeppel's findings were a major setback

for neuroscience and for those scientists

who are eager to tell us life is just a

chemical accident, humans are nothing more

than hairless apes and the brain is a thinking

machine, a biological computer whose

operating system and application software

were stored in our DNA. If six studies led to

six different answers, why should anybody

believe anything that neuroscientists had to say? (Nobody does of course, except

other scientists because, like the priests and elders of a fanatical religious cult they

know it is important not to let the lay followers sense a wavering of belief.)

Publicly the high priests of neuroscience carried on pretending they are only a

whisker away from understanding the mysteries of the brain and refusing to

acknowledge the brain - mind conundrum was as far as ever from being resolved.

Privately there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Some said Poeppel's

research was invalid because PET, which involves injecting a radioactive tracer into

the brain, was unreliable. Others claimed the studies themselves were flawed and

DNA

sloppy?

In spite of the discovery that years of neuroscientific research had produced no

answers, only questions, the field prospered. Well why not, the idea of unravelling the

mysteries of the human psyche and thus being able to control the thoughts of whole

populations, to persuade large social groups to accept policies that were totally

against their interests is a wannabe tyrant's wet dream and most politicians who

aspire to high office are wannabe tyrants. Governments poured almost as much into

the neuroscience scam as they did into other scientific scams, notably global warming

and genetically engineered crops.

The technique of PET was replaced with the more flexible technique of

functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which allowed scientists to study

people's brains without the use of the risky radioactive tracers, and to conduct longer

studies that collected more data and yielded more reliable results. Experimental

methods gradually become more careful.

Brain imaging, despite being

demonstrably flawed became more, not

less, popular. I have a very good personal

illustration of how useless. Following a

massive brain haemorrhage I was subjected

to several MRI scans. And over the months

I had some bizarre conversations with

doctors and was told, "According to the

science you cannot possibly have survived

such severe brain damage." I was sitting talking to these people and they were telling

me as scientists that I was dead. Does anybody still not understand why I think

scientists are a cunch of bunts? (It's a Spoonerism, a kind of scientific term)

As MRI scanners became more widely available, and as methods of interpreting

the data (interpretation owing more to the dark arts than the natural sciences) became

more standardized and refined, researchers finally started to find a degree of

consensus between labs.

MRI scanner

Meanwhile the research grant phishing industry went into overdrive, after all

unravelling the mysteries of the human brain and proving we are just biological

machines with no soul and no collecive consciousness and that the spiritual aspect of

humanity is an illusion promised to be a bigger money spinner that looking for the

Higgs Boson, a project similar to looking for a needle in a haystack when you do not

know what either a needle of a haystack look like. Neuroscience started to go public

in a big way. Fancy color pictures of brains in action became a fixture in media

accounts of the human mind and lulled people into a false sense of comprehension.

The word breakthrough became as overused as the word science, and as abused too.

(In a feature for the magazine titled "Duped," Margaret Talbot described research at Yale that

showed that inserting neurotalk into research papers made them more convincing.)

Brain imaging, which was a very esoteric field in 1990, became in the eyes of the

adademic community the most advanced way of understanding the human mind. The

prefix "neuro" was suddenly being attached to everything. Neuroethicists wondered

about whether you could alter someone's prison sentence based on the size of their

neocortex. Like I said, a cunch of bunts.

After almost two decades of running this scam for profit and glory the Church of

Scienceology's luck had to run out. A few bright souls started speaking up, asking:

Are all these brain studies really telling us much as we think they are? (Mine

certainly wasn't, according to the "science" I'd been a zombie for twelve years but I

showed no sign of decomposing, in fact I was copping off with women half my age!)

A book published in 2011, “Neuromania" questioned our growing obsession with brain

imaging. A second book, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of

Humanity by Raymond Tallis, published in 2012, invoked the same term, neuromania,

and made similar arguments about the subjective nature of interpretations of brain

scans. In the book Out of our Heads, the philosopher Alva No wrote, "It is easy to overlook

the fact that images made by fMRI and PET are not actually pictures of the brain in

action. Instead, brain images are elaborate reconstructions that depend on complex

mathematical assumptions which can, as one study earlier this year showed,

sometimes yield slightly different results when analysed on different types of

computers.

Which is what I, as an ex computer man before the physical organ in my head

was trashed by blood leaking from a ruptured artery, have said to those people who

told me "according to the science, you're dead." My speciality was data networks.

Now the electrical pulses that come in through a copper wire or radio signals or the

light pulses from a fibreoptic are pretty meaningless to a computer unless it has a

codec designed and programmed to interpret them. And if I was to change the

parameters on your receive data channel, the pulses coming in would not be readable

text, but gibberish. And for the record, I'm not dead, even in my early days though my

body was fairly useless and my brain trashed, my mind, was intact. I could speak,

write, think, had good spatial awareness and my cognitive skills were pretty much as

they had been even though half my body was paralyzed. Not bad for a dead guy eh?

What these neuroscientists had done was repeat the trick pulled off bt the

cosmologists and by placing highly imaginative interpretations on images constructed

from energy readings taken on light arriving from distant cosmic bodies, convince

those who dole out the funds contributed involuntarily by taxpayers that they were

really making progress on understanding “life, the universe and everything” as

Douglas Adams put it. In fact they did not really know what had generated the radio

activity their monitors picked up. I'll give you an example, the standard proof that Big

Bang theory is correct is the existence of Cosmic Background Radiation. This, the

'science' says is echoes of the big Bang itself. “What else could it be,” ask the science

tits when challenged.

What indeed. With a hundred billion galaxies each containing a hundred billion

stars (a scientist went round and counted them all!) including pulsars, quasars, Red

Dwarfs, Red Giants, White Giants, Neutron Stars, black holes and so on, all

emitting radiation all the time across many different frequencies it could just be a

radio active mushg that fills the gaps between things. So much of what is passed of as

science is nothing more than highly imaginative interpretations of electronic

reconstructions of data synthesized from perfectly commonplace natual phenomena.

Questions about the limitations of neuroscience occupied thoughtful blogs like

Neuroskeptic (Discover Magazine) and The Neurocritic and finally made their way into the

mainstream media, in the form of a blunt New York Times op-ed, in which the

journalist Alissa Quart declared, "I applaud the backlash against brain porn, which raises

important questions about this reductionist, sloppy thinking and our willingness to

accept seemingly neuroscientific explanations for, well, nearly everything."

Quart and the growing chorus of neuro-critics are half right: our early-twenty-

first-century world truly is filled with brain porn, with sloppy reductionist thinking,

bad science, bogus science, scientific arrogance and an unseemly lust for Nobel

Prizes neuroscientific explanations.

There is a lot to understand about the brain and how it works before the failings

of neuroscientists can be understood, at this level it is sufficient to say that just as the

climate scientists constructed completely false models of the earth's atmosphere

because they simply ignored hundreds, possibly thousands, of interactions that

contribute to climate trends in the localised microclimates and. (motivated by

political prejudices perhaps) oversimplified their algorithm by only considering

carbon dioxide as a possible cause , so the people who have tried to create a computer

model of the brain have focused on just a few areas of the brain and deliberately

ignored areas that are poorly understood or not understood at all.

And they have not even considered the interface between the physical brain and

the great, unknowable human mystery, the mind.

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Illustration 1: Mysteries of the mind: The Persistence Of Memory by Salvador Dali