The Ghost in the Machine

Neuroscience is the new black. “It has rappelled down from its ivory tower and eloped from the hospital world,” Martha Farah asserted during her William James Award Address on Sunday. No longer just pretty pictures on a screen, studies of the brain have contributed to a host of enhancement techniques. Students and business people alike take the same attention-enhancing drugs to keep them on track. Judges mandate brain change through SSRIs for violent criminals and aging boomers pop memory boosters just to compete with the younger generation. 

As we find out more about the brain and the processes that underlie the smallest of behaviors, we gain a better sense of humanity. Farah enthusiastically suggests that this gives us a unique opportunity to change the way our society currently operates. By incorporating a “neuroscience worldview” into our lives, we can adapt concrete scientific results into our education and legal systems. In fact, Farah presented recent evidence that brain scans can predict when a child may be ready to start reading. Those results coupled with the teacher’s behavioral approaches may alleviate the anxiety that arises with late readers. 

For the more spiritual among us, reducing a human to a completely physical system may conflict with the idea that our soul operates as a separate entity inside our brain, what Arthur Koestler has called “the ghost in the machine.” However, she encourages us to assimilate this worldview into our lives without devaluing humanity and the value of life. “I think we can do this without becoming nihilists,” she concluded.

-Catherine Allen-West