Neuroscience
Inflammatory title, isn't it. Puzzled by how it could possibly happen? Then read on!
A few days ago, The Chronicle of Higher Education published a piece called Neuroscience Is Ruining the Humanities. You can find it in a Google search and at reddit, among other places. The url is http://chronicle.com/article/Neuroscience-Is-Ruining-the/150141/ {notice the “Neuroscience-Is-Ruining” part.}
Oh wait. Here's a tweet.
At some point along the way, without explanation, the title of the article was changed to the more mundane The Shrinking World of Ideas. The current take-home bullet points are:
The author is essayist Arthur Krystal, whose 4,000+ word piece can be summarized as “postmodernism ruined everything.” In the olden days of the 19th century, ideas mattered. Then along came the language philosophers and some French historians in the 1920s/30s, who opened the door for Andy Warhol and Jacques Derrida and what do you know, ideas didn't matter any more. That's fine, he can express that opinion, and normally I wouldn't care. I'm not going to debate the cultural harms or merits of postmodernism today.
What did catch my eye was this: “...what the postmodernists indirectly accomplished was to open the humanities to the sciences, particularly neuroscience.”
My immediate response: “that is the most ironic thing I've ever heard!! there is no truth [scientific or otherwise] in postmodernism!” Meaning: scientific inquiry was either irrelevant to these theorists, or something to be distrusted, if not disdained. So how could they possibly invite Neuroscience into the Humanities Building?
Let's look at Krystal's extended quote (emphasis mine):
I'm as reductionist as the next neuroscientist, sure, but Krystal's depiction of the field is either quite the caricature, or incredibly naïve. Ultimately, I can't tell if he's actually in favor of "neurohumanities"...
...or opposed:
Then he links to articles like Adventures in Neurohumanities and Can ‘Neuro Lit Crit’ Save the Humanities? (in a non-critical way) 2 before meandering back down memory lane. They sure don't make novelists like they used to!
So you see, neuroscience hasn't really ruined the humanities.3 Have the humanities ruined neuroscience? Although there has been a disturbing proliferation of neuro- fields, I think we can weather the storm of Jane Austen neuroimaging studies.
Footnotes
1 Although I haven't always seen eye to eye with Satel and Lilienfeld, here Krystal clearly overstates the extent of their dismissal of the entire field (which has happened before).
2 Read Professor of Literary Neuroimaging instead.
3 The author of the Neurocultures Manifesto may disagree, however.
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Neuroscience
The Humanities Are Ruining Neuroscience
Photo illustration by Andrea Levy for The Chronicle Review
Inflammatory title, isn't it. Puzzled by how it could possibly happen? Then read on!
A few days ago, The Chronicle of Higher Education published a piece called Neuroscience Is Ruining the Humanities. You can find it in a Google search and at reddit, among other places. The url is http://chronicle.com/article/Neuroscience-Is-Ruining-the/150141/ {notice the “Neuroscience-Is-Ruining” part.}
Oh wait. Here's a tweet.
Neuroscience Is Ruining the Humanities http://t.co/OtimMp7rHI
— Chronicle (@chronicle) November 21, 2014At some point along the way, without explanation, the title of the article was changed to the more mundane The Shrinking World of Ideas. The current take-home bullet points are:
- We have shifted our focus from the meaning of ideas to the means by which they’re produced.
- When professors began using critical theory to teach literature they were, in effect, committing suicide by theory.
The author is essayist Arthur Krystal, whose 4,000+ word piece can be summarized as “postmodernism ruined everything.” In the olden days of the 19th century, ideas mattered. Then along came the language philosophers and some French historians in the 1920s/30s, who opened the door for Andy Warhol and Jacques Derrida and what do you know, ideas didn't matter any more. That's fine, he can express that opinion, and normally I wouldn't care. I'm not going to debate the cultural harms or merits of postmodernism today.
What did catch my eye was this: “...what the postmodernists indirectly accomplished was to open the humanities to the sciences, particularly neuroscience.”
My immediate response: “that is the most ironic thing I've ever heard!! there is no truth [scientific or otherwise] in postmodernism!” Meaning: scientific inquiry was either irrelevant to these theorists, or something to be distrusted, if not disdained. So how could they possibly invite Neuroscience into the Humanities Building?
Let's look at Krystal's extended quote (emphasis mine):
“...By exposing the ideological codes in language, by revealing the secret grammar of architectural narrative and poetic symmetries, and by identifying the biases that frame "disinterested" judgment, postmodern theorists provided a blueprint of how we necessarily think and express ourselves. In their own way, they mirrored the latest developments in neurology, psychology, and evolutionary biology. [Ed. warning: non sequitur ahead.] To put it in the most basic terms: Our preferences, behaviors, tropes, and thoughts—the very stuff of consciousness—are byproducts of the brain’s activity. And once we map the electrochemical impulses that shoot between our neurons, we should be able to understand—well, everything. So every discipline becomes implicitly a neurodiscipline, including ethics, aesthetics, musicology, theology, literature, whatever.”
I'm as reductionist as the next neuroscientist, sure, but Krystal's depiction of the field is either quite the caricature, or incredibly naïve. Ultimately, I can't tell if he's actually in favor of "neurohumanities"...
In other words, there’s a good reason that "neurohumanities" are making headway in the academy. Now that psychoanalytic, Marxist, and literary theory have fallen from grace, neuroscience and evolutionary biology can step up. And what better way for the liberal arts to save themselves than to borrow liberally from science?
...or opposed:
Even more damning are the accusations in Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld’s Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience , which argues that the insights gathered from neurotechnologies have less to them than meets the eye. The authors seem particularly put out by the real-world applications of neuroscience as doctors, psychologists, and lawyers increasingly rely on its tenuous and unprovable conclusions. Brain scans evidently are "often ambiguous representations of a highly complex system … so seeing one area light up on an MRI in response to a stimulus doesn’t automatically indicate a particular sensation or capture the higher cognitive functions that come from those interactions." 1
Then he links to articles like Adventures in Neurohumanities and Can ‘Neuro Lit Crit’ Save the Humanities? (in a non-critical way) 2 before meandering back down memory lane. They sure don't make novelists like they used to!
So you see, neuroscience hasn't really ruined the humanities.3 Have the humanities ruined neuroscience? Although there has been a disturbing proliferation of neuro- fields, I think we can weather the storm of Jane Austen neuroimaging studies.
Footnotes
1 Although I haven't always seen eye to eye with Satel and Lilienfeld, here Krystal clearly overstates the extent of their dismissal of the entire field (which has happened before).
2 Read Professor of Literary Neuroimaging instead.
3 The author of the Neurocultures Manifesto may disagree, however.
link via @vaughanbell
- Professor Of Literary Neuroimaging
Haskins Laboratories - brain areas activated during reading. An unfocused and rambling article in the New York Times the other day was excited about the potential use of neuroimaging to revive the gloomy state of university literature departments. It...
- Double-blind Bind
An editorial on peer review was published today in Nature, and the text is reprinted in their Peer-to-Peer blog. The editors are soliciting comments and suggestions, and so far the count is up to 25 48. Working double-blind Should there be author anonymity...
- The Utility We Don't See
We all worry that what we're doing is useless: it won't help us in the future, it won't give us any benefits, or it's just too unpredictable. Let's not worry a thing. When I talk to people about what I learn in philosophy courses,...
- The Pre-medical Motive: Curiosity, Practicality, And Numbers
We are what we learn. As a lie in the bedroom of my dorm, I have only a few weeks left of classes for this semester. This summer I will have the wonderful opportunity of performing research at the Conte Center of the University of Chicago. ...
- What Pre-medical Students Can Learn From The Humanities
As I finish writing my final lab report for my Intermediate Physics Lab, the fall semester of my sophomore year comes to a slow, much-needed end. I've taken some time to reflect on the impact my classes have had since the beginning of the year. This...