The Mind/Brain Concept

The Mind/Brain Concept

I’ve spent this past year in the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute faculty-development seminar on “Interface.” Scholars in several different disciplines at Duke University have been reading and thinking about the interface between human beings and technology and, more precisely, the problem of how we are and are not changed by new technologies. If we are doing something differently now (such as learning in the social, associational, and collaborative manner of what has been termed ‘Web 2.0’), does that influence not just what we think but how?

My particular way of addressing this issue has been to consider how we learn anything at all. My year’s course of study has been in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and neurobiology, reading about infant knowledge-acquisition. Since I am not a neuroscientist, I have had the luxury of reading lab results and experiments across many subspecializations. From this extra-disciplinary or even ab-disciplinary reading, I am convinced that by about the age of two, a child has learned concepts of ‘male’ and ‘female,’ of ‘race,’ of ‘foreign(er),’ of ‘threatening’ and ‘nurturing.’ By about the same age, a child reacts differently to melodies from of his or her own culture than to those of other cultures, and the same is true of tastes, languages, smells. By three, a child can arrange pictures of males and females of different races and ages hierarchically in a way that mirrors pretty accurately the worst stereotypes of the child’s society.

It seems, from dozens of studies in as many scientific subfields, that infants are learning cultural norms at the same time that they are learning the language or languages that surround them. Philosopher Elizabeth Grosz calls these “concepts” and notes that the real world exists—it’s just hard to get to it unmediated by concepts. Much of the new work in brain science seems to confirm that we acquire those concepts before we’re old enough to know any better. Literally.

If true, then what is learning but a continual confirmation or disruption of those concepts? That is a theory of knowing that has been batted around at least as far (says one of my colleagues in the Interface seminar) as the pre-Socratics. The complex interrelationship of ontology and epistemology—what is known and how we know it--is a continually and constantly refined, thoughtful, and contested terrain. So it strikes me as strange that many (not all, but many) of the studies that have fueled my imagination and curiosity this year start from the premise that the case is closed, that we know what cognition is, and that brain science proves genetic causes, or biological determinism, or evolutionary ones. Really? It’s that simple? Even with the fascinating new work on mirror neurons? What are those neurons in infant brains mirroring if not care-giver behaviors already organized according to those ornery pre-lingual “concepts”?

Of course I am over-simplifying, and I am doing so to make a point. As any historian knows, it is far easier (in any era) to amass new data than to change paradigms. New technologies have given us sophisticated computational tools that allow us to understand more about the workings of the human body and the human brain than ever before. But we will have squandered this bioinformatic moment if the computational advances, statistical measures, and experimental methods of our era reiterate simplistic understandings of what it means to be human.

So now back to Web 2.0. Can new technologies change what and how we know? I think so, if we are smart about the mechanisms of learning and thinking, the process of enculturation, the perils of letting go old ideas and taking on new ones. That requires true collaboration across our different ways of knowing, our specific trainings and forms of expertise, where the lessons of history help make visible what is and isn’t “new,” and where the practices of philosophy and literary and cultural theory—knowledge construction and deconstruction—help us understand what our concepts bundle and obscure. The neuroscientist who constructs a brilliant lab experiment on, for example, whether infants understand the concept of “female” shouldn’t also have to be an expert on gender theory who understands all of the social constructs packed into the society’s definition of what “female” is, constructs that come packaged along with that original identification. Only by working together, pooling our knowledge and our theories, can we begin to understand something as complex as how the mind comes to know what it thinks it knows.

Universities thrive on specialization and so do most granting agencies. That, to me, is the challenge and excitement of this intellectual moment. We have to find ways to overcome the barriers of our actual institutions in order to make "virtual universities" where we can cross boundaries in order to think better together. In this way, we might transform the Information Age to the Age of Understanding where the goal is not to generate massive amounts of data—but to understand what the data are trying to tell us.