Day: May 13, 2008

David Brooks Bonus

I wrote on David Brooks’ editorial Neural Buddhists earlier today. In his piece Brooks recommends a series of authors, but no titles and no links, to help grasp this new brain science and its implications for our understanding of ourselves. Here’s his list, with Amazon links inserted to relevant books.

Andrew Newberg and Why We Believe What We Believe
Daniel J. Siegel and The Developing Mind and The Mindful Brain
Michael S. Gazzaniga, with his 2005 The Ethical Brain and Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique coming out in June (see this excerpt from Edge)
Jonathan Haidt and The Happiness Hypothesis
Antonio Damasio, with his classis Descartes’ Error (which kicked off a lot of this popular shift)
Marc D. Hauser, a little questionable in my mind, but here’s his Moral Minds.

Greg has described other books, such as Bruce Wexler’s Brain and Culture (see his excellent critical review here, Why Brain Science Needs Anthropology) and John Medina’s Brain Rules. I might add Liars, Lovers and Heroes by Steven Quartz and Terrence Sejnowski and The Accidental Mind by David Linden

I also ran across another book this morning which looks like a great addition, John Horgan’s Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border between Science and Spirituality. Horgan is a journalist (including a former stint at Scientific American), and helps run the Center for Science Writings blog, which looks quite good!

Some other people are already reacting to Brooks editorial. Mary Martin at Animal Person has an interesting take, examining more the athiesm and religion angle. She also recommends the Mind & Life Institute, which does “Collaborative Research among Buddhists and Western Scientists.”

The Neural Buddhists of David Brooks

It definitely appears that the New York Times columnist David Brooks is on a neuroanthropology kick. Today he’s published an editorial called The Neural Buddhists, which complements previous ones on globalization and cognition and demography and cultural identity.

Brooks’ editorial comes down to three things: dispatching soulless science; presenting the new touchy-feely brain; and taking on our culturally hard-wired Protestantism.

Richard Dawkins stands in nicely as the representative of the old science—genetic determinism, lumbering machines, neo-Darwinian atheism. Tom Wolfe, as Brooks points out, described this world view well in his essay Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died. On this site Greg fought the good fight against Dawkins’ memes in February, while I had fun taking on Dawkins’ protégé, Steven Pinker, and his argument about hard-wired morality back in January.

Unfortunately for people like Dawkins and Pinker, but fortunately for the rest of us, the brain plays a different game. Here’s what Brooks says about the new neuroscience:

The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.

Ah, music to my ears. Indeed, Greg took down the computer metaphor some weeks ago. I wrote on emotion’s role in decisions making (sorry, rational-genetic man). Still, a lot of old brain crap gets out in both scientific journals and the popular press. So Time Magazine’s version of love, the not-quite touchy-feely view, got Hannibal Lecterized at the start of the year.

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