Lewontin reviews Steven Rose's latest book on the brain

[Charles Brown <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The part of this metaphor that has whole people doing things in the thinking
part of the brain of an individual is actually very good. What distinguishes
human thinking from computers or other species brain activity is that humans
minds are a vast network of connections to other actual whole people , their
brains and experiences through the medium of culture, tradition, custom,
language. Culture is a great social network, people to people, including
even past generations. Human mind is especially social mind.

Of course, the people in the brain should be pictured in a much greater
variety of activities, including working in factories, not just in offices. 

Charles


*       From: Chris Burford 
>From the Lancet March 12 2005

The 21st-Century Brain: Explaining, Mending and Manipulating the Mind


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Steven Rose. Jonathan Cape, 2005. Pp 344. £20·00.
ISBN 0-224-06254-9.

In their attempts to make the mysterious complexities of the natural 
world understandable, scientists have over and over again used 
metaphors. Descartes likened the animal body to a machine, and 
physicists tell us that if we are to understand the way molecules of a 
gas behave we should think of them as billiard balls that, unlike any 
real ball, undergo perfectly elastic collisions. Hanging on the wall 
of my study is a German scroll from the 1920s, The Human Factory, 
which depicts the inner workings of the human torso below the neck as 
an interconnected series of assembly lines, supply pipes, spray guns, 
crushers, storage vats, wheels, and pulleys. Then, as one's gaze rises 
to the head, the form of the metaphor changes. At the base of the 
skull, connecting the factory floor to the offices on the upper 
stories, is a telephone exchange with women operators plugging and 
unplugging wires in a switchboard. And in those offices, labelled 
"Willpower", "Intelligence", and "Judgement" are men sitting at tables 
and desks arguing, consulting, and--thinking. Even the electric line 
metaphor of pathways of communication requires operators to decide 
whom to connect with whom. The metaphor for thought is just more 
thought. Technology had not yet provided devices that could serve as 
models for memory, consciousness, and rationality.