Neuroscience and personhood

Debashish Munshi & Priya Kurian

The eternal Nature Vs Nurture debate keeps re-surfacing in many different ways. Is social behaviour determined by our biological architecture or is it a result of the social, cultural, and political environment we are exposed to? Is the human brain pre-programmed with genetic circuitry or can it be trained to adapt to social influences?

The escalating interest in neuroscience in the last decade has put the spotlight on the brain, its intricate pathways and its sophisticated signalling systems that control physical and emotional responses. Graphic full-colour images of the brain are now ubiquitous in the media.

But is the proliferating coverage of neuroscience in the popular media radically changing the way people think of notions of Self or personhood? In other words, is the public engagement with neuroscience making significant changes in the way people think about the brain and its influence on the complexities of human agency? This is a topic that Cliodhna O’Connor and Helene Joffe grapple with in their forthcoming article on “How has neuroscience affected lay understandings of personhood?” in Public Understanding of Science.

In a thorough review, O’Connor and Joffe conclude that the propagation of radical neuroscientific explorations has come through “in ways that perpetuate rather than challenge existing modes of understanding self, others and society”. This is because “people selectively attend to and interpret science in ways that cohere with their pre-existing values, identities and beliefs.”

In the course of their review, the authors touch upon what they call the “philosophical battle” between conceptions of every human being as a “free agent” and conceptions of a human whose character, behav­iour and life-course are pre-patterned by their biological constitution”. The latter conceptions, the authors say, paint “neuroscience research as the definitive refutation of the notion of free will, which is cast – in Nobel Laureate Francis Crick’s words – as ‘no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules’.”

Talking of Francis Crick, news has just come in of the decision of his family to sell his Nobel medal and give the proceeds to research institutions – see LiveScience. Crick, of course, was not only credited, with his colleagues, of mapping the structure of the DNA but also for his discovery of the molecular structure of nucleic acids and the role this structure played in the transfer of information in human beings. 

Commenting on the news of the sale, blogger Grant Jacobs, in the blog Code for Life, draws attention to one other item for sale – a letter written by the Nobel Laureate to his 12-year-old son to explain the Double Helix structure of the DNA. “It’d be interesting to see his efforts at science communication from the time of suggesting the model for the structure of DNA”, Jacobs says. It would indeed. As James Borrell says in his blog on How to communicate science and not be boring: “There’s a saying that if you can’t explain your research to a child, then you don’t understand it well enough yourself.”

The Art of Science

The excitement in our children’s eyes when they looked through a large concave lens to see a furnished apartment transformed into the face of the Hollywood star of yesteryear Mae West said it all. Sure, they hadn’t heard of Mae West – after all she was in her prime in the early part of the 20^th century, a time when even their grandparents were not born. But to see a lens reconfigure an odd assortment of furniture in a room with a shiny wooden floor into a glamorous face was enough to get them thinking about the mysteries of science.

We were at the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres, Spain, and the exhibit in question was the famous Mae West Room in the museum. It was created by the enigmatic, surrealist artist, Salvador Dali, who had a deep interest in science. As an education resource at the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia says, the artist “described himself as a fish swimming between ‘the cold water of art and the warm water of science’”.

Art is such a fabulous way to raise public understanding of science, we thought, as we spent an entire afternoon at the museum mesmerised by the thought-provoking art of Dalí. One of the more striking paintings at the museum is the Galatea of the Spheres, an oil-on-canvas work that is, as the catalogue describes it, “the outcome of a Dalí impassioned by science and for the theories of the disintegration of the atom”. There is a sense of awe in this painting – the exuberance of scientific discovery bridled by a sense of its destructive potential captured by the disintegrating spheres that make up the model’s face.

Even before you enter the museum, what catches your eye in the courtyard outside is a sculpture offering Homage to Newton and a motif on the hydrogen atom. Amidst the array of masterpieces inside the museum are many that mesh art and science to create hidden images within paintings – the face of Abraham Lincoln embedded in what looks superficially to be the back of a woman in the nude. There are also precious art works that use holography and a range of optical illusions.

Art and Science have, of course, had close links for centuries. The Master of the Renaissance era, Leonardo da Vinci was both an artist and a scientist, combining extraordinary skills in painting and sculpting with a legendary prowess in mathematics and engineering. In recent times, there has been an increasing push to bring art and science together as is being done by the Catalyst Collaborative at MIT, for example. Also, as the Arthur I. Miller exhibition on Art & Science: Merging Art & Science to Make a Revolutionary New Art Movement in London says, ‘Artists are bringing science out of the laboratory’.

In an earlier blog, we talked about an innovative exhibition of art, sculpture, and narratives on the future at the ASU Art Museum in Tempe that featured ‘a collaborative interaction between art and science, society and academy, the grassroots and the elite.’

                                     

If you have examples of how art is enhancing public understanding of science anywhere in the world, do let us know.

Unseen Treasures of the Natural World

We were in Oxford, the city of Matthew Arnold’s ‘dreaming spires’, recently to talk about our research on building fresh values of citizenship and equity around the uses of new and emerging technologies at an international conference on Environmental Justice and Global Citizenship. For us, as with many other scholars, public understanding of, and engagement with, science and technology is a core element of citizenship.

At this conference, we heard a very stimulating presentation by Alison Pouliot on a crucial domain of the natural sciences that very few people have a thorough understanding of – fungi. Alison Pouliot, who is an independent photographer (the photos on this page are by her) and researcher, is our guest blogger for this edition. Her blog follows:

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Dirt isn’t usually well regarded.  It’s the stuff that we spit on, dig up, wage wars on, bury toxins in, suck resources from and sweep from sight.  Yet the subterranean world of dirt, of soil, often symbolic of darkness and inertia, is in fact a living and astonishingly diverse part of our biosphere.  It is the realm of dynamic webs of relationships of a most curious kingdom of organisms - a kingdom that is little known and largely overseen.  And that is the Kingdom of Fungi. 

Like dirt, the larger implications of fungi rarely enter our minds despite them underpinning every terrestrial ecosystem on the planet.  For some of us, fungi are a delectable culinary treat or the psychedelic culprits that inspired Lewis Carol’s enchanted stories.  Indeed both are fungi.  But mushrooms represent only the fungal fruit body or reproductive structure.  The actual fungal ‘body’ or mycelium is a labyrinthine matrix of tubular filaments called hyphae, hidden beneath the soil.

It is the underground workings of fungal mycelium that provide a vast communicative network, connecting landscapes and kingdoms of organisms, creating soils through the breakdown of minerals and organic matter, enabling plants to access nutrients, maintaining soil fertility, hydrology, climate and sustaining human civilization.

Despite the obvious importance of fungi, they’ve been almost entirely overlooked in global conservation.  Fungi rarely attract the attention of the supposedly more charismatic flora and fauna that dominate the world’s RED lists.  But the survival of flora and fauna is inseparably intertwined with fungi.  For example, over 95 per cent of plant species including those on RED lists rely on mutually beneficial symbioses formed with their subterranean fungal partners.  It seems a rather gross oversight that charismatic organisms are protected while their vital partners down in the dirt are forgotten.

The great challenge for scientists, conservationists and advocates of

fungi is finding innovative and inspiring ways to communicate their  importance, not just for the health of ecosystems, but also for humanity.

The true nature of charisma goes beyond attractiveness to include the exceptional and the extraordinary.  It is perhaps through highlighting these qualities in fungi that their significance could be promoted.  Science has informed us of the astonishing intricacies, complexities and importance of fungi but other disciplines such as arts and aesthetics could provide further conduits to communication, to reconnecting people with their inspirational aspects.  It is indeed challenging to visualise this vast underground network of connective fungal mycelium but the fruit bodies, through their remarkable diversity of forms, bizarre habits and evanescent beauty, could be key in igniting curiosity and advocacy. 

Finding ways to communicate the importance of fungi could not only improve the potential for their conservation but also foster biophilia for all of nature.  Fungi are a fabulous metaphor for the interconnectivity of our world; for the linking of systems, of kingdoms, of timescales, of humanity with nature.  Their potential to catalyse public understanding of science remains largely unexplored.

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We invite people to reflect on Alison’s post and join the conversation on expanding and extending public understanding of fungi.