"...Descartes was wrong: the brain somehow is the mind. But how this happens remains a mystery."

http://www.bookforum.com/review/10287

OCT 10 2012

The New Wounded by Catherine Malabou

Meehan Crist

"In the 1600s, French philosopher René Descartes split the world into two kinds of stuff: material stuff subject to the laws of physics and immaterial stuff that operates according to some other set of rules. He argued that the human body is material but the mind is immaterial, relegating it to what the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle famously called "a ghost in the machine." But even Descartes, years after articulating his theory of the mind-body divide, amended it to suggest that the physical brain might act as an intermediary between the two. In his revised theory, the "spirits" of the mind worked on the tiny, almond-shaped pineal gland, sending messages through the brain, which issued commands to the rest of the body. Modern neuroscience has shown this amendment to be false (we now know the pineal as an endocrine gland that secretes hormones), but Descartes' dualism is still deeply, some would say perniciously, embedded in the language we use to talk about brain and mind.

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While modern neuroscience has shown that a group of neurons firing in a particular pattern can also be described as a certain feeling, is still far from articulating the relationship between the brain and the subjective experience of the mind. Within the discipline, this falls into the category of what is known as a levels problem. Scientists can describe, in great detail, what happens on a number of different levels—the molecular, the neuronal, the behavioral, etc.—but they often can't connect the activity on one level to the activity on another.

An act of translation from brain to mind is the holy grail of much scientific research, particularly in the nascent fields of neuropsychology and neuropsychoanalysis that Malabou so admires. In most scientific circles, it is now understood that Descartes was wrong: the brain somehow is the mind. But how this happens remains a mystery. With her new terms, Malabou is trying to offer a bridge from one level to another, but in the end, it seems she is stuffing theory into the old gap rather than actually building a bridge, or better yet, shining light into the chasm to show us that it's simply a shadow created by our own limited imaginations."