The New Yorker, Brain Science, and Our Unconscious

Source: New Yorker

In his latest piece on brain science and psychology for the New Yorker, David Brooks looks to explain "how the new sciences of human nature can help make sense of a life." The article is now the top read at the New Yorker online and is picking up commentary elsewhere. Arts and Letters Daily linked to it with the attention-grabbing header, "We are in the middle of a revolution in consciousness, writes David Brooks."

Parts of his article, "Social Animal," do indeed convey that shift, including by quoting the following remarkable lines from one charismatic neuroscientist: "We have a hundred billion neurons in the brain; infants create as many as 1.8 million neural connections per second; a mere sixty neurons are capable of making ten to the eighty-first possible connections, which is a number ten times as large as the number of particles in the observable universe; the ability to distinguish between a ‘P' and a ‘B' sound involves as many as twenty-two sites across the brain; even something as simple as seeing a color in a painting involves a mind-bogglingly complex set of mental constructions."

What's striking about the rest of the article, by contrast, is the idea, articulated most forcefully since the mid nineteenth century, that our social forms have evolved imperfectly to fit our biological and evolutionary needs. That principle certainly is not news. The problem is that much of Brooks's article repeats it as if it were.

As a result, we get an awful lot of new wine in old bottles. Except, to extend the metaphor, the bottles are being dusted off and repackaged as if they represented an incredible new grape rather than, say, a significant vintage.

Brooks isn't alone is forgetting and ignoring large amounts of the history of psychology. In reviewing both published and unpublished works in the field, I'm often startled by how much contemporary academic scholarship in the discipline circles around itself, unaware of its past discoveries and thus of its own history.

"A core finding of this work" on brain science, Brooks writes, as if to a drumroll, "is that we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking. The conscious mind gives us one way of making sense of our environment. But the unconscious mind gives us other, more supple ways."

That's new? Perhaps if one hasn't read much Freud it may seem so. Yet Brooks, in the article, grapples with an age-old misfit between culture and biology that Freud pinpointed in the late nineteenth century, then helped greatly to assuage, including through the "talking cure," a concept still very much with us today.

Neuroscience is finding fresh ways to describe and calibrate the gap between culture and biology, potentially leading to sharper distinctions and treatment options. Still, it's odd and unsettling to see it and cognitive and evolutionary psychology, having spent decades trashing and mischaracterizing Freud, represent his concepts and arguments as if they were their own. And then see articles in prominent newspapers and magazines, unaware of the same trick, repackaging the same "truth" to an even-larger number of readers.

"Maybe the real action was in this deeper layer" of the mind, Brooks concludes in startled amazement about the unconscious, as if hearing about it for the first time. "After all, the conscious mind chooses what we buy, but the unconscious mind chooses what we like."

"Social Animal" is available online here.

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