“It’s like this with the brain,” neurobiologist Hannah Monyer said to us this past Wednesday, “use it or lose it”. So use the brain we did like it was our job. From morning till evening. This is a short report from the Marsilius Kolleg Heidelberg Winter School 2011.
I don’t have much time to write; the schedule is tight in the best way possible: lunch is in about one hour and I don’t want to miss out on the warm companionship that we have developed with each other. ‘We’, that’s 29 young academics working in medicine, neurobiology, genetics, philosophy, theology, sociolgy, law, linguistics and psychology.We have all come to Heidelberg in order to discuss in an interdisciplinary manner the vital issues of the day, ‘how transparent is the human being?’
‘Not very much at all’, you may think, and you’d be right. One thing I have learned this past week is that neither the natural sciences nor the humanities can explain human thoughts, action and feeling very well at all. They can describe it beautifully and theorise certain aspects of it, but there are limitations. Although the human genome has been fully sequenced, neuroscientists don’t really know which processes in the DNA determine deseases or human traits. Claus Bartram, the first speaker at this winter school, pointed this out clearly to us. “The more we learn about the genome the less assurances we have about causal processes regarding human character, traits or deseases.” This is partly because the DNA is not, as had been thought until recently, the main driver behind the genetic wheel. The RNA intercepts and affects many processes of the DNA. Epigenetics also plays a big role; as Thomas Fuchs in particular made clear, environmental factors can have a lasting epigenetic effect. Hannah Monyer likewise emphasised the connection between neural processes and environmental changes and demonstrated how specific areas in the brain can be stimulated in such a way that their capacity changes in the long run.
All of this was a lot to take in for me and others, of course. One of the main lessons we learned from the genetics and neuroscience talks was that neither the body-mind nor the person-environment dualisms are credible figures of thought in the natural sciences any more. To put it bluntly and sociologically: even the brain is socially constituted, i.e. affected by social interaction.
Herman Schmitz, the great German philosopher, probably drove the point about the end of dualistic thinking home from a different angle when he explained his concept of embodied emotions to us. Emotions, he said, are intuitively treated as personal, fleeting sensations that are sort of ‘inside’ a self. Schmitz’s phenomenological thesis, in contrast, is that emotions are embodied, that we feel because our entire existence is embedded in bodily life (Leiblichkeit). There is a spatial aspect to this, too, which Schmitz captures in the notion of ‘emotions as atmospheres’: Schmitz used the example of an early morning forest and the freshness, uplifting, precious feeling it arouses in the person that walks into it. Schmitz would say that the walker came upon ‘the forest’s atmosphere’ and therefore herself felt fresh and inspired. This was a difficult move to make for many, me included. Far from preceding the walker spatially and temporally, Schmitz’s early morning forest atmosphere is clearly a creation of the Romantic spirit who has read a tad too much Brentano and Geothe. Yet the important point there too was that thinking of events as happening ‘out there’ and our responses to them, whatever they may be, as emerging ‘inside me’, is a reductionistic way of approaching the study of any human processes. To be sure, there is a continuum between different material, mental and emotional states of being, and positions on that continuum are subject to different and varied influences of a biological, social, cultural or spiritual kind.
I am very enthusiastic about the progressive ways of thinking I have been exposed here so far (although there was some analytical philosophy too – not everyone is riding the progressive wave yet). I am most blown away by the honesty with which neurobiologists and medical researchers that I have spoken to or that have given papers have admitted that they know very little about some of the processes that are of vital interest today, e.g. in genetics. The cause for the development of some carcinoma or the cause for morbus Parkinson are not fully illuminated yet. In order to help anyway, these researchers must be able to accept that they are in the dark about some issues and focus on getting better in what they’re doing in the already researched areas, in the hope of some day being able to also shed light into the dark.
That same kind of ‘we cannot know this yet’-attitude is very alien to me as a sociologist. We seem to always know everything in one way or another. It’s all a matter of which perspective you take on a given issue, which body of theories you’re working with or which intellectual style you prefer. At the end of the day, you need to make a convincing argument. Admitting that you cannot know something would probably equal the statement ‘I am feeble-minded’ in its social effect. Yet at the same time the social sciences explicitly style themselves on the natural sciences…bit ironic, don’t you think?
This issue is certainly more mine only than it concerns other participants at this winter school. A problem that we all share, however, and that is determined by the nature of this kind of interdisciplinary event is how to talk with each other. Each discipline has its own terminology which it uses in intricate ways that are not immediately plausible to others. When a non-social scientist asks me “But what do you think about freedom? Surely people must be free! This is our greatest good!”, then I sort of need to (and do) translate that for myself first. In sociology, I think, ‘freedom’ makes an appearance as ‘agency’, and said questioner above was arguing against structural determination (which sociologists are apparently intuitively associated with – I’m not surprised). One of the best translation efforts I have seen was by a socio-linguist explaining a theological text, specifically the relationship between God, Jesus Christ and us folks. Using the language of communication studies in a highly illuminating way, partly because she needed to make sense of what she was reading to herself too, the theological text became immediately accessible to all of us. The point remains, however, that we tend to translate the new ideas and vocabulary that we are being confronted with into the language of our own discipline. We also usually flag up our disciplinary affiliation when we make a comment on a talk or text that is from a different field of inquiry. “I really liked what you said but being a philosopher/psychologist/lawyer, I instantly ask myself…” is a preamble we have heard often this past week. Interdisciplinary discourse does emerge but usually only after longer explanations made over a cup of coffee or a light alcoholic beverage. The recognition ultimately often is that we agreed all along but did so in ways that were unintelligible to each other.
Hannah Monyer pointed out that the more we use our brain, the more we strain particular parts of it repetitively, the more efficient the entire machine (what a shocking metaphor!! I’d be hit over the head if one of the other participants read this!!) will work even when the stimulus is a singular occurrence. The idea of a winter school like this one, then, could be to over-strain the participants’ brains for 10 days so that they are lastingly capable of dealing with large amounts of input on the spot. I am looking forward to that long-term effect!
