The social brain: discovering the networks of the mind.

The Social Brain: Discovering the Networks of the Mind

COLUMBUS SPOKE of India, bumped into America, and thought he'd reached Japan; yet his brilliant seamanship still changed history. Michael Gazzaniga's book is rather like that.

Dr. Gazzaniga is the leading authority on split-brain research: Thanks to him and his associates, most people vaguely know by now of the significant differences between the human brain's right and left hemispheres. In relaxed conversational style, The Social Brain first takes us through the unfolding history of these researches, as gripping a detective story as Oedipus Rex, and as rich in wonder, pity, irony--and fear. Severing of links between the right and left brain is last-resort treatment in some cases of epilepsy; it apparently works well, but its hidden effects are odd. The elegant series of psychological experiments that Gazzaniga describes uncovered those oddities, and in doing so taught us an immense amount about the normal human brain as well.

Recounting this takes half the book. The aim is to equip the reader to grasp Dr. Gazzaniga's new thesis as to the essentially "social" or "modular" nature of hte brain. If that is understood, the author feels, then our attitude to many of the world's problems changes: the phenomenon of religious or quasi-religious belief, in particular, being thoroughly demystified. And if neighbors realize how the same inescapable mental processes manufacture all their very different beliefs, then mutual tolerance must increase, and world peace come one step closer . . .

In short, here is a book in the honorable, century-old American intellectual tradition of Charles Sanders Peirce: a distinguished laboratory-trained scientist pushed into a concern with philosophy, tempered by a certain preoccupation with religion. Dr. Gazzaniga's "modular" model of the mind/brain (of which more below) is clearly important, even if on religion he is perhaps disappointing. Yes, his account of the mind's primary belief-generating mechanisms might well deflate many lateral-minded church/mosque/temple/synagogue-goers--if they had the mental sophistication to grasp it. But, if they had that, then their religion would be of a different kind anyway: He doesn't seem fully to allow for the metaphorical dimension to all language, or the way genuinely religious people often use their faith not literally but, so to speak, in quotation marks.

For Gazzaniga, psychology has in a sense become a department of sociology. He argues for the brain as an assemblage of independently co-conscious modules, each with a specific location (i.e., they're not just software). Each module is a virtual person, capable of initiating action and with the usual penumbra of instinct and emotion. However, only one fully possesses the power of speech; the others apparently think in images. Thus each of us is really a committee, with members struggling to get the chairman's ear, while the latter (the speech module) tries to cobble together resolutions that cover up the disagreements. The once so startling distinction between right- and left-brain personality seems now, to Dr. Gazzaniga, just a uniquely accessible instance of a differentiation that must also exist between the major modules even in the same half-brain.

How new is this picture? (Even Peirce wrote that the soul "may contain several personalities and . . . the faculties are as real as the convolutions of the cortex.") Juggle the definition of consciousness, and you can turn Gazzaniga into a disguised retelling of Freud: But what of it? Add enough epicycles and you can turn cpernicus into Ptolemy. Gazzaniga insists that some of his experimental results are simply more accurately described in terms of co- or multiple consciousness than by invoking the Unconscious; and in any case the real impact of his picture surely comes from the indications that at last we are talking about the hardware rather than the software of the brain.

In the world of the arts, where the kaleidoscopic powers of the brain are most fully extended, it seems to me that in time the impact of Dr. Gazzaniga's ideas will be particularly strongly felt: They sit so well with what many analyses of major literary works, for instance, seem to show. Any new conception of the mind enforces new techniques in the arts: Indeed, artists sometimes seem to glimpse the new idea before it crystalizes, as Freud thought his own insights at times anticipated in nineteenth-century novels.

This is no less true of criticism. It is no accident that I. A. Richards, the father of the standard New Critical approach to literature still daily taught in thousands of classrooms, with its stress on the unified "organic" complexity of true art, was deeply influenced by the psychology of his own day. Yet the very techniques of literary analysis the Richards/New Critical tradition inculcate tend themselves to produce results more consistent with Gazzaniga's "committee" model of the brain than with that tradition's own view. That this has been felt but not articulated explains the waves of fads and gurus that have swept through the university English departments for the past twenty years, each promising intellectual salvation until overtaken by the next. Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Deconstruction, Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Derrida--always the basic appeal is in subdividing, multiplying, counter-eddying that single, coherently complex stream of meaning that for orthodox critics makes up a successful literary work. Clearly, there's an intuition in the air that our minds aren't really like critical orthodoxy's picture of them.

Now Dr. Gazzaniga has rooted that intuition in fact, sharply updating our conceptions of "the networks of the mind." No doubt, as with Freud, only a fellow specialist could handle his ideas entirely correctly; but he has still equipped us with new tools of thought, and they shift the boundaries of the possible: It is remarkable what can become obvious, once you cease to be blinded by "just knowing" that an artist's mind "simply couldn't have worked like that." From now on the Anglo-American empirical tradition can move forward again, and totalizing Continental European theorists--as surfocatingly authoritarian in aesthetics as in politics--shrink to their true dimensions. Thank you, Columbus: I think India's over there, actually; but meanwhile on this continent the arts are going to change.