Neuro-forum: An Introduction

Abstract

Developments in the brain sciences are a key focus for BioSocieties, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. We are thus pleased that our first issue of BioSocieties includes three articles devoted to the interrelated issues of psychopharmacology, enhancement, and the body. We take this as an opportunity to provide some framing remarks from the Editorial team, which might also stimulate further contributions on these issues. The articles in this issue raise important concerns about the costs of pursuing perfected minds and brains, at the expense, potentially, of individuality, free will and authenticity. Some authors’ concerns about fairness are organized around a polarity: resistance and access. Can individuals resist/access the pharmaceutically powered drive toward perfection; is their personal agency sufficient to resist/access enhancing drugs, especially if they are very young, or poor, an ethnic minority, a convicted felon – or, for that matter, if they are students at elite competitive universities? These are questions that focus on the individual in relation to psychopharmacological enhancement. But they also raise the question of the status of the individual in neuroscientific research. Many have remarked on the slippage between the person and the brain that seems to be endemic in such research. Moreover, as research into mental functioning and mental health moves ever more deeply into the brain, and as it attempts to elucidate the workings of psychoactive drugs, it becomes caught up in a complex metaphoric landscape: neural networks and pathways, blood flows, synaptic bridges, channels and docking sites. Mapping this internal landscape is complex enough without attempting the task of tying structure to function; neural mechanism to behavioural outcome. Perhaps as a consequence, perhaps because of deeper ontological commitments, there is a tendency to elide this complex issue, to treat the brain as an entity unto itself, and to subsume therein behaviour, mind and person. But we need to ask what we lose when we attribute such aspects of ‘human being’—of being human—to the individualized brain. There is, we suggest, ample empirical evidence, some of it long-standing, that shows that capacities often attributed to the individual—intellectual functioning, memory, cognition, emotion, desire or the effects of drugs on any of these—are actually ‘distributed’ functions, shaped, organized, facilitated and given meaning and salience by the particularities of their interactive, spatial, pragmatic and linguistic context. Consider a simple example: alcohol. The same volume of alcohol will have quite different behavioural, emotional and cognitive consequences depending on whether it is taken on a solitary and melancholic evening at home, at a celebratory 40th birthday party, on the terrace of a football match or in the controlled setting of a psychological experiment. In this sense we must recognize that the laboratory and the clinic—the sites of so many of contemporary studies of mental functioning—are not ‘non-spaces’ evacuated of social meaning. They are each social