Hello, my name is Shining Li, and I’m a recovering neuro-aholic.
I’m glad to report that I’ve regained sanity now, but my infatuation with neuroscience ran a deep and conflicted course, and I’ve only just recently emerged from the dark tangle of neurons and neural tracts that characterized my love affair.
This is my story.
Over steamed vegetables and apple crisp, we discussed lofty concepts that left us with the illusion of collegiate intellectualism: free will, altruism, the human soul (or lack thereof), memory, identity, consciousness. The brain was the key to all these overwhelming insights, and it seemed that I was privy to a new wave of special information—I was in on something Big that was about to shake our very understanding of the human being.
I fell head over heels (that is, central nervous system over peripheral nervous system) for neuroscience during that first critical semester. So earnest was my fervor that I started working in a cognitive neuroscience lab in the spring. I read about brain research in the news and felt a jolt of pride whenever a neuro-term I recognized was mentioned. I used neuroscience to justify my beliefs in every subject imaginable, from theology to politics to sexual morality.
This infatuation was a strange feeling somewhat akin to the stomach flu. I felt queasy at times, inexplicably apprehensive about the way neuroscience was such an easy way to justify my beliefs. Could humans be selfless? Of course not—the same reward centers that light up for monetary reward also activate after the performance of an act of charity. Was casual sex okay? Of course not—the flood of oxytocin emitted after orgasm creates a biologically unavoidable feeling of love between two people, despite their best intentions at no-strings-attached physicality.
Find a question, and I could dismiss it with any small tidbit of neuroscience research. That was the power my new enthusiasm gave me.
Did I doubt my neuroscience ego at times? Of course—sometimes I would catch myself reducing all emotion to neurotransmitters, simplifying human action to robotic mechanism. I realized that my lab research seemed more and more pointless by the day.
But like any victim of the flu, I didn’t piece together the symptoms in time. Like anyone stuck in a bad relationship, I made excuses for neuroscience the way I used to for lackluster boyfriends. Like any addict, I waited until it was too late.
Instead of running the other way, I started working in another lab, told everyone I was a major and thought ahead to a brighter future in which neuroscience would once gaze at me lovingly over dinner and amaze me with its intellectual complexity.
That day never came. Like all proper tragedies, this one comes to a catastrophic, grinding halt. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold, especially a center adopted as faddishly as I’d clung onto neuroscience.
One morning, I woke up and realized that I didn’t want to talk about the brain anymore—at least not as the be-all and end-all of comprehending human nature. Underneath its veneer of presumptuous assertions, neuroscience had proven to be an incurable bore, a stuffy pedant with a knack for reductive thinking.
Brain research had for too long stolen too much of my academic regard without deserving it, without proving itself robust enough to answer the questions it audaciously set out to conquer.
In the end, knowing neurons was not the same as knowing humans.
My story has a happy ending: Jolted out of my addiction, I quit my lab, backed out of my major and made my apologies to friends still obligated by their neuroscience requirements. Then I sprinted toward freedom.
A disclaimer to those who maintain a happy relationship with neuroscience: In no way is my experience meant to be universal. After all, not all people are compatible with all fields of study.
For my humanities-oriented purposes, neuroscience could not serve as an adequate replacement for philosophy, English, political theory. Its empirical validity offered an appealing contrast to the scorn with which the humanities are often greeted by the science community, but there are some questions science can never answer.
So I caution anyone naive enough to believe in the magic powers of neuroscience to answer age-old questions about human nature—be careful how brashly you decide to adopt the trend. Don’t fall in love too quickly.
Shining Li is a Trinity sophomore. Her column runs every Tuesday.
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