The English philosopher is remembered as the father of the scientific method [1]. He held the aim that scientists should concentrate on certain important kinds of experimentally reproducible situations. The investigator should aim to make a gradual ascent to more and more comprehensive laws, and will acquire greater and greater certainty as he or she moves up the pyramid of laws.
What does it mean to be a good scientist?
In the case of Tammie and Angela, the answer emerged in the form of unspeakable acts with a pipette and numerous Eppendorf tubes. But at a moment in which neuroscience has so much cultural authority, one could interpret being a 'good neuroscientist' as developing a deeper awareness of the reciprocal interactions between culture and neuroscience. How does culture shape neuroscientific ideas and applications, and what are the implications of neuroscientific findings for culture? Just as a neuron does not exist in isolation in the brain, the brain is situated in a world of meanings.
In the last several decades, cognitive neuroscience experiments have provided striking insights into the neural underpinnings of memory, language, vision, emotion and social interaction. Neuroscience has, in this way, changed our common sense about ourselves. In more recent years, non-invasive brain-imaging tools, coupled with academic and public fascination with themes such as the quest for the neural correlates of moral reasoning, the brain basis of revenge, cooperation and empathy or imaging-based lie detectors have seemed to render the limits of neuroscience almost boundless.
How can we, as neuroscientists, incorporate the epistemological and ethical issues that arise from the widening gap between our tools and our research questions — relating to self, subjective experience and the understanding of others — into our research practice? As the gap between what the tools can do and the questions to which they are applied widens, the experimental process involves making more inferences and interpretations. Perhaps we could here benefit from thinking about the social and cultural context of the way we study the brain.
The new focus on brain-centered explanations has immediate implications for how we understand, and deal with, normal and abnormal behavior in everyday life. The consequences are exemplified in psychiatry, in which biological reductionism brings about explanations of human problems that tend to be based in the body alone rather than in our social circumstances and histories. Such biological models tend to reduce personhood, the subjective and contextualized self, to 'brainhood' (Vidal, 2005). The critical neuroscience approach traces the journey of a neuroscience research topic, for example antisocial behavior, empathy, deception, volition or political orientation, from its entry into the laboratory as a question for neuroscience, to its translation into the language and practices of neuroscience that produce a neuroscientific fact and the subsequent application outside the laboratory. This is not necessarily a linear process; indeed the facts about the mind produced by neuroscience can direct new questions and even give rise to new behavioral phenomena. For example, Hacking has suggested this 'looping effect' in the case of autism and multiple personality disorder, which he calls 'interactive kinds' (Hacking, 1995). He argues that scientific classification of people interacts with the experience of those being classified and may create new ways of being. As such, the classification itself changes and may in turn shift the target of study over time.
What is 'critical neuroscience'?
Central to 'critical neuroscience' is the idea that analysis of the social and cultural structure of neuroscience may inform the design of experiments in a meaningful way, particularly studies of the social or cultural brain. The idea was born out of shared interests between junior researchers working in neuroscience, philosophy and anthropology, who were becoming increasingly aware of the social and ethical issues within the brain sciences, as well as the gulf between the disciplines that deal with them and experimental neuroscience itself.
The shared objective of critical neuroscience is to search for a ways to incorporate an understanding of the social structure of neuroscience into the practice of the empirical work. It is particularly timely as the pace of cognitive neuroscience research steps up and its outcomes are materialized in daily life, through new ways of being, new categories of normal and abnormal and various new forms of interventions.
What is 'critical' about critical neuroscience'?
The brain sciences, particularly social neuroscience, are producing neuropsychiatric theories of behavior that have recently been imported into clinical contexts, law courts, commercial marketing, psychoanalysis and thus the popular consciousness about our minds, our selves and the way we live. Given that cognitive neuroscience produces not only theories of subjective experience, but also interventions directed towards our selves, this field of science seems to hold a special status in terms of its potential for self-understanding, the understanding of social behavior as well as the cultural influence on behavior. As such, our research also warrants critical analysis.
Critical neuroscience aims to assess some of the basic assumptions upon which cognitive neuroscience is founded, and to evaluate the social and political implications of the experimental research. Ultimately, it seeks to find ways to incorporate theoretical critique into practice in the laboratory, in particular, to apply to empirical approaches to the study of the 'cultural' and 'social brain'. In order for this to happen, critical neuroscience is concerned with examining the philosophical foundations, cultural practices and economic imperatives in neuroscience which may shape the experimental and explanatory frameworks produced through our research.
For further information about Critical Neuroscience visit www.critical-neuroscience.org
By Daniel S. Margulies and Suparna Choudhury, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Berlin School of Mind & Brain
This article originally appeared June 2011 in Volume 04, Issue 02 " Good & Bad Scientific Practice"
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