The Cerebral Mystique

3/30/24, 5:29 PM We are more than our brains: on neuroscience and being human | Aeon Essays
e cerebral mystique
Neuroscience gives us invaluable, wondrous
knowledge about the brain – including an
awareness of its limitations
by Alan Jasanoff
Alan Jasanoff is professor of biological engineering, brain and cognitive sciences,

and nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
His latest book is The Biological Mind: How Brain, Body, and Environment Collaborate
to Make Us Who We Are (2018).
Edited by Sam Haselby
M ore than 2,000 years ago, the semi-mythical father of medicine, Hippocrates of
Kos, challenged the spiritualists of his time with a bold claim about the nature of
the human mind. In response to supernatural explanations of mental phenomena,
Hippocrates insisted that ‘from nothing else but the brain come joys, delights,
laughter and sports, and sorrows, griefs, despondency, and lamentations’. In the
modern age, Hippocrates’ words have been distilled into a Twitter-friendly pop-
neuroscience slogan: ‘We are our brains.’ is message resonates with recent
trends to blame criminality on the brain, to redefine mental illness as brain
disease and, in futuristic-technological circles, to imagine enhancing or
preserving our lives by enhancing or preserving our brains. From creativity to
drug addiction, there is barely an aspect of human behaviour that has not been
attributed to brain function. To many people today, the brain seems like a
contemporary surrogate for the soul.
But lost in the public’s romance with the brain is the most fundamental lesson
neuroscience has to teach us: that the organ of our minds is a purely physical
entity, conceptually and causally embedded in the natural world. Although the
brain is required for almost everything we do, it never works alone. Instead, its
function is inextricably linked to the body and to the environment around it. e
https://aeon.co/essays/we-are-more-than-our-brains-on-neuroscience-and-being-human 1/11
interdependence of these factors is masked however by a cultural phenomenon I

call the ‘cerebral mystique’ – a pervasive idealisation of the brain and its singular
importance, which protects traditional conceptions about differences between
mind and body, the freedom of will and the nature of thought itself.
e mystique is expressed in multiple forms, ranging from ubiquitous depictions

of supernatural, ultra-sophisticated brains in science fiction and the popular
media to more sober, scientifically supported conceptions of cognitive function
that emphasise inorganic qualities or confine mental processes to neural
structures. is idealisation is almost reflexively adopted by laypeople and
scientists alike (including me!) and it is compatible with both materialist and
spiritual world views. e cerebral mystique might help to increase enthusiasm
for neuroscience – a valued consequence – but it drastically limits our ability to
analyse human behaviour and address important social problems.
e widespread analogy of the brain to a computer contributes powerfully to the

cerebral mystique by distancing the brain from the rest of the biology. e
contrast between a machine-like brain and the wet, chaotic mess we have
throughout the rest of our bodies sets up a brain-body distinction that parallels
the historical mind-body distinction drawn by early philosophers such as René
Descartes. In keeping with Western religious notions of the soul, Descartes in the
17th century postulated that the mind is an ethereal entity that interacts with the
body but does not join with it. With his timeless axiom ‘I think, therefore I am’
Descartes placed the mind in its own universe, autonomous of the material world.
To the extent that the brain resembles a machine, we can more easily imagine
removing it from our heads, preserving it for eternity, cloning it or sending it
through space. e digital brain thus seems separable from the body in both its
substance and causal relations, much like Descartes’s detached spirit. It might be
no accident that some of the most influential inorganic analogies to the brain
were introduced by physical scientists who in their later years took to the problem
of consciousness in the way that elderly people sometimes take to religion. John
von Neumann, the computer pioneer, was the best-known of these; he wrote the
influential book e Computer and the Brain (1958) shortly before his death in
1957, inaugurating this enduring analogy at the very dawn of the digital age.
B rains are undoubtedly somewhat computer-like – computers, after all, were

invented to perform brain-like functions – but brains are also much more than
bundles of wiry neurons and the electrical impulses they are famous for
propagating. e function of each neuroelectrical signal is to release a little flood
of chemicals that helps to stimulate or suppress brain cells, in much the way that
chemicals activate or suppress functions such as glucose production by liver cells
or immune responses by white blood cells. Even the brain’s electrical signals
themselves are the products of chemicals called ions that move in and out of cells,
causing tiny ripples that can spread independently of neurons.
Also distinct from neurons are the relatively passive brain cells called glia (Greek
for glue) that are roughly equal in number to the neurons but do not conduct
electrical signals in the same way. Recent experiments in mice have shown that
manipulating these uncharismatic cells can produce dramatic effects on
behaviour. In one experiment, a research group in Japan showed that direct
stimulation of glia in a brain region called the cerebellum could cause a
behavioural response analogous to changes more commonly evoked by
stimulation of neurons. Another remarkable study showed that transplantation of
human glial cells into mouse brains boosted the animals’ performance in learning
tests, again demonstrating the importance of glia in shaping brain function.
Chemicals and glue are as integral to brain function as wiring and electricity. With
these moist elements factored in, the brain seems much more like an organic part
of the body than the idealised prosthetic many people imagine.
Stereotypes about brain complexity also contribute to the mystique of the brain
and its distinction from the body. It has become a cliché to refer to the brain as
‘the most complex thing in the known Universe’. is saying is inspired by the
finding that human brains contain something on the order of 100,000,000,000
neurons, each of which makes about 10,000 connections (synapses) to other
neurons. e daunting nature of such numbers provides cover for people who
argue that neuroscience will never decipher consciousness, or that free will lurks
somehow among the billions and billions.
But the sheer number of cells in the human brain is unlikely to explain its
extraordinary capabilities. Human livers have roughly the same number of cells as
brains, but certainly don’t generate the same results. Brains themselves vary in
size over a considerable range – by around 50 per cent in mass and likely number
of brain cells. Radical removal of half of the brain is sometimes performed as a
treatment for epilepsy in children. Commenting on a cohort of more than 50
patients who underwent this procedure, a team at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore
wrote that they were ‘awed by the apparent retention of memory after removal of
half of the brain, either half, and by the retention of the child’s personality and
sense of humour’. Clearly not every brain cell is sacred.
If one looks out into the animal kingdom, vast ranges in brain size fail to correlate
with apparent cognitive power at all. Some of the most perspicacious animals are
the corvids – crows, ravens, and rooks – which have brains less than 1 per cent
the size of a human brain, but still perform feats of cognition comparable to
chimpanzees and gorillas. Behavioural studies have shown that these birds can
make and use tools, and recognise people on the street, feats that even many
primates are not known to achieve. Within individual orders, animals with similar
characteristics also display huge differences in brain size. Among rodents, for
instance, we can find the 80-gram capybara brain with 1.6 billion neurons and the
0.3-gram pygmy mouse brain with probably fewer than 60 million neurons.
Despite a greater than 100-fold difference in brain size, these species live in
similar habitats, display similarly social lifestyles, and do not display obvious
differences in intelligence. Although neuroscience is only beginning to parse
brain function even in small animals, such reference points show that it is
mistaken to mystify the brain because of its sheer number of components.
P laying up the machine-like qualities of the brain or its unbelievable complexity

distances it from the rest of the biological world in terms of its composition. But a
related form of brain-body distinction exaggerates how the brain stands apart in
terms of its autonomy from body and environment. is flavour of dualism
contributes to the cerebral mystique by enhancing the brain’s reputation as a
control centre, receptive to bodily and environmental input but still in charge.
Contrary to this idea, our brains themselves are perpetually influenced by torrents
of sensory input. e environment shoots many megabytes of sensory data into
the brain every second, enough information to disable many computers. e
brain has no firewall against this onslaught. Brain-imaging studies show that even
subtle sensory stimuli influence regions of the brain, ranging from low-level
sensory regions where input enters the brain to parts of the frontal lobe, the high-
level brain area that is expanded in humans compared with many other primates.
Many of these stimuli seem to take direct control of us. For instance, when we
view illustrations, visual features often seem to grab our eyes and steer our gaze
around in spatial patterns that are largely reproducible from person to person. If
we see a face, our focus darts reflexively among eyes, nose and mouth,
subconsciously taking in key features. When we walk down the street, our minds
are similarly manipulated by stimuli in the surroundings – the honk of a car’s
horn, the flashing of a neon light, the smell of pizza – each of which guides our
thoughts and actions even if we don’t realise that anything has happened.
Even further below our radar are environmental features that act on a slower
timescale to influence our mood and emotions. Seasonal low light levels are
famous for their correlation with depression, a phenomenon first described by the
South African physician Norman Rosenthal soon after he moved from sunny
Johannesburg to the grey northeastern United States in the 1970s. Colours in our
surroundings also affect us. Although the idea that colours have psychic power
evokes New Age mysticism, careful experiments have repeatedly linked cold
colours such as blue and green to positive emotional responses, and hot red hues
to negative responses. In one example, researchers showed that participants
performed worse on IQ tests labelled with red marks than on tests labelled with
green or grey; another study found that subjects performed better on
computerised creativity tests delivered on a blue background than on a red
background.
Signals from within the body influence behaviour just as powerfully as influences
from the environment, again usurping the brain’s command and challenging
idealised conceptions of its supremacy. A particularly powerful pathway for
reciprocal brain-body interactions is the so-called hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal
(HPA) axis, named for a set of structures both inside and outside the brain that
together coordinate the storied fight-or-flight response. Activation of the HPA axis
is often triggered by fear-related brain signals that lead to secretion of cortisol and
adrenalin from a gland that sits on top of the kidneys. ese hormones lead to a
range of bodily changes that affect breathing, heartrate, sensory acuity and many
other variables, providing feedback to the brain and closing a circuit of mutual
brain-body interaction. In some cases, the HPA axis can be engaged from outside
the brain, as in pregnancy, when a surge of cortisol originates on its own from the
placenta.
e HPA axis provides one of the routes by which our emotional states more
generally are coupled to body-wide changes that extend far beyond the brain.
Monitoring of externally observable physiological parameters such as skin
conductance and respiration has long supported the idea that various emotions
produce distinct responses relevant to how emotions are perceived. In a 2014
study, a group of researchers led by Lauri Nummenmaa at Aalto University in
Finland asked participants to describe bodily sensations that they associate with
14 distinct emotions. e result was a stunning set of ‘bodily maps’ of the
emotions, revealing variegated patterns of increased and decreased sensitivity
associated with feelings of anger, fear, happiness, depression, love and so on. e
subjects’ ability to report their sensations emphasises that bodily changes are part
of how the emotions are experienced, and not just passive, downstream
consequences of emotion-related brain activity.
A n amazing finding of recent years is the fact that microbes living in the
intestines are also part of the physiological network that determines our
emotions. Changing the gut microbial population by eating bacteria-rich foods or
undergoing an off-putting procedure called a faecal transplant can alter
characteristics such as anxiety and aggression. A key experiment was performed
in mice, where a two-way exchange of gut microbes between the normally shy
BALB/c mouse strain and the more outgoing NIH Swiss strain was enough to flip
the two personalities. In human organ-transplant patients, both cognitive and
emotional effects are also commonplace. Some of these have to do with correcting
the medical condition that required the transplant in the first place. For instance,
liver or kidney failure causes a buildup of toxins such as ammonia in the blood;
this in turn causes cognitive difficulties that can be corrected by replacing the
diseased organ. But even procedures such as stomach stitching, which does not
cure a disease, are said to cause personality shifts in about 50 per cent of patients.
Such examples illustrate the extent to which what happens in the brain is
interwoven with what goes on in the body and the environment. ere is no
causal or conceptual boundary between the brain and its surroundings. Aspects
of the cerebral mystique – idealised views of the brain as inorganic,
hypercomplex, self-contained and autonomous – fail when we look more closely
at what the brain is made of and how it operates. e integrated involvement of
brain, body and environment is precisely what makes having a biological mind
different from having a soul, and the implications of this difference are
tremendous.
Most importantly, the cerebral mystique fosters a misleading sense that the brain
is the prime mover of our thoughts and actions. As we seek to understand human
conduct, the mystique prompts us to think first of brain-related causes, and pay
less attention to factors outside the head. is leads us to overemphasise the role
of individuals and underemphasise the role of contexts across a range of cultural
phenomena.
In the arena of criminal justice, for instance, some writers suggest that the
perpetrator’s brain should be blamed for transgressions. is argument often
invokes the case of Charles Whitman, who in 1966 committed one of the first
mass shootings in the US, at the University of Texas. Whitman had reported
psychological disturbances in the months leading up to the crime, and an autopsy
later revealed that a large tumour had been growing near a part of his brain called
the amygdala, which is involved in stress and emotional regulation. But although
advocates of blaming the brain would argue that Whitman’s brain tumour might
have caused his crime, the larger reality is that Whitman’s act occurred against a
background of many other predisposing factors: growing up with a violent father,
the recent divorce of his parents, Whitman’s repeated career rejection and court
martial from the army, his substance abuse, great physical stature, and access to
high-powered weaponry. Even the high temperature on the day of the crime – 99
degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celsius) – might have contributed to Whitman’s
aggressive behaviour on the fateful day.
Blaming the brain for criminal behaviour offers an escape from outmoded
principles of morality and retribution, but it still neglects the extended network of
influences likely to contribute to any given situation. In the current discussion

about the causes of violence in the US, it is more important than ever to maintain
a broad view of how multiple factors work together in and around each individual;
mental problems, gun access, media influences and social alienation can all play
their parts. In other contexts, we miss analogous factors when we attribute drug
addiction or adolescent misbehaviour to the brain, or when we credit the brain for
creativity and intelligence. In each case, an idealised view that simply locates good
and bad personal qualities in the brain is remarkably similar to old-fashioned
perspectives that assigned virtue and vice to the metaphysical soul. An updated
view should instead accept that any act of brilliance or depravity arises from a
combination of brain, body and environment working together.
e cerebral mystique has particular significance for the way that our society
grapples with the problem of mental illness. is is because of the widespread
drive to redefine mental illnesses as brain disorders. Proponents argue that doing
this places psychological problems in the same category as influenza or cancer –
sicknesses that don’t evoke the social stigma commonly associated with
psychiatric disorders. ere is some evidence that using the language of brain
disorders in fact lowers the barrier for mental-health patients to seek treatment,
an important benefit.
In other respects, however, reclassifying mental illnesses as brain disorders can be

highly problematic. For patients, attributing mental problems to intrinsic
neurological defects incurs a stigma of its own. Although people with ‘broken
brains’ might not be held morally accountable or told to ‘just get over it’, the
sense that they are irredeemably flawed can be just as damaging. Biological flaws
can be harder to fix than moral lapses, and people with brain dysfunction can be
seen as dangerous or even less than fully human. is attitude reached extremes
under the Nazis, who murdered thousands of mental-health patients as part of
their ‘euthanasia’ programme during the Second World War, but it persists in
more subtle forms today. A large analysis of changing attitudes to mental illness
in 2012 found that there was no increase in social acceptance of patients with
depression or schizophrenia, despite increasing awareness of neurobiological
contributions to these conditions.
Regardless of its social implications, blaming the brain for mental illnesses might
be scientifically inaccurate in many cases. Although all mental problems involve
the brain, the underlying causal factors can be elsewhere. In the 19th century, the
sexually transmitted bacterial disease syphilis and the vitamin-B deficiency
pellagra were among the greatest contributors to insane-asylum populations in
Europe and the US. A more recent study estimated that as many as 20 per cent of
psychiatric patients have a bodily disorder that might be producing or worsening
their mental condition; the maladies include heart, lung and endocrine problems,
all of which have cognitive side effects. Epidemiological surveys have found
remarkable correlations between incidence of mental illness and factors such as
ethnic minority status, being born in a city, and being born at certain times of
year. Although these correlations are not well-explained, they emphasise the likely
role of environmental factors well beyond the brain in bringing about psychiatric
problems. We must be sensitive to such factors if we want effective treatment and
prevention of mental disorders.
At an even deeper level, cultural conventions circumscribe the notion of mental

illness in the first place. Just 50 years ago, homosexuality was classified as a
pathology in the American Psychiatric Association’s authoritative compendium of
mental disorders. In Soviet Russia, political dissidents were sometimes confined
on the basis of psychiatric diagnoses that would horrify most observers today.
Nevertheless, sexual preference or failure to bow to authority in pursuit of a
righteous cause are both psychological traits for which we could imagine finding
biological correlates. at does not mean that homosexuality and political
dissidence are brain diseases. Society rather than neurobiology ultimately defines
the bounds of normality that determine mental-health categories.
T he cerebral mystique exaggerates the brain’s contribution to human behaviour,

and for some it also prompts remarkable visions of the brain’s role in the future of
humanity itself. In technophilic circles, there is increasing talk of ‘hacking the
brain’ to improve human cognition. is notion evokes the kind of sophisticated
but semi-subversive intervention one might make into a fancy smartphone or a
government server, but the reality is usually more like the type of hacking one
would perform with a machete. Some of the earliest brain hacks involved the
purposeful destruction of parts of the brain, famously as part of the now-extinct
psychosurgery procedures that inspired Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest (1962). e most advanced of today’s brain hacks involve surgically
implanting electrodes for direct stimulation or recording of brain tissue. ese
interventions can restore basic function to patients with severe movement
disorders or paralysis – an incredibly impressive feat, but still a world away from
enhancements to normal abilities. is distance has not stopped entrepreneurs
such as Elon Musk or the US defence agency DARPA from investing heavily in
technology that they hope will one day routinely hardwire healthy human brains
to computers.
But this exuberance is largely the product of an artificial distinction between what
goes on inside versus outside the brain. e philosopher Nick Bostrom of the
Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford points out that ‘most of the benefits you
could imagine achieving through [brain implants] you could achieve by having
the same device outside of you, and then using your natural interfaces like your
eyeballs, which can project 100 million bits per second straight into your brain’.
Indeed, most of us are familiar with the kind of cognitive-enhancement aids that
live in our desks, pockets and handbags, boosting our memory and
communication capabilities without touching a neuron. It is debatable whether
connecting smartphone-like devices more directly to brains would add much
except annoyance and distraction.
In the medical realm, early efforts to restore vision in blind people using brain
implants quickly gave way to much less invasive approaches involving retinal
prostheses, which leverage the body’s natural physiology for early processing of
visual information. Cochlear implants that restore hearing in deaf patients rely on
the similar strategy of interfacing with the auditory nerve in the ear, rather than
the brain itself. Except in the most impaired patients, prostheses for restoring or
enhancing movement also benefit from interfaces to the body. To give amputees
control over mechanised artificial limbs, a technique called ‘targeted muscle
reinnervation’ allows physicians to connect loose peripheral nerves from the
missing original limb to new muscle groups that in turn communicate with the
device. For enhancing motor function in healthy people, powered exoskeletons
developed by companies such as Cyberdyne in Japan communicate with the
wearer through skin-surface electrodes, also accepting input from the brain
through indirect but evolutionarily honed channels. In each of these examples,
the brain’s natural interactions with the body help the person use the prosthetic,
leveraging rather than denying the continuity between brain and body.
e most extreme direction in futuristic brain technology is the drive to achieve

immortality through the postmortem preservation of human brains. Two
companies now offer to extract and preserve the brains of dying ‘clients’, who do
not wish to go gentle into the good night. e organs will be stored in liquid
nitrogen until technology advances to the point (now nowhere in sight) where the
brain can be restored to function in some form or analysed in sufficient detail to
‘upload’ the mind into a computer. is venture takes the cerebral mystique to its
logical endpoint, fully embracing the fallacy that human life is reducible to brain
function and that the brain is just a physical embodiment of the soul.
Although seeking immortality through brain preservation does little harm to

anything other than a few people’s bank accounts, this fringe pursuit also
epitomises why demystifying the brain is so important. e more we feel that our
brains encapsulate our essence as individuals, and the more we believe that our
thoughts and actions simply emanate from the bundle of flesh in our heads, the
less sensitive we will be to the role of the society and environment around us, and
the less we will do to nurture our shared culture and resources – whether in the
context of criminal behaviour, creativity, mental illness or any other aspect of
human life.
e brain is special because it does not distil us to an essence, it unites us to our

surroundings in a way a soul never could. If we value our own experiences, we
must protect and strengthen the many factors that enrich our lives from both
inside and outside, so that as many people as possible can benefit from them now
and in the time to come. We must realise that we are much more than our brains.
aeon.co 8 May 2018

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3/30/24, 5:29 PM We are more than our brains: on neuroscience and being human | Aeon Essays

Alan Jasanoﬀ is professor of biological engineering, brain and cognitive sciences,

Edited by Sam Haselby

interdependence of these factors is masked however by a cultural phenomenon I

e mystique is expressed in multiple forms, ranging from ubiquitous depictions

e widespread analogy of the brain to a computer contributes powerfully to the

B rains are undoubtedly somewhat computer-like – computers, after all, were

P laying up the machine-like qualities of the brain or its unbelievable complexity

inﬂuences likely to contribute to any given situation. In the current discussion

In other respects, however, reclassifying mental illnesses as brain disorders can be

At an even deeper level, cultural conventions circumscribe the notion of mental

T he cerebral mystique exaggerates the brain’s contribution to human behaviour,

e most extreme direction in futuristic brain technology is the drive to achieve

Although seeking immortality through brain preservation does little harm to

e brain is special because it does not distil us to an essence, it unites us to our

aeon.co 8 May 2018

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