Neuroscience: We Are Not Just Our Brains

At the end of 2016, the Argentine Macri government began to unleash its full rhetorical power, blending ontological coaching, conscious breathing from Ravi Shankar, and that sumptuous scientific novelty that was gradually gaining global ground, establishing itself as a discourse devoid of exteriority: neuroscience. Public policy in health and education celebrated with yellow balloons the creation of "Neuroscience Poles" as a semantic replacement for psychiatric hospitals in Buenos Aires, and organized massive events in Tecnópolis under the slogans "The brain goes to school" or "Celebrating mental health."

It was in this context that I became interested and concerned about the phenomenon, especially regarding its effects on clinical practices in the field of mental health and in broader ways of thinking about ourselves. In those years, together with Professor José A. Castorina, we compiled Neuroscientism or Mental Health (2019). Since then, the trend of explaining human experience exclusively in brain terms has not only persisted but has been refined, serving as a "scientific" foundation for various social experiments, trendy neologisms, and technological fads.

The trend of explaining human experience exclusively in brain terms has not only persisted but has been refined, serving as a "scientific" foundation for various social experiments.

In this text, we will briefly develop the fundamental issues surrounding neuroscientism, addressing problems that at that time, and at least for me, were simply unthinkable: technologies linked to cognition, the struggle for attention, posthumanism, or artificial cerebralism. I am interested in an attempt at interdisciplinary articulation and discussion that allows for a revival regarding the dangers of taking the cerebral issue lightly.

Subjectivity disappears behind cognition, and cognition is reduced to the brain. If everything plausible to be explained, diagnosed, and intervened refers to that secular, neuroontological soul, are we our brain? A final kidnapping: that of your mood.

The brain as a synonym

Cerebral, mental, cognitive, psychological, and subjective are often used as synonyms, although they refer to diverse and often incommensurable theoretical traditions. They are categories or dimensions of analysis of different orders. A little-noticed consequence of neuroscientism is the disappearance of psychological or subjective problems under a new vocabulary. The issue is not merely terminological, as concepts are a condition of possibility but also restrict the formulation of certain problems.

To clarify the terms: the brain is an organ, the cerebral is a cut (for example, neurological), cognition refers to certain functions that include but exceed the cerebral, subjectivity designates historical and relational modes of existence; and the mind, the psychic or the emotional are psi constructs, stemming from adjacent human sciences or from ancient philosophical problems. This ordering is perfectible, but the intention is to point out that we are not talking about the same thing at all.

Besides the brain, without a heart (the organ, not its romanticization), thought, language, emotions, etc., are also improbable. For this reason, when we say someone is a person with a good heart, no one assumes we are praising an organ that pumps. We are talking about a way of being in the world.

Neurobabble

Neurosciences have achieved a level of prestige that is hard to match. Images from resonance as a mirror of our inner selves, neural maps as cartographies of our ideas, and promises of definitive intervention, not only in behavior but also in our souls: a pre-Cartesian dream of total apprehension of our essence.

The problem begins when a necessary condition transforms into a sufficient explanation: that there is no thought, emotion, feeling, behavior, or affection without the brain does not imply that all psychological/mental/emotional life finds its ultimate explanation in the brain. We are still in the realm of the obvious and common sense. But the shine of scientific totalization dazzles us, causing us to retreat in our approach to reality.

That there is no thought, emotion, feeling, behavior, or affection without the brain does not imply that all psychological/mental/emotional life finds its ultimate explanation in the brain.

We can call this displacement neuroscientism, and by saying this, we are not disputing the neurosciences as a whole (their contributions and clinical derivations) but their applicationism: transferring neurobiological findings to any domain of social, educational, political, or health life, as if historical, institutional, and clinical mediations were secondary obstacles to be eliminated.

Examples of applicationism:

- The conditioned reflex produced in the famous Pavlov's dog as a model for educating or raising a child.

- Darwin's postulates on evolution as a foundation for domination and exploitation (social Darwinism).

- The isolated finding of a specific response in a neurotransmitter as the ultimate explanation for a highly complex phenomenon like depression.

- That when feeling pleasure, a certain area of the cerebral cortex is activated, leading to the conclusion that enjoyment has a precise and potentially stimulable location.

- Or when the absurd merges with the cruel: it would be applicationist to explain the guillotine purely and exclusively by Newton's laws of gravity.

Through intentional conceptual confusions and relying on an ontological-reductive approach, a significant portion of the neuroscientific canon arrogates the power to hegemonically intervene in the field of mental health, while simultaneously invalidating any other approach, relegating it as if it were museum pieces or obscure techniques.

The classic argument of Adorno and Horkheimer regarding scientific absolutism resonates here, a tendency in which science ceases to explain itself and instead presents itself, discursively, more as a dogma of faith. We find its reactive formation, for example, in the flat Earth movements (the emotional one included), which, in their paranoid nihilism, reject this absolutism.

It is asserted that the brain decides, learns, loves, or makes mistakes, and this is said by anyone walking down the street; but also by any researcher in neuroscience of the highest academic prestige, indicating that we are not merely facing the simple vulgarization of a corpus but rather the brain's common sense functioning as an epistemic framework for many neuroscientists. Monkeys with neuron knives.

In our grand country, expressions like "he's out of his mind," "she's got a fried brain," "the mind deceives you," or "your unconscious betrayed you" are part of our language. The difference between these expressions and what is strictly cerebral is that contemporary technoscience has a theoretical-speculative and empirical corpus (neuroimaging, brain mapping, etc.) that makes scientific reality more extravagant than popular fiction: yes, it would be possible for neuroscientism to assert, no longer as a metaphor or euphemism, that it was due to a particular brain event that you performed poorly on an exam, or that your sadness can be reflected in this or that neuronal activation.

This is what Leo XIV just referred to with psycho-piquancy as the "Babel syndrome", the pretension of a unique language capable of translating everything. Neuroscientism (or neuro-narrativism) constitutes one of the contemporary expressions of this dangerous delusion of grandeur.

Brain subject

Since the beginning of this millennium, the brain subject has been, by far, the most hegemonic mode of subjectivation. If the subject refers to its brain, technology is no longer strictly psychological or cognitive but neurochemical: a "brain-ego." The operation seems too subtle, but we will see that it is not.

We refer to the tendency to ground identity, emotions, and even suffering in the brain. Far from considering that this view arises solely from advances in neuroscience, it is better thought of as a broader historical and social construction that has favored an increasing neurologization of postmodern experience. This is the basis for the Foucauldian continuations of Nikolas Rose or the contributions of Ortega and Vidal. Therefore, we are not talking about a concrete scientific discovery but rather an epistemology about what it means to be human.

If throughout most of the 20th century subjective life was interpreted through psychological categories (personality, unconscious, cognition, internal conflicts, or traumas), in the last two decades there has been a growing trend to describe ourselves exclusively and unquestioningly in terms of references to the brain, neuroplasticity, or neurotransmitters.

The brain ceases to be merely an object of study to transform into a kind of identity core, alongside neuroinfluencers, the publication of bestsellers where the prefix neuro- is added to practically everything and, obviously, the complex pharmaceutical-industrial complex that was declining due to the exhaustion of modern psychiatry.

Cerebral subjectivation is based on philosophical assumptions of a naturalistic and reductionist nature that tend to ignore the complexity of human experience. Reducing suffering, desires, or decisions to brain function implies overlooking the constitutive role of social bonds, material conditions of existence, and biographical trajectories. Ironically, the brain ends up eliminating the body that supports it.

All of this sounds obvious from a certain worldview, and it is indeed easy to state but very difficult to understand and even more so to experience. What does someone who can't find a way out of their situation want but a quick fix? Is a rigorous spiritual exercise more rewarding, or a certainty stemming from the most sophisticated technological objectivity? Does the invitation to narrate one's own story become enticing when we are shown a mapping of our brain-soul that points out the exact locus of our trauma?

Reducing suffering, desires, or decisions to brain function implies overlooking the constitutive role of social bonds, material conditions of existence, and biographical trajectories.

To make matters worse, this mode of subjectivation is not limited to clinical settings. The proliferation of discourses on brain optimization, cognitive training, personal performance, or strengthening neural capacities expresses the emergence of new forms of self-governance. These practices or neuroasceticism promote an ethic of permanent self-improvement that presents brain development as a condition for achieving success, productivity, or well-being.

And this is when the brain, with many more comparative advantages over cognition, mind, psyche, or spirit, appears as the definitive unit for optimization, since it is quantifiable and mappable in real-time: the illusion of being able to overcome, to make transparent, the problem of interiority as that which resists comprehension is realized. Subjectivity without mysteries, all visible and printed in real-time. A brain Polaroid of the soul.

Nothing is more psychopathic than a brain subject. Neuroscientism is particularly compatible with neoliberal subjectivation because it offers an image of the individual as an autonomous, transparent entity, improvable and responsible for managing their own biological capital. Not to surveil or punish, but to map and optimize in an aspirational key: "that brain we want and must be."

The stomach and the unconscious

Someone with a psychology degree says:

Your digestive and nervous systems are in constant bidirectional communication. Optimal metabolic health, influenced by what you eat, is necessary for the proper regulation of emotions and for maintaining low stress levels. For your brain to create new connections (neuroplasticity) and for you to learn new tools in therapy, you need a protein called BDNF. Interventions that combine exercise and healthy nutrition enhance the production of this "fertilizer" for neurons.

The underlying neuromythology (or in Freudian terms, childhood sexual theory) of this Instagram advertisement is that of the stomach/intestine as the "second brain." It is literally reasoned that we have a nervous system embedded in the digestive tract, because it:

-It has its own neural network (enteric nervous system, with 500 million neurons, far more than in the spinal cord), which controls digestion, contractions, and secretions "without the brain giving an order";

-It produces dopamine and manufactures its own neurotransmitters, as 90% of the body's serotonin (a great novel by Houellebecq) is produced in the intestine, regulating mood, sleep, and appetite;

-It "talks" directly to the brain through the vagus nerve, which is the "fiber optic cable" between the two, and that’s why when you’re nervous, you feel "butterflies";

-It has "memory," as if something doesn’t sit well with you, the intestine registers it.

But then it’s the same AI (from which I extracted this enumeration) that cuts in:

the phrase "second brain" is a bit of an exaggeration, because it doesn’t think or reason. But it captures well that the intestine is not a passive tube: it makes decisions, produces brain chemicals, and informs the brain how you’re feeling.

This example of neuro-cerebral application is framed within an ancient tradition, not of psychologizing the body ("psychosomatic" reductionism) but rather of biologizing mood, which becomes appealing if there are cerebral subjects on the other side.

Let’s remember the ancient conception of the "wandering womb" (from the Greek hystera) as an explanation for female mood, which by the end of the 19th century transformed into the psychiatric nosography of hysteria and which Freud's patients helped to rectify/dignify, emerging from esoteric-biologistic misogyny. This intestine as a second brain, clearly marketed towards women, sets back almost 150 years of feminist emotional struggle.

Nothing is more psychopathic than a cerebral subject. Neurocentrism is particularly compatible with neoliberal subjectivation because it offers an image of the individual as an autonomous entity.

Conversely, the positivist accusation against psychoanalysis regarding the non-brain localization of the unconscious is common. This confusion, exploited by some Anglo-Saxons in concoctions such as neuro-psychoanalysis, fails to acknowledge that there exists a dimension of the emotional that resists being fixed and that, like words, is always in flight.

Regarding the mistake of equating psyche with head, Lacan would often reply that his unconscious was in his feet:

We think we think with our brains, but I particularly think with my feet. That’s the only way that allows me to connect with something solid.

Cerebral fallacies

From analytical philosophy, Wittgenstein rejected the idea that psychological functions can be attributed to the brain, since "only a human being (...) can be said: has sensations, sees or is blind; hears or does not; is conscious or unconscious". From a phenomenological perspective, Ricoeur insisted that it is not legitimate to move from a discourse about neurons and their systemic connections to one about thoughts, actions, or feelings, linked to a body with which we have a relationship of belonging: it is a categorical error.

Thus, the persistent mind-body problem is sustained by an original bias, which is to assume that the human is composed of a body and a mind of radically different natures. However, concepts that have diverse logical properties are considered equivalent: the mind becomes a mysterious and enigmatic entity, distanced from the body it inhabits but intimately connected to it.

By erroneously attributing mental properties to the brain, statements such as "the brain has anxiety" or "it is essentially social and collaborative" will arise. Claims that, although literally nonsensical, carry performative effects in concrete practices.

In terms of current logic, an argument is fallacious if it contravenes some of the principles of clarity, relevance, and sufficiency, and one of its modalities is the mereological fallacy (from the Greek meros, "part"): an inference that attributes to the part (brain function) the attributes applicable to a whole (intentional activity or relation to the symbolic world).

Neurosciences can investigate the neuronal conditions of the vicissitudes of emotional life; or discover the neuronal preconditions that make thinking and articulating imagination possible. They are even capable of establishing very relevant correlations between neuronal phenomena and the exercise of psychic functions, or between biological disorders and abnormalities in mental functions.

The persistent mind-body problem is sustained by an original bias, which is to assume that the human is composed of a body and a mind of radically different natures.

Cerebral activity is concomitant with subjective activity, and involves relationships with objects or symbolic systems of a socio-historical nature, as well as individual and social intentionality. But psychological predicates cannot be attributed to the brain, nor can we assert that someone "is sick in the brain," unless we refer purely and exclusively to a problem described by neurology.

There is psychological life!

These contemporary rhetorics operate as pre-psychological forms of self-examination. They represent the pinnacle of the scientistic pyramid that precisely eliminates all the foundational mediations that psychological knowledge once formulated. Let’s mention a few:

-There is a general psychology with a variety of authors concerned with establishing an epistemology of emotions, feelings, higher psychological functions, etc.

-Freud turned to bioenergetic and physiological metaphors to create a model of the psyche: he started from neurology (his original profession) towards a metapsychological conceptualization that would allow him to operate clinically where medicine failed to succeed.

-Social psychology and its current relationship with historical-cultural approaches, bordering on anthropology and the field of social representations, in its relationship with the construction of common and singular sense.

-Classical behaviorism designed complex experimental devices and various approaches to establish a relationship between interiority and behavior, paving the way for modern cognitive psychology and its closest branches to computational models of the mental. This tradition has been applied in a utilitarian manner by neuro-positivism.

-Piagetian constructivism delving into the dialectical relationship between the subject and the object of knowledge, impacting parenting practices and the educational field.

-Lev Vygotsky at the beginning of the century in the USSR thinking in a materialist-historical key about human activity mediated by cultural-semiotic instruments, forming a very complex, ambitious, and unfortunately unfinished psychological cartography due to his premature death.

-Integrative clinical approaches, especially those stemming from Gestalt, with their excavations of phenomenological rudiments.

-The Palo Alto School and its derivatives as systemic psychology, interested in paradoxical modes of communication.

The differences and distances are much greater than their points of convergence, as is the case in many other disciplinary fields. But again, this brief enumeration reflects various traditions, currents, and theories that compose the psychological field, which is quite prolific in our country, whose unity is not merely descriptive but metatheoretical: between biology and experience, there exists some kind of mediation, a cut or object of study called 'psychological life' that has an irreducible specificity, even when it is supported by a machine called organism.

Neuroscientific discourse often skips over this problem. Where the psychological field discusses representation, symbolization, cognition, affectivity, or conflict, a direct explanation based on brain mechanisms resurfaces. Theoretical, epistemic, and clinical critiques of one or several of these schools are valid and necessary, but far from a corporate defense, and in the face of ahistorical trends, we will say once again that the old ways work.

Decerebrating mental health

The critique of cerebral subjectivation takes on special relevance in the field of mental health, as its hegemony favors a disease-centered conception, deficit, or biological anomaly. The clinical act becomes impoverished, as the listening to singularity is replaced by the search for neurobiological alterations and strategies aimed at normalization or improvement of brain performance. The difference between a human being who listens and a chat bot that trains us for an upgrade or brain hack is erased.

If scientists and researchers are pushed into exile (brain drain) or the opposing activist is called decerebrated, positivizing the insult can result in a very powerful operation of significant alchemy. Should we decerebrate mental health?

“Neurosciences = neoliberalism” is a lazy and imprecise equation. It’s about rectifying the place of neuroscientific knowledge, critiquing its uncritical and unilateral application, acknowledging it as valid for its incompleteness, just like other knowledges that intervene in our field. Testing interdisciplinary points of convergence in practices, deepening the epistemological discussion where incommensurability looms.

The biggest problem in mental health practices is the resistance to recognizing those who suffer as subjects of rights, a matter present in normative frameworks such as the National Mental Health Law (which the current government seeks to counter-reform) that recognizes psychic suffering as a complex reality where neurobiology is historically situated and related to others. It seems obvious, but for there to be a subject of rights, one must first assume a person, a socio-political relationship between people, conflicts of interest, etc.

The clinical act becomes impoverished, as the listening to singularity is replaced by the search for neurobiological alterations and strategies aimed at normalization.

That the soma or the brain have effects on identities is not independent of complex relationships between people, and thus speaks beyond myself. Someone “is diverse” due to the effect that their body and brain have on themselves and others, in a specific historical and social moment; otherwise, biology will once again be destiny. Here lies the danger of categories like “neurodiversity.”

It exceeds the scope of this writing, but it is pertinent to point out the ramifications of cerebral individualism in the construction of citizenship and socio-cultural, governmental, and electoral agendas: what several authors refer to as neuropolitics. In this sense, avoiding paranoid exaggerations, the paradox is equally concerning that one form of citizenship, the cerebral, could end up imploding the category of citizen as we know it, with a worse outcome, more sophisticated, more subtle, than any dystopian futurism: a scientism with no room for that fiction called democracy.

At this point, the critique of biological citizenship developed by Rose resonates. The horizon should be the opposite: a person must be considered a subject of rights before any neurobiological self-perception.

Neuroscience fiction

Lastly, we present some neuro-fables of the future or neuroscience fiction. Perhaps the only place where the brain metaphor fully works is in artificial intelligence. Because AI is indeed its brain. Here are some intuitions and concerns:

I. For decades, we have tried to understand people as if they were biological computers. The unexpected result was that we ended up building machines that extraordinarily resemble the caricature of a person we had imagined. Technologies that process information, recognize patterns, correlate data, and produce something akin to language (LLM). We are tempted to encompass all of the above and define it as intelligence or consciousness. Then a disturbing inversion appears: the machines are not demonstrating that they think like us, but rather showing how far we had begun to think of ourselves as brain machines.

We ended up building machines that extraordinarily resemble the caricature of a person we had imagined.

If computing is trying to emulate neuro-cerebral functioning, given the efficiency and biological complexity, why would we want to make our brain a crude transistor and our subjectivity a closed circuit?

II. If we only focus on patterns, the human model in question is an Asperger subjectivization (also known as high-functioning autism) or bordering on paranoia: those beings dedicated to recognizing subtle patterns but incapable of inhabiting and experiencing other kinds of subtleties in social bonds.

The provocation from Pennisi and Benasayag ("Artificial intelligence doesn't think, neither does the brain") points exactly there. Just as it is not the brain that loves, remembers, or feels anguish, neither does an AI understand in its own flesh what it computes. Processing information does not equate to producing meaning, since recognizing patterns is not enough to constitute a cognitive act or an awareness.

III. AI forces a revision of our ideas about learning and knowledge, and in reflection, it returns to us the limits of neuro-cerebral reductionism. Learning is not exactly the same as knowing, understanding, or apprehending. “Machine learning” or the verb to learn does not encompass all of the above. Does a machine learn or simply process vast amounts of information? Democratic machines, in the Borgesian sense: they abuse statistics. Humans do not learn solely with our brains; rather, we constitute ourselves, whether we are fully aware or not, as subjects of knowledge before we become learning machines, and we do this within very complex socio-affective practices: very human ones.

Processing information does not equate to producing meaning, since recognizing patterns is not enough to constitute a cognitive act or an awareness.

Between information (input-output) and understanding lies a territory that no statistic can capture. Geniuses do not merely find patterns. A “talented” or “artistic” person is one who goes beyond information, since otherwise, any statistician would be a Statesman or any bookworm a Writer.

IV. In the series Pluribus, we see the chilling reverse of the fantasy of a collective brain or “hive mind”: when brain connectivity is total, there is no possibility of negativity or denial (the primary condition for all human thought and language), which allows us to lie but also to differentiate, contrast, nuance, exaggerate, and fictionalize. Cerebralism must be thought of as the foundation of all capitalist science fiction.

V. We explain the incessant scrolling driven by dopamine, or we say that the novel form of gambling addiction fostered by online betting is due to a brain-centered “reward architecture,” etc. As we are lost and overwhelmed by such complex social phenomena, we respond from neuroscientism. In wanting to engage in critical thinking, we end up contributing to cerebral subjectivization: a perfect crime.

VI. The promises of externalizing consciousness into technical/ethereal devices make sense since the mind is supposedly located, where else, in the brain. The architecture of parallel or replacement virtual realities is one of the themes of the novel Materials for a Nightmare (2021) by Juan Mattio. Nothing more sinister than the Borgesian cerebral self: “in the ulterior shadow of the other realm, I will be waiting for myself.” Why would a cerebral-virtual reality be any different? Where we exist without this crude matter called body and are pure computation, wouldn’t that be precisely the realm of depression?

VII. The Empire Strikes Back (1980) introduced Lobot, a cyborg assistant to Lando Calrissian in the administration of Cloud City. He was [the son of a] slave, and at the age of 15, space pirates killed his father. After the fall of the Republic, he escaped to Cloud City, where he stole and was arrested. The city’s administrator decided to give the young man a chance: to be imprisoned or become the first link to the city’s computers. Between the bag or the life, he chose the internet, obtaining a brain implant. He can communicate directly with the central computer, manages its language, and precisely for that reason, he cannot speak.

Lobot, the prefix of lobotomy, believes that "direct information is more efficient." The dream of the cerebral subject, its posthumanist drift, is ultimately the elimination of language. Where Lando betrays, regrets, and returns to the bright side, Lobot only processed zeros and ones from his neuronal morality.

VIII. As I subscribe to the forceful idea of cognitive sovereignty, I consider it imperative to rectify the place of the brain in the dispute over attention. Since sovereignty is a permanent exercise, it cannot be reduced to a cerebral know-how, which unwittingly subjects us to a passivity typical of any organ or morbid thing.

Building sovereignty implies subjective appropriation, psychic work, cultural mediation, conflict, and affiliation. There are cognitive biases precisely because we function with something more than our brain: manipulation and truth do not play out in neurons.