Can scientists really read thoughts

in the brain?

Neuroscience — the science of the

brain — is all about new technology.

Raymond Tallis is a medical man,

and he points out rather revealingly

that fMRI ‘brain scanners’ aren’t

infallible and can be rather impre-

cise; they certainly can’t pinpoint

particular thoughts placed in minds

by the social scientists.

Forget all those colour pictures in

magazines of people’s brains work-

ing as they are shown pictures of

‘loved ones’ — or maybe fast food.

Because Tallis accuses the experi-

ments with brain scanners as being

laughably crude and ‘mind‐numb-

ingly simplistic’. For example, even

the best scanners operate by mea-

suring blood flow, which varies

over timescales of seconds — but

the real activity of the brain, the

electrical changes in the busy neu-

rons, is measured in milliseconds.

Experiments in which subjects may

be shown photographs of friends

on the one hand, and lovers on the

other, and researchers take the

‘differences’ in the brain scans to

indicate the ‘unconditional‐love spot’

sound amazing. Yet when more mun-

dane experiments are done with sub-

jects being asked to, for example,

tap their fingers, researchers can

deduce nothing from the brain scans

about finger‐tapping. So what are

the chances of discovering anything

about grand emotional reactions?

Neuroscience is very good at show-

ing things like light getting into the

brain through the eyes and trigger-

ing nerve impulses. However the

gaze looking out remains another

matter entirely. After all, as Tallis

says, ‘it is a person that looks out,

not a brain’. Even neurophysiolo-

gists allow that the seen object that

people construct isn’t really there,

but is created by the brain. But this

is paradoxical — the brain is shap-

ing the world that’s it shaped by?

Philosophers in particular should

remember that the world is an undif-

ferentiated mass until the mind splits

it up into discrete parts.