Leaving out a lot of reality

Sunday's LA Times carried a fascinating op-ed piece, by Seed magazine editor Jonah Lehrer, on the limitations of contemporary neuroscience. He writes:

The success of modern neuroscience represents the triumph of a method: reductionism. The premise of reductionism is that the best way to solve a complex problem -- and the brain is the most complicated object in the known universe -- is to study its most basic parts. The mind, in other words, is just a particular trick of matter, reducible to the callous laws of physics.

But the reductionist method, although undeniably successful, has very real limitations. Not everything benefits from being broken down into tiny pieces. Look, for example, at a Beethoven symphony. If the music is reduced to wavelengths of vibrating air -- the simple sum of its physics -- we actually understand less about the music. The intangible beauty, the visceral emotion, the entire reason we listen in the first place -- all is lost when the sound is reduced into its most elemental details. In other words, reductionism can leave out a lot of reality.

Lehrer isn't a fuzzy-headed idealist. He credits reductionist neuroscience with, for example, great and beneficial advances in pharmaceuticals. "A work of art," he writes, "obviously isn't a substitute for a scientific experiment -- Proust isn't going to invent Prozac." But, he continues:

the artist can help scientists better understand what, exactly, they are trying to reduce in the first place. Before you break something apart, it helps to know how it hangs together.

As a lover of Joyce's Ulysses, which traces many of the thoughts of a character during a single day, I am grateful to Lehrer for a quotation I didn't know about:

Virginia Woolf . . . famously declared that the task of the novelist is to "examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day ... [tracing] the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness."

And as a lover of Shakespeare's Tempest, which gives this blog its name, I especially noted Lehrer's conclusion:

Unless our science moves beyond reductionism and grapples instead with the messiness of subjective experience -- what James called a "science of the soul" -- its facts will grow increasingly remote. The wonder of the brain is that it can be described in so many ways: We are such stuff as dreams are made on, but we are also just stuff. What we need is a science that can encompass both sides of our being.

In between the passages I've quoted are many more I could have. In my browser, the essay is less than four screens long; you'll be rewarded for the time you spend.

(Thanks to Seed magazine for the link.)