– There must be few people who know as well as you the kilo and a half of neurons that we have in our heads. What would you tell me if I asked you how they work?
-That our brain works by making decisions. Actually, the question to ask is: what is our brain for? And the answer is that you are there to make decisions that improve reproductive success.
–Could you summarize the conclusions of your studies in one sentence?
-I like to say that “you are your brain”; it means that it is your brains that generate your mind. The fact that you exhibit various behaviors in relation to the environment shows that you have cognition. The millions of feelings and thoughts that you enjoy are his processes interacting with the environment and become a physical part of your neurons. All your mental processes, including the feeling of having a mind and a Self, are the fruit of your brain.
–You propose a philosophy of life based on neuroscience. What does it consist of?
-I am simply trying to say that you can try to explain human nature by better understanding the physical substrate of our thoughts. We are discovering that there are many aspects of moral behavior that are built into the nature of our brain, mixed in with other rules that come from living in a social group. You have to understand that people owe their way of being to the nature of their brain, which is where who we are is built.
-If a large part of our way of being is based on this body, a true learning machine, wouldn’t there be many issues that should be solved with education, instead of later with the penal code?
-The issue of education and justice is complex. I think that the ethical aspects of our life should be a common issue in schools, since nowadays it seems to have disappeared in the general culture that we receive. On the other hand, the real challenge for modern neuroscience is to see how much of our ethical behavior is incorporated into us as a species and to what extent that is the source of social rules. It is a fascinating challenge for the neuroscience of this century.
-Some people might feel threatened by this point of view, as it might seem that science is trying to open a gap in a field that in many societies has traditionally been reserved for religion. Is there a science-religion clash?
–They are two different stories. I think that some things that science has to say make certain aspects of religion hard to believe. I am not a believer, but I do not include myself among those who have problems with the existence of religions: if both religious people and scientists understood better why we believe what we believe, our life together would be easier.
-Would we live in a more just world if we based our morals on the answers that neuroscience gives to some of the great questions of philosophy?
– My personal opinion is that yes. We could better understand why we do what we do by better understanding the human brain, but that will take a long time to come. To think that the cultural systems of the world can be changed rapidly is insane; it is a fact that it is easier to change human genes than culture. When people realize that the decisions they make are not related to any cultural institution – from which they believe they have learned to do so – the impact on the way they live is going to be enormous.
-An example?
-I can talk about what we are doing today, about our studies on individual variability -the fact that each person is unique- and the brain mechanisms that generate it. They are the differences between you and your sister or you and your colleague; things they can do and you can’t, and things you can do and they can’t. If we can understand it, it will have a great impact on society. All of these issues didn’t even exist a decade ago. Two years ago we hardly had the information and now we can analyze it.
-What does neuroscience have to say about justice?
-We are going to start a new project to study the impact of certain scientific results on the law and justice systems. Much of the matter will consist of showing that in many cases neuroscience does not paint anything in the courts. For example, there is abuse in American courts, where they try to use scientific results to make it appear that someone is not responsible for their crimes. We hope that our studies will change this way of working. It’s a very promising project and we can’t wait to get started … if we can get someone to finance us!
–Your book deals with neuroethics, which is the intersection between neuroscience and ethics … Is it very broad today?
-Yes, it is quite wide. Studies of how this gray mass works have a lot to say in the great ethical debates of our time. For example, about the moral status of embryos, related to stem cell research, but also about what will happen if neuroscience ends up discovering what the differences between one person and another are due to and how we will use that information, privacy of our thoughts … All this requires a careful analysis and is really new, since the technologies that make it possible are also recent and, frankly, I think that most of the people who generate these results have never thought about their ethical implications . So we are launching this discipline called neuroethics and encouraging people to think about it.
-What is the “hot” debate in this scenario?
-We are working on increasing memory, and also on erasing it. We study drugs that have raised expectations around this possibility. We have to see what kind of situation we want: do we want there to be human beings out there taking pills to reinforce their memories – I personally sign up for that – or do we want something like: “Look, this year has been bad, so I I’m going to take a pill and forget it “? We will have to consider the impact that something similar can have on our lives. This is an issue that everyone wants to talk about and wants to work on. I don’t find it very problematic, but there are those who do, and therefore we will have to discuss it.
-And what about the possibility of altering our mental capacities?
-The increase of our mental capacities, what is called intelligence, still has a very long way to go. There have been some studies on this, but the fact is that no one understands why one person is smarter than another. To try to manipulate the mechanisms on which intelligence is based, you must first know how they work and only then can their biology be altered. -A recent research points to the possibility of reading someone’s intentions before they execute them. Will we lose our privacy of thought? -There are many works that suggest that you can read someone’s intentions, but in reality everything that those results tell you is very different: that by the time you are aware of your thought, your brain has already executed it. So those who study it will have to figure out how to sneak in there and listen when it is preparing to do something that you are about to become aware of. These types of results are spectacular because they show that when you are aware of a thought, it has already passed.
–You are part of the Presidential Council on Bioethics in the USA, an advisory body made up of relevant figures, from science to religion. What has been the hottest debate?
-Undoubtedly the first was the most controversial: determining the moral status of the embryo and assessing the impact of this decision when advising the President if he should support stem cell research. There were long conversations about therapeutic and reproductive cloning. No one endorsed reproductive cloning, but of the 17 council members, 10 determined they had no moral issue in supporting therapeutic cloning, versus 7 who did. So we sent our recommendation, but the President did not change his decision on that issue. Some states support stem cell research, as well as some universities on their own, when what would be necessary is government support in order to have sufficient funds for this important issue.
Guillermo Santamaria
