The undiscovered mind: How the human brain defies replication, medication, and explanation, by John Horgan

In The End of Science, I argued that particle physics, cosmology, evolutionary biology, and other fields of pure science have entered an era of diminishing returns (Horgan, 1997). Although scientists will continue refining and extending current theories and applying their knowledge in the realms of technology and medicine, they may never again achieve insights into nature as profound as quantum mechanics, relativity theory, the big bang theory, natural selection, and DNA-based genetics. One reasonable objection to the book was that mind-related research, of all current scientific enterprises, has the most revolutionary potential, and it deserves a more thorough treatment than it received in The End of Science. I responded to this objection by writing a book that focused on “mind-science” (Horgan, 1999). The Undiscovered Mind considered not only the debate over consciousness, which was the primary focus of The End of Science; it also reviewed the record of fields such as clinical psychology, psychiatry, behavioral genetics, evolutionary psychology, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience. I contended that there has been little progress in understanding the mind, replicating its properties, or treating its disorders—especially compared with the extravagant claims made by proponents of certain approaches. In this article, I summarize some of my book’s main points. In The End of Science (Horgan, 1997), I coined the term “ironic science” to describe science that never gets a firm grip on reality and thus does not converge on the truth. Ironic science does not make the kind of literal, factual statements about the world that can be either confirmed or invalidated through empirical means; it is thus more akin to philosophy, literary criticism, or even literature than to true science. Ironic science crops up in the so-called hard sciences, such as physics (an obvious example of ironic science is a theory that postulates the existence of other universes in addition to our own). But ironic science is most pervasive in fields that address the human mind. Theories of human nature never really die; they just go in and out of fashion. Often, old ideas are simply repackaged in more palatable forms. Phrenology is reincarnated as cognitive modularism. Sociobiology mutates into evolutionary psychology. Eugenics, stripped (for the most part) of its unsavory political tenets, evolves into behavioral genetics. Old treatments for mental illness linger, too. Shock treatments and lobotomies, although pushed to the sidelines of psychiatry in recent decades by Prozac and lithium, are still prescribed for severe mental illness (Sackheim, Devanand, & Nobler, 1995; Vertosick, 1997). The variability and malleability of minds enormously complicate the search for general principles of human nature. The evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, of Harvard University, has pointed out that no field of biology can match the precision and power of physics, because unlike electrons or neutrons, all organisms are unique (Mayr, 1988). But the differences between two E. coli bacteria or two leafcutter ants are trivial compared with the differences between any two humans, even those who are genetically identical. Each individual mind may also change dramatically when its owner is spanked, learns the alphabet, reads Thus Spoke Zarathustra, takes LSD, falls in love, gets divorced, undergoes Jungian dream therapy, or suffers a stroke. One striking symptom of mind-science’s lack of progress is the persistence of psychoanalysis. Freud’s legacy has sustained brutal attacks over the past decade (Crews, 1998). Nevertheless, millions of people still receive psychotherapy based—at least indirectly—on Freudian tenets. Moreover, many intellectuals—including not only French philosophers but also scientists who supposedly should know better—still profess admiration for psychoanalysis (Edelman, 1992; Fisher & Greenberg, 1996; Kandel, 1998). Even scientists who disavow Freudian concepts still employ them as benchmarks for evaluating newer ideas (LeDoux, 1996; Schacter, 1996). Psychoanalysis has persisted not because it has been empirically validated—of course, it has not been—but because science has not yielded an obviously superior explanation of the mind and its disorders. Anti-Freudians argue, in effect, that psychoanalysis has no more scientific standing than phlogiston, the pseudosubstance that 18thcentury physicists believed was released during combustion. But the reason physicists do not still debate the phlogiston hypothesis is that it was rendered utterly obsolete by the discovery of oxygen and other advances in chemistry and thermodynamics. A century’s worth of research in psychology, psychiatry, genetics, neuroscience, and adjacent fields has not yielded a paradigm powerful enough to obviate Freud, once and for all. If psychoanalysis is the equivalent of phlogiston, as the anti-Freudians claim, so are all its would-be successors. PSYCHOTHERAPY AND THE DODO HYPOTHESIS After reading the first draft of this article, the editor of this journal objected that experimental psychology has produced an “extraordinarily detailed understanding” of vision, memory, and language. But as many observers have pointed out, the findings of psychology have not been drawn together into a coherent, compelling paradigm. The neuroscientists V.S. Ramachandran and J.J. Smythies complained recently that the history of psychology “has been characterized by an embarrassingly long sequence of ‘theories,’ each really nothing more than a passing fad that rarely outlived the person who proposed it” (Ramachandran & Smythies, 1997, p. 667). Perhaps the major application of psychology is psychotherapy. One would hope that as psychology progresses, it would lead to refinements in psychotherapy that make it more effective. In fact, few psychotherapists practice classic Freudian psychoanalysis any more. It has yielded to other, supposedly more “modern” talk therapies, such Address correspondence to John Horgan, 241 Route 403, Garrison, NY 10524; e-mail: [email protected]. PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE