Shufflebrain

To the holist, mind depends on the brain as a whole; the mental cosmos cannot be mapped like the surface of the earth or broken into subunits, this bit going here, that bit over there. Historically, holists have based their beliefs on the survival of cognition and the retention of memory after massive injury to the brain. Structuralists conceded that the brain's programs are not easily found; but holists consistently failed to link their theories to physical reality. To me, structuralist that I was, holism looked at best like metaphysics, and at worst like magic.

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Let me say a few words about the genesis of my former faith in structuralism, and about anatomy as it is practiced in the latter half of the 20th Century. Anatomy of course includes what rests on the dissecting table, but the scope of the science goes far beyond this. Anatomy is an attempt to explain living events by observing, analyzing, and, if necessary, conceptualizing the body's components, whether the object of study happens to be a genital organ or the genes within its cells, whether the search calls for a sophisticated Japanese electron microscope or the stout crucible steel blade of a Swedish butcher knife. Anatomy rests upon a belief shared by many in our culture, in and out of science. Robert Traver's Anatomy of a Murder and Ashley Montagu's Anatomy of Swearing express metaphorically what many in our day embrace epistemologically: in order to find out how something really works, take it apart. What could seem reasonable than that?

As a student entering science in the 1950s, during some of the most exciting moments in intellectual history, I could see no basic philosophical difference between what anatomists were seeking to discover and what other scientists, with different titles, were actually finding out about the cell and the molecular side of life. In the 1950s and 1960s, scientists in large numbers and from diverse fields had begun accepting the anatomist's already ancient credo: physiological functions explicitly and specifically reduce to the interplay between discrete structural entities. Structure was suddenly being used to account for events that only a generation before seemed beyond reason: how genes maintain a molecular record of heredity; how muscles contract, cells divide, the sperm penetrates the egg; how a cell's membrane actively picks and chooses from the body's milieu what shall and shall not pass across its boundary; how an irritated nerve cell generates and propagates a neural signal and then transmits the message to the next cell in the network; how cells fuel and refuel their insatiable demands for energy. Those investigators who abided by the structural faith were coming up with answers any child of our thing-bound culture could easily comprehend--and they were winning the Nobel Prizes in the process. The intellectual environment in which I grew up vindicated every fundamentalism of my chosen field, virtually everywhere anyone chose to look. Everywhere except the brain.

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Judging from artifacts, club-wielding cave men seemed to know that something essential to behavior existed inside the skull of a foe or quarry. Physicians of ancient Egypt correlated malfunctioning minds with diseased brains. Gladiators wore helmets, and those who lost them sometimes contributed personally to the early anecdotal wisdom about the brain's biology. Phrenologists, seeking to map the facets of the human personality over the surface of the cerebrum, laid the very foundations for modern neuroanatomy. High-velocity rifle bullets, which could inflict discrete wounds, afforded mid-nineteenth century battlefield surgeons with insights into the brain that they and others pursued at the laboratory bench. And the study of the nervous system in our own times can be traced directly to the science and surgery of Victorian and Edwardian Europe.