An interesting take on dualism, btw:
In a very important recent book outlining progress in scientific studies of the human pre-frontal cerebrum, the distinguished Russian-American neuropsychologist, Elkhonon Goldberg1, discusses the problem of understanding that brain structures and processes are intimately bound up with personality:
“This raises” he says “the broad issue of general public awareness of cognitive impairment. Although rhetorically, the educated public understand today that cognition is a function of the brain, this abstraction often fails to inform specific, real-life situations. As a result, Cartesian dualism is alive and well when it comes to everyday encounters with brain-damaged people. This naïve dualism is evidenced, even at the level of healthcare policy-making and health coverage, when physical health is treated seriously whilst so-called mental health is given short-shrift.
Everyday public attitudes betray a sharp division between physical and non-physical symptoms and between physical and non-physical body organs. Problems with vision or hearing, limp weakness on one side of the body, will unfailingly be perceived as physical and will engender sympathy and readiness to help. The bodily nature of these symptoms will be immediately grasped but, curiously, even so, mostly people will be very slow to attribute these problems to the brain.
By contrast, patients with higher order cognitive impairments are often denied the sympathy accorded people with physical infirmity, and are treated instead in moralistic, almost puritanical terms. Forget the hapless criminals. Consider the common situation of a demented elderly individual whose life has been an example of civic responsibility and moral rectitude. Now she is old and very forgetful. Having diagnosed early dementia, I am trying to explain the implications of my findings to the eager family members. I tell them that their mother suffers from amnesia but her forgetfulness is caused by brain shrinkage; that she cannot help it; that it's likely to get worse and that they have to be patient with their loved one. The family members listen intently; they nod; they seem to understand - and then comes an irate comment: “But how come I give her breakfast in the morning and she comes back asking for her breakfast again?” When I encounter this lack of understanding I feel like tipping my hat to my friend Oliver Sacks, who has done more than anyone else to enlighten the general public about the effects of neurological injury on cognition. I urge people to read “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”.
But if the neurological nature of impaired memory, perception or language usually can be grasped by the general public, the executive deficit caused by frontal lobe injury almost never is grasped. Point to the patient's impulsivity, volatility, indifference, lack of initiative, and the common response will be “This is not his brain, this is his personality!” This is total retreat three-and-a-half centuries back to Cartesian dualism, as if “personality” were an utterly extracranial phenomenon. And the notion of “personality”, of course, is something that, on a par with an apple pie and spring water, carries moralistic, righteous connotations. If you were born into an honest family and went to a good school, then how dare you not have an upright personality!
It is my hope that this book will put “personality” and related expressions of the mind where they belong, inside the brain, so to speak, in the eyes of the general public. “By helping accomplish this, the book will help correct the unintended public insensitivity and sometimes outright cruelty, toward the most devastating of all forms of brain damage, the damage to the frontal lobes.”
Katherine
