Neuroscience has advanced by leaps and bounds in recent decades, but there are still many unresolved questions about what goes on in our heads.
What is the soul and, if it exists, how does it differ from consciousness,
what form do thoughts have, what someone's personality is made of
... the missing links between the psychological and the neurobiological are the protagonists of the latter Siri Hustvedt's collection of essays,
The Mirages of Certainty
(Seix Barral), where
and the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature in 2019
criticizes computational theory of mind, the gender ideology that exists in the scientific community
and thinkers like the popular
Steven Pinker.
How did your interest in the brain start?
When I was in college, I became interested in Christian mystical states and their relationship to epilepsy and migraine.
This is how I began to read about the connection between mind and body.
At some point I read the story of Phineas Gage, a railroad man who had a terrible accident: a steel bar went through his brain and came out the other side of his head.
He recovered from that injury but after the accident he became a different person, his personality changed, his morals.
I was very impressed with how what we call the physical brain relates to the mind.
I started reading about aphasia and wrote my doctoral thesis on it.
But in the 90s I realized that I had not paid enough attention to the biological part and decided that I wanted to learn about neuroscience.
It fascinated me and I haven't stopped since.
Several decades have passed since then and the models in neuroscience have changed.
Some have finished, they have been exhausted.
What model are you referring to?
Computational theory of mind is out of date.
It is an idea strongly influenced by Descartes, who firmly believed that mind and body were two separate substances.
It is something closely related to Artificial Intelligence and with that idea that the mind is like a
software
, a battery that you can stick to the body.
I do not think that's true.
Biology is something very complex, there is still a lot that we do not know.
We are embodied subjects, we are within a body.
Mind and body are not different things.
Other criticisms that the book goes through is the weight of certain stories, such as the Darwinian, about some ideas that are still held about the differences between men and women.
I'm a fan of Darwin, but I think some of his ideas about sex and gender were wrong.
He generalized the idea that the male was more promiscuous and the female more sensible, and that idea made its way into science.
When you take a look at the animal kingdom you realize that there are various ways of relating, gestating and reproducing.
It is a much richer field than Darwin said.
The idea of evolution is very important in science and there are different ways to interpret it.
There is neo-Darwinism, represented by Richard Dawkins, the author of
The selfish gene
, whom I criticize.
Gender ideology has been a part of science for a long time.
We do not escape from it.
That fantasy of absolute objectivity does not exist, it is a dream.
But most people do believe that science is free from ideology.
Yes, and that is something that science promotes, it is presented like this.
I deeply admire scientists.
There are wonderful achievements, like vaccines.
At the same time, I think there is this idea of purity and objectivity that can be misleading.
Scientists are sometimes given a confidence that can be misleading.
Geneticist Evelyn Fox Keller, whom I deeply admire, has drawn great criticism in that regard.
She knew how to see how ideology can shape perception in science.
Our perceptions are based on our expectations, which in turn come from past experiences.
He also criticizes Pinker.
Pinker is wrong.
What fascinates me is the popular perception of someone like him.
He writes in such a close way so that his ideas are understood and are more accessible, he has that pose of a normal type, of any citizen;
count things easily.
But my feeling is that when you review where most of his ideas come from, from evolutionary psychology, you realize that they are very ideological and drink from the eugenic, from the idea that the gene is dry (not wet and molecular) and it fixes human beings, not only in terms of gender, but also in terms of race.
That whole argument is quite questionable as a scientific argument.
The discipline of behavioral genetics comes from a name, Francis Galton, and his ideas regarding the dilemma between nature and nurture.
If you follow that current you end up reaching thoughts that are not very pleasant.
What annoys me the most is that there are very few people who have put things on the table for Pinker because of those ideas.
In the world of science it has many criticisms, but not so many outside.
This theory about the innate fits very well with the capitalist discourse, which always tends to make people believe that what happens to them depends on them, as if the system did not influence.
Yes, this dichotomy is false, separating upbringing and education is ridiculous.
If you argue that nature is what dominates, that everything is in genes and dna and that this determines who we are, it is tremendously practical for capitalism.
It comes in handy because by that logic, whatever you do, you won't be able to change anything.
The idea that we are fixed, that we are what our genes are, eliminates the political part of the human being.
It is an idea very of our time, of neoliberalism, where everything is privatized.
The idea that if you have a depression from working for an eternity for a paltry salary it is because you have a tendency to depression and therefore it is your problem and your fault is something pernicious.
We are collective beings, we depend on others.
What is the soul to you?
I don't think it is the kind of soul that has been sold to us in western society since the Greeks.
I believe that there is transcendence in human life and that there is still much to know.
We don't quite understand the mind-body problem.
Margaret Avendish believed that consciousness was everywhere and this idea has become popular lately.
Let's look at quantum physics, which tells us that two very distant particles communicate, how do they do it?
We do not know.
There are many mysteries to be solved in nature.
And a certain intellectual humility in the face of it will help us to understand everything.
Intellectual humility is not playing dumb, but recognizing how much we still have to know.
In your book you criticize the arrogant title essays, smug statements and easy statements that oversimplify science, are there too many popular science books?
In popular culture, science tends to be thought of as one thing.
But scientists fight each other, there are different positions.
There is good science and bad science.
But since bad science tends to be simplistic and reductionist, that is what often remains in the media.
There are also very good science journalists capable of explaining and understanding complex ideas.
What I am looking for is a certain mental flexibility, that we are able to see a problem and approach it from different perspectives.
The problem of the mind, for example: you have to try to see it from philosophy, neuroscience, psychoanalysis;
only then can we enhance knowledge, not reduce it.
We tend to think that science is at the top and the humanities at the bottom, but I believe that scientists have a lot to learn from philosophy and literature.
Some scientists have a philosophical atrophy, they have not bothered to think beyond when it comes to tackling the big problems.
The great physicists of the 20th century were also philosophers.
A few years ago he wrote 'The trembling woman or the story of my nerves', about some episodes of tremors that he suffered, what did you think of Angela Merkel's?
Someone in Germany told me that she had read my book, which made me very excited.
My experience was very similar to his from what I could see: your body trembles and you cannot control it.
I did not have a definitive neurological diagnosis.
The therapeutic part of writing the book was realizing that I was the trembling woman, instead of thinking that something foreign was attacking me and causing the fears.
Thinking like this does not free you from the symptoms but it makes you integrate it as part of your story, it is something that helps.
I don't know why, but for me it was quite useful.
It helped me to see their tremors because despite having lived it, I had never seen it in other people.
I love it.
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