All is in the title

Being a researcher in Neuroscience, I have always thought that the brain is a fascinating system to study. Emotions, thoughts, senses, we now know that everything going on around your body is fully and without any doubts controlled by this one and a half kilo organ.

This simple statement, which is the result of several centuries of research in the field have enormous consequences on aspects like ethics, religion and our self-consciouness.

Before going in the details, I want you to know that I am completely open to discussion and ready to peacefully argue about all that it is gonna get out of my mind.

Anyway, let me explain my point of view and why I think we underestimate the incoming role of Neuroscience in our society.

One of the thing which can be a big surprise for a new guy coming in the field is that most of the neuroscientist now thinks that everything is simply chemical and electricity. There is now a certain agreement that all that you commonly use to describe someone: personality, emotions, fear, thoughts, is encrypted, somewhere chemically in the brain. So in short the concept of a soul which could live apart from the body has more or less completely disapear among the experts.

Now I think a good example will show you how we came to this materialistic idea.

Before being one really famous figure in Neuroscience, Phineas Gage was an ordinary railroad worker in the nineteenth century until he survices one really peculiar accident: an iron rode went through the frontal part of his cortex (as you can see on the picture). But, unfortunately for Phineas, this become really interesting when you learn that his personality changed a lot. From an industrious worker, he became a surly, combative man, quite different from the person he was before. This case, now in every neuroscience handbook, clearly showed how personality can be localised in a certain part of the brain. This example and tons of others convinced us of the fact that, if there is a soul, it’s engraved in chemicals.

However, if you leave the close circle of scientists, if it’s not for religious reasons, you will see that most people refuse such an idea. Neuroscience is already pretty much unpopular because it tries to answear questions that we don’t want to face.

I could write down a simple list :

• If my personality is fully chemicals and electricity, where is my own freedom?
• When I die, all of this brain activity just go down and disapear? Well, then, it means that I simply disapear in a snap?
• So we can change someone personality using a few chemicals?
• What is Love then, a few drops of NGF (Nerve Growth Factor) secreted in the blood for about one year, and which make you brain goes crazy?
• What about a criminal? Should we consider something is malfunctioning in his brain?

All of those question are related to the freedom one. Everytime I start chatting about Neuroscience, all of those questions scare.
Sooner or later, we will start to answear them. It will be probably sooner than we expect: Neuroscience is now receiving massive funding because of the growing old population in western world and the importance of Alzeihmer and Parkinson diseases.

But people are not ready because it touches our very own privacy, our very own freedom.