Biomedicine on Display

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about neurophysiologist and Nobel Prize winner Ragnar Granit’s essay on the distinction between discovery and understanding as two separate modes of scientific work, which, he suggested, are differentially distributed throughout a scientist’s life-course — young researchers are impatient to discover something new, whereas older scientists are more interested in getting insight, he suggested.

Even more interesting, in my view, is Granit’s thoughts about how researchers ‘keep track’ and ‘take care’ of their identity in order to achieve understanding and insight:

By “keeping track of one’s identity” I mean cultivating the talents of listening to the workings of one’s own mind, separating minor diversions from main lines of thought, and gratefully accepting what the secret process of automatic creation delivers.

In all creative work, including scientific work, Granit said, there is ”need for a good deal of time for exercising the talent of listening to oneself”, and this self-listening is “often more profitable than listening to others”. Listening to oneself is at any rate more important than going to scientific seminars and conferences, which the ageing neurophysiologist thought was a pretty overrated activity:

There are so many of these meetings nowadays that people can keep on drifting round the world and soon be pumped dry of what is easier to empty than to refill.

Granit was aware of the possibility that some colleagues might regard his notion of ’keeping track of one’s identity’ as idiosyncratic. But he also knew others, who, like himself, when looking back on their lives, might recognise ”a main line of personal identity in the choice of their labors”. And maybe these colleagues would also agree with his own conviction that “if one can take care of one’s identity, it, in turn, will take care of one’s scientific development”.

Today, such ideas seem largely anathematic. Any graduate school programme will tell their students how important it is to engage with others, go to seminars, attend conferences, and read the literature systematically. Period. Few, if any, graduate school programmes would tell their students to listen to their own selves and take care of their scholarly identity.

The reason I find Granit’s idea of ‘keeping track’ and ‘taking care’ of oneself interesting is that it is pretty close to the ancient notion of ‘care of self’. I don’t know if Granit read Socrates or the Stoics or about the Epicureans. But his ideas are close to the notions of ’spiritual excercises’ and ’souci de soi’, which have been reintroduced into contemporary philosophy by Pierre Hadot, and later by Michel Foucault.

Such ideas — whether expressed by French philosophers or Finland-Swedish medical Nobel Prize winners — are definitely not on the agenda of present-day research governance agencies, who view researchers in more neo-liberal terms. It’s also a far cry away from the contemporary tradition of social studies of science, which shuns the idea of researchers taking their destiny in their own hands.

Just saw this on Danny’s blog. Artist meta-comment on entire museum: 

The former London home of Sigmund and Anna Freud, now the Freud Museum, is enveloped in a cats cradle of rope made of dolls’ hair. Standing as it does on a prosperous suburban street of imposing redbrick villas, the bound house looks like a scene from a dream itself, a dream of home denied. Such dreams are typically untangled on a therapeutic descendant of the very couch that sits inside the museum; the fairytale Rapunzel tress-ropes also suggest the kind of psychological decoding of myth and culture that Freud indulged in.

It’s interesting how an entire exhibition can transform and be experienced in a whole new way through one persons art-work derived from subjective associations. She hasn’t changed anything in the exhibition, just put the doll-hair-ropes around like a giant meta-comment.

Prompted by a recent guest blog post on the Scientific American site, I’ve just revisited an almost 40 year old essay titled “Discovery and understanding” by the Finland-Swedish neurophysiologist and Nobel Prize Winner Ragnar Granit.

Growing out of a talk (see video here) that Granit gave at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in 1972, the essay was published in the Annual Review of Physiology later the same year. I remember dimly having read it when I was a PhD student a few years after it was published, but apparently I didn’t really appreciate it then — and didn’t understand the deeper significance of the message either.

But now I think I’ve got it. And it’s quite interesting for discussions about the culture of science, especially the contemporary political emphasis on scientific competition and race for publication.

The thrust of Granit’s argument is the distinction between discovery and understanding (and later insight) as two separate modes of scientific work that are differentially distributed throughout a scientist’s life-course. Discovery is all-important in the younger, passionate, phase of a scientist’s life, he suggests, whereas understanding and insight is the mark of more mature and detached scientists (which is probably why I didn’t understand the deeper significance of his essay when I was 30).

Young scientist are, he writes, characterised by an “impatient passion” to make discoveries. They want to ”see something that others have not seen”. They are on the outlook for what’s new, unexpected, and exciting, they are ”ruled by ambition”, they crave for “immediate satisfaction” and “instantaneous excitement”.

It’s easy to believe, he continues, that this passionate quest for discovery is the goal of science, partly because discoveries perpetually initiate new lines of experimental work, but partly also because they are more visible through popular media: “It catches the eye and, in the present age [1972] is pushed in the limelight by various journals devoted to the popularization of science”.

But even if the history of science is full of important discoveries that have “led to major advances”, they are nevertheless not what science is fundamentally about; they are just the means for the “real goal” of scientific work, which is “to try to realize some fundamental ideas about biological structures and their functions, that is to promote understanding”. And “gradually understanding will ripen into insight”.

If Granit had lived today he would probably have been horrified by the fetishisation of long publication lists, impact factors, and bibliometrics:

This attitude [understanding and insight] toward scientific work has the advantage of permitting the experimenters to devote themselves quietly to their labors without filling various journals with preliminary notes to obtain minor priorities

Was the distinction between discovery and understanding valid back in 1972? If so, is it still valid? Is there still a divide between the young postdoc’s passionate quest for rapid discovery and fast publication, on the one hand, and the older professor’s slower and more detached search for insight, on the other? And if so, is it only a question of psychology and individual ageing, or are there other, structural, factors at play?

My old interest in biomedical identity, individuality and personality was stimulated by an opinion piece on Buddhism and the brain by physician David Weisman in last week’s online Seed.

Weisman discusses the apparent similarities between some of Buddhism’s core ideas and the alleged findings of neurology and neuroscience with respect to the non-existence of a unified ‘self’.

On this convergent view, the ‘self’ is fragmented and impermanent; what ’exist’ are constantly changing emotions, perceptions and thoughts. The idea of a permanent, constant ‘self’ behind it is an illusion.

It struck me that this is not an uncommon view among humanities and social science scholars today. And that several influential Western philosophers — Hume, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Anscombe and Daniel Dennett — can actually be mobilised to support it. For example, Nietzsche denied the existence of a ‘self’ in On the Genealogy of Morals: “There is no ‘being’ behind doing … The ‘doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed”".

A more recent argument against a unified ‘self’ is Derek Parfit’s suggestion, in Reasons and Persons (1984), that a stream of psychophysical events is all there is and that it is therefore unnecessary to introduce a person that has this stream of consciousness.

The views of Nietzsche, Parfit and Buddhists evidently contradict the everyday notion of a ‘self’ (or an ‘I’, a ’he’ or a ‘she’) lying behind ‘our’ emotions, sensations, perceptions and thoughts (‘our’ is here put in inverted commas, of course, because on this view there are no ‘we’ who ’have’ these mental events).

But is this attack on the everyday notion of ‘self’ sustainable? Is the notion of a fragmented stream of mental events something we can actually live by? Or is the mundane notion the basis of our existance as humans?

Whatever scientific, religious and philosophical arguments can be levelled against the notion of a unified ‘self’, I believe the mundane understanding of ‘self’ is the only viable possibility.

Imagine a social world in which personal pronouns are made meaningless, a world in which it doesn’t  make sense to think in terms of ’I believe this’ or ‘you are entitled to your opinion”. A social world in which we aren’t able to think about ’his feelings’ or about ‘her appreciation of music’. A world in which human agency, ethical responsibility, mutual trust and responsibility are all meaningless notions because there is no ‘self’ behind the stream of consciousness and gestures.

One contemporary philosopher, who systematically argues against the notion of the fragmented ‘self’ and for a more mundane understanding of ‘self’, based on close readings of ancient philosophers, is Richard Sorabji . In Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life and Death (Chicago UP 2006), Sorabji claims that the ‘self’ is not an undetectable soul or ego, “but an embodied individual whose existence is plain to see”. The ‘self’ is ”something that owns not only a consciousness but also a body”.

The point here is that the understanding of the notion of ‘self’ changes when we think of it in terms of the embodied individual. And I think this might give a clue to how the contemporary understanding of the ‘self’ based in recent neuroscientific findings can be interpreted in terms of a unified ‘self’ — namely that from a materialist point of view it doesn’t make sense to think in terms of a fragmented and impermanent ‘self simply because the material basis of the neuroscientific ‘self’ is a series of signalling processes among a permanent set of interconnected neurons.

Like biography, autobiography has always been an important genre for science communication — like Francis Crick’s autobiography What Mad Pursuit (1988).

A couple of decades ago, only a tiny scientific elite had, in practice, access to present themselves autobiographically in the form of book-length memoirs and interviews in newspaper and magazines.

Science communication through self-presentation was thus largely restricted to famous life scientists, medical doctors and their famous patients.

Now, thanks to the web, and especially social web technologies, public self-presentation has become an opportunity for the global biotechnoscientific multitude.

Medical and nursing students, life science PhD students, and all kinds of ordinary patients are blogging, facebooking and twittering accounts of themselves in dialy work in labs and clinics or their experiences of being medicalised.

No doubt, these new practices of communication and self-presentation are contribution to changing public understandings of biomedical culture and its place in culture at large.

This conference promises to inspire to more thinking along these lines.

Patrick Crowley, Kerstin Fest, Rachel MagShamhráin and Laura Rascaroli at the University College Cork are inviting papers about new media, film and “new theoretical approaches to autobiography post-Lejeune“, as they put it, for a conference titled ‘Technologies of the Self: New Departures in Self-Inscription’, which they are organising 2-3 September in Cork, Ireland.

In an era in which self-expression has undergone an exponential growth fuelled by technological innovation, most importantly, perhaps, the creation of an internet that hosts an ever-increasing number of blogs, tweets, personal webpages and other forms of audiovisual self-expression such as YouTube, it seems timely to think again about the phenomenon of writing, filming, recording and, indeed, publishing or publicizing the self: what innovations in self inscription have recent decades witnessed, what continuities and discontinuities can be traced, what changes in attitudes to the self and to self-revelation or exposure have been witnessed, how have developments in the channels of broadcasting altered how, what and why we engage in various, if always elusive acts of self-expression, are there now new practitioners of self-inscription because of these changes, and, finally, with so many outlets and such a market for narratives of self, how is such material consumed?

The organisers particularly welcome 250-300 words abtracts on the following themes:

- new theories of autobiography: thinking beyond Lejeune
- technologies and self-inscription: the Internet and new media innovations
- the avant-garde: experimentation and the changing boundaries of the self
- on-line writing and freedom of expression: the blogosphere as political third space
- auto-ethnographies: new ways of recording the self in its sociocultural context
- issues of veridicality
- consuming selves: the appetite for self expression
etc

Send abstract proposals to self.inscription@gmail.com, before 4 April. And please consult the conference website, http://www.ucc.ie/en/german/events/selfinscription.

Studies of biomedicine (a subarea of science studies) has long been defined in terms of social studies of biomedicine (social studies of science). Over the years, some, but alas not many, scholars (including myself) have tried to infuse some awareness of the individual and personal dimensions of biomedicine.

Now, an interdisciplinary conference titled ‘Turning Personal’ at the University of Manchester, 16-17 September, promises to take the discussion a step forward by providing a forum for the discussion of how social research can incorporate more complex and multi-layered accounts of personal lives into academic writings and analyses:

It has been argued that we now have a sociology without real people and the same may be said of some sister disciplines and although there have always been threads of work which re-imagine the personal (eg biographical work) there is more to be done and said about capturing some of the more detailed aspects of personal lives, as well as theorising personal life more cogently.

Topics include (e.g.) emotions and emotional spaces, escape(s) from intimacy, relationships/ relationality/ connectedness, virtual lives and second lives, impersonal lives, writing / researching / theorising the personal. Keynote speakers include Carol Smart (Uni Manchester), who works on how people conduct their personal lives, Tia DeNora (Uni Exeter), who is interested in musical selves in musical spaces, and Ann Phoenix (Institute of Education, London). Send abstract submission (here) to victoria.higham@manchester.ac.uk before 1 April.