Carole Wade
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what happiness is in the first place? How do we know where love is found in the brain,
when love can mean the romantic infatuation of Romeo and Juliet, the abiding attach-
ment of Prince Charles and Camilla, or the fond bickering of Ma and Pa Kettle?
Even the simple act of looking at something involves attention, sensory encoding,
memory, pattern recognition, and interpretation. This makes the physical localization of
any mental process a challenge, to say the least. And it helps explain why the simple par-
tition of the brain into a part for this and a part for that keeps falling, well, apart. As Uttal
notes, the more complex a psychological process, the less likely it is to be associated
uniquely with a circumscribed region of the brain. It is far more likely that it involves the
collective interaction of multiple circuits that communicate back and forth in highly com-
plicated and perhaps, in some instances, even unknowable ways.
Even if we could locate discrete centers or brain circuits associated with discrete psycho-
logical operations or mental states, we would have to deal with the fact that brain circuitry
and structure vary from person to person. Because of genetic differences and because the
experiences and sensations of a lifetime are constantly altering the brain’s neural networks,
each brain is unique. Those nice schematic brain illustrations that you find in every psy-
chology textbook are necessary for teaching purposes, but they are misleading because no
such brain actually exists. String musicians have larger than average areas associated with
musical production, and the earlier in life they start to play, the larger these areas become
(Jancke, Schlaug, & Steinmetz, 1997). Cab drivers tend to have larger than average areas
in the hippocampus associated with visual representations of the environment (Maguire
et al., 2000). In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, Roger Sperry (1982, p. 1225)
put it well: “The individuality inherent in our brain networks makes that of fingerprints
or facial features gross and simple by comparison.” In brain-scan research, however, such
individuality is often ignored. Instead, scans from a number of individuals are averaged or
pooled. The result may be an apparently well-demarcated active brain area that does not
actually correspond to the pattern of activity in any of the individual brains that were
studied.
Perhaps the most important challenge in brain-scan studies has to do with interpret-
ing the results. This is a critical issue for students to understand. At this point in time,
brain scans tell us only that something is happening at a particular site or sites; despite
their precision, they fail to tell us what is happening, either mentally or physiologically.
If you know that certain parts of the brain are activated when you think hot thoughts
of your beloved, what, exactly, does that tell you about love, or sex, or how they are
“processed” in the brain? One researcher (cited in Wheeler 1998) drew this analogy:
A researcher might scan the brain of gum-chewing volunteers and find out which parts
of their brains are active as they chomp away, but that does not mean the researcher has
located the brain’s “gum-chewing center.” Similarly, if a scan shows that a brain area
“lights up” when someone is doodling, that does not mean you have found the doodling
center.
These examples may seem silly, but analogous errors are sometimes made in neuroscience.
A few years back, a prominent researcher reported that he had found where spiri tual experi-
ences get processed, and the area promptly got dubbed by reporters as the “God spot.”
Some writers even speculated that the reason people become atheists or agnostics is that
their God spot is less developed than in religious people. Talk about oversimplification!