The conceptions of the human brain have changed considerably over the past 300 years, since the birth of modern science and the emergence of capitalist society. The way in which the brain has been perceived has historically been coloured by the existing religious and philosophical prejudices. For the Church, the mind was “God’s house”. The mechanistic materialism of the 18th century regarded it as a clockwork machine. More recently, it has been described as an improbable sum of probabilistic events. In mediaeval times, when the Catholic ideology dominated everything, the soul was said to permeate all portions of the body; brain, body, mind or matter were indistinguishable. With the appearance of Copernicus, Galileo and finally Newton and Descartes, with its views of mechanical materialism, there was a shift in this viewpoint.

For Descartes the world was machine-like, and living organisms merely particular types of clockwork or hydraulic machines. It is this Cartesian machine image which has come to dominate science and to act as the fundamental metaphor legitimating a particular world view, which takes the machine as a model for the living organism and not the reverse. Bodies are indissoluble wholes that lose their essential characteristics when they are taken to pieces. Machines, on the contrary, can be dismantled to be understood and then put back together. Each part serves a separate and analysable function, and the whole operates in a regular manner that can be described by the operation of its separate parts impinging on each other.

At each stage, the image of the brain has faithfully reflected the limitations of the science of the period. The mechanistic world-outlook of the 18th century reflected the fact that the most advanced science of the day was mechanics. Had the great Newton not explained the entire universe in terms of the laws of mechanics? Why then should the human body and mind work in any other way? Descartes accepted this point of view when he described the human body as a kind of automaton. But since Descartes was a devout Catholic, he could not bring himself to accept that the immortal soul could be part of this machine. It had to be something entirely separate, situated in a special area of the brain, the so-called pineal gland. From this obscure corner of the brain, the Spirit took up temporary residence in the body, and gave life to the machine. Steven Rose presents this as the source of the:

“inevitable but fatal disjunction of Western scientific thought, the dogma known in Descartes’ case and that of his successors as ‘dualism’; a dogma which, as we shall see, is the inevitable consequence of any sort of reductionist materialism which does not in the end wish to accept that humans are ‘nothing but’ the motion of their molecules. Dualism was a solution to the paradox of mechanism which would enable religion and reductionist science to stave off for another two centuries their inevitable major contest for ideological supremacy. It was a solution which was compatible with the capitalist order of the day because in weekday affairs it enabled humans to be treated as mere physical mechanisms, objectified and capable of exploitation without contradiction, while on Sundays ideological control could be reinforced by the assertion of the immortality and free will of an unconstrained incorporeal spirit unaffected by the traumas of the workday world to which its body has been subjected.”[53]

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the conception of the mind being the “ghost in the machine” changed. With the advent of electricity, the brain and nervous system were perceived as an electrical maze. At the turn of the century, the telephone exchange analogy emerges, where the brain processes messages from different organs. With the era of mass production came the model of business organisation, as typified in this quote from a child’s encyclopaedia:

Imagine your brain as the executive branch of big business. It is divided, as you see here, into many departments. Seated at the big desk in the headquarters office is the General Manager – your conscious self – with telephone lines running to all departments. Around you are your chief assistants – the Superintendents of Incoming Messages, such as Vision, Taste, Smell, Hearing, and Feeling (the last two hidden behind the central offices). Nearby also are the Superintendents of Outgoing Messages which control Speech and the movement of Arms, Legs, and all other parts of the body. Of course, only the most important messages ever reach your office. Routine tasks such as running the heart, lungs, and stomach, or supervising the minor details of muscular work are carried out by the Managers of Automatic Actions in the Medulla Oblongata and the Manager of Reflex Actions in the Cerebellum. All other departments form what the scientists call Cerebrum.

With the advent of the computer, which can carry out staggering calculations, the parallel with the brain became inevitable. The very way computers stored information was called memory. More and more powerful computers were built. How close could a computer get to the human brain? Eventually, science fiction brought us the Terminator films, where computers had surpassed human intelligence and fought to take over the world. Yet as Steven Rose explains:

Brains do not work with information in the computer sense, but with meaning. And meaning is a historically and developmentally shaped process, expressed by individuals in interaction with their natural and social environment. Indeed, one of the problems of studying memory is precisely that it is a dialectical phenomenon. Because each time we remember, we in some senses do work on and transform our memories; they are not simply being called up from store and, once consulted, replaced unmodified. Our memories are recreated each time we remember.[54]

  1. Rose, S. Molecules and Minds, p. 23.

  2. Rose, S. The Making of Memory, p. 91.