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Programmed for Addiction?
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10395 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1993 |
2,897 Words |
| Author
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Richard Restak
Richard Restak is a neurologist and neuropsychiatrist and the
author of eight books on brain and behavior including The
Brain Has a Mind of its Own, published last year. |
NATURE'S MIND
The Biological Roots of Thinking, Emotions,
Sexuality, Language, and Intelligence
Michael S. Gazzaniga
New York: Basic Books, 1992
256 pp., $25.00
Michael Gazzaniga is a man in the grips of "a passion which seems only to intensify with age": to explore the biological roots of human thought and emotion. Director of the Center for Neurobiology at the University of California at Davis, Gazzaniga believes the brain sciences can now explain such complicated issues as sexuality, language, intelligence, addictions, and temperament. He argues that the environment exerts an influence upon circuits built into the human brain over millions of years of evolution.
The strong form of the argument is that an organism comes delivered into this world with all the complexity it will ever have already built into it. In the case of the modern brain, a range of circuits that enable a variety of behavioral and cognitive strategies become matched with an environmental challenge and the selection process starts. What looks to be learning is in fact the organism searching through its library of circuits and accompanying strategies that will best allow it to respond to the challenge.
Selection theory provides an appealing compromise between the environmentalist argument--which holds that the mind is nothing more than, in John Lock's phrase, a "blank slate" upon which experience is written--and the belief that all thought and emotion is determined for us ahead of time by our genes. A popular compromise between these two extremes holds that some aspects of human thought and behavior (our capacity for language) are based on genetic processes, while variations (the language we actually learn), depend upon the language environment in which we grow up.
Recently, selectionists have introduced a subtle distinction that shifts the major emphasis to biology.
For the selectionist, the absolute truth is that all we do in life is discover what is already built into our brains. While the environment may shape the way in which any organism develops, it shapes it only as far as preexisting capacities in that organism allow. Thus the environment selects from the built-in options; it does not modify them.
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