Can we explain everything with our brains? “Broad Ideas”, by Arte, questions the specialist Albert Moukheiber

Is called ” neuromania Or this ability we have today to bring everything back to the brain. “Why does our brain destroy the environment? »,« How are certain areas of the brain responsible for procrastination? “. So many questions that we think we can only answer through the functioning of the brain, the study of which could explain everything: why people are lazy, eat fat, fail at school or vote left or right …

Are our habits and our brains connected?

” We see it a lot in the media, it’s very popular, that’s your brain when you drink coffee in the morning […] it’s kind of an image clearance sale, we will show colorful brains and explain this or that “Explains Albert Moukheiber, a brain specialist who wants to warn about the media and political excesses of his discipline.

If yesterday the brain was still a mysterious organ, and the focus was more on genetics, it seems that lately it is at the center of all analyzes, particularly thanks to neuroscience. This discipline, which emerged in the early 1960s in the United States, experienced significant growth at the dawn of the 1980s, particularly thanks to improved imaging and mapping of our brain activity.

Intertwining of the social and the organic

Over the decades, the study of the brain has tried to explain and justify a large number of behaviors, considering that only the biological was responsible for individual actions, but that these could be overcome, modified, in particular thanks to the neuroplasticity of the brain, or the ability of the our brain to change according to the context in which it is located (and what we say to ourselves). In short, we are responsible for the impact of our actions on our individual and collective lives, and these are the result of the activity of our brain, which it is up to us to control, train to improve our life and the world.

However, contrary to what we think when we observe, in the media in particular, the brain does not work by zones (colored in the image to make them visible), which would be activated only by an action or an emotion, but as a more complex network. , each of which can be induced by an infinite number of causes. This is called the intertwining of the social and the biological. Or how, for example, the context also influences the brain reaction. Albert Moukheiber explains, for example, that the results are inevitably skewed when we analyze the behavior of the brain of a person who slide his Power supply Facebook under certain conditions: in this case the analysis conditions necessarily differ, the person is lying down, in a machine that makes noise, in a cold place.

The impossibility of measuring the feeling of love

In the same way that we cannot grasp the physiological experience of love only with the emotion physically felt, since there are also other criteria to be taken into account when it happens: what we say to ourselves, what we feel, criteria that differ from one person to another. ‘other. There will never be brain images that can capture a universal feeling of love. In this, the experience and experience of each one also counts a lot, and it is something eminently difficult to measure.

We cannot therefore explain everything with the analysis of the brain, and its activity cannot fully define us. And this is where the limits of the study of our gray matter reveal themselves.

It is not just a matter of will

For Albert Moukheiber, the cognitive abilities of individuals and the neuroplasticity of the brain were transformed into a sort of magic wand to entrust all the responsibility for many often social and complex topics to individual behavior “Under the pretext that we are solely responsible, this consists, for example, of encouraging people to save water by taking shorter showers to save resources, and thus saving the climate, when we ignore the 9 euro flights of some airlines. Because it’s all a matter of will …

Therefore, the capabilities of our brains are an excellent excuse to blame us for many systemic problems that society as a whole cannot solve. A fascinating, educational and accessible topic, brilliantly explained in less than 30 minutes, to be reviewed on the website ofart.

To hear Albert Moukheiber talk about the brain, go to the Youtube channel tonight “Broad ideas”.

Photo credit: Albert Moukheiber in Broad Ideas / ARTE.tv screenshot