You are a male office worker. Your day begins with the buzz of the alarm, and ends uneventfully back in bed. During the day, you interact with characters in your life, including your son Jack, and Bobo the border collie, who is so insistent on a walk first thing in the morning, that – heaven forfend – you skip coffee. The day progresses, and you experience it in the only place that subjectivity occurs, which is in your brain. It’s this device that neuroscientist Susan Greenfield has chosen to frame her latest wade into brains and consciousness. Each chapter begins with a flourish of sorts, a short portrait of the key moments in this nameless drone’s day. It’s a joyless grind – Fight Club without the fighting. Your avatar’s wife Jane is distant and miserable, perpetually tired, probably clinically depressed. Jack is 14, distant and smells of fags, perpetually lost in a two-dimensional online world. On page 150, it is revealed that your mother-in-law Daisy is living with you and has dementia. Basically, your life sucks.
If this is your actual experience, I’m sorry for your troubles. My expression of sympathy is sincere but of course platitudinous: experience is personal and I can never truly know what it feels like to have such a dreary existence. Our sense of how a newspaper feels in your hands, or what the coffee tastes like, occurs in our neural circuitry.
So far, understanding of the connections between neurons and the electrochemical impulses in our heads remains elusive, and transferring personal experience from the ineffable to the effable has proved hard for neuroscientists. It’s so tricky a scientific concept that some describe it as the “Hard Problem”.
Greenfield is proposing new insights into the problems of consciousness. “Neuronal assemblies” are synchronised flashes of activity in specific networks of brain cells that may correspond to a specific activity. In unpicking the Hard Problem, neuroscientists hunt for “neural correlates of consciousness”, meaning the minimum amount of specific brain activity that corresponds to a subjective experience. Greenfield argues that neuronal assemblies might be a “Rosetta stone” that will translate subjective experience into the scientifically objective.
In books as well as brains, structure is everything. Her device of the unfolding day masks a lack of underlying structure to the book, which I found to be a confusing jumble. Greenfield’s style is hard work. She has a habit of writing breathless, bewilderingly long sentences, crammed with clauses and sub-clauses, brimming with clunky metaphor, with data, with results, with the names of past scientists whom she admires, and so on, and offers little respite for a reader frequently left with a feeling of having been assaulted. The sentence you just read had 51 words in it before I ran out of steam. I counted many in Greenfield’s book that clock in at more than 70.
There are some awkward attempts to summon meaning from what little we do know. “Another telling parallel,” she writes, “is that neither children nor schizophrenics can interpret proverbs (and expands this thought in a relatively succinct 57-word sentence).” Let’s ignore the questionable sweeping generalisations (children learn metaphor, and their brains are profoundly different from adults’; proverbial psychopathology is far from universal in schizophrenia, which is probably a spectrum of disorders). What is the intention in this comparison? Superficial similarities in complex behaviour may have no commonality in neuronal processing, and it’s silly to draw any conclusions from such speculation.
I am sure there is some good and interesting contemporary neuroscience in here, and neuronal assemblies are an idea worth exploring. But I found it exhausting to extract meaning from the leviathan sentences, from the impenetrable figures and the frequent parts that made me scientifically frown. Maybe my neuronal assemblies are not large enough. Maybe I spent too much time playing video games over the last 30 years. I’m an empiricist, and I think we will crack consciousness one day. There will be no simple key. I’m sure it will involve the flashes of neuronal assemblies, as well as other neuroscience known and yet to be discovered. The idea that in the transience of these neuronal assemblies lies our conscious experience is speculative. That’s fine, and deserves investigation. But there are an awful lot of mights and coulds in Greenfield’s book, and an uneasy degree of speculation. Maybe we’ll look back on these days of fumbling around in the dark of our brains and chuckle at how naive we were. Who knows? For now, our desire to understand how we think is going to need some much clearer thinking than this.
A Day in the Life of the Brain is published by Allen Lane (£20)
