Week 7 Neuro Reverie

“The headline on Sky News on April 26, 2010 read: ‘Murdered Gangster’s Brain Donated to Science: Scientists Have Been Given the Chance to Get Inside the Mind of One of Australia’s Most Notorious Gangsters.’ It was reporting the fact that Roberta Williams had given ‘experts’ permission to examine the brain of her husband, Carl Williams, who had been murdered in Melbourne’s maximum security Barwon Prison less than three years into a thirty-five year sentence. ‘I believe it’s to help with research,’ Mrs. Williams is quoted as saying, ‘and might help explain why guys like Carl do the violent things they do.’”

-Rose , N., & Abi-Rached, J. (2013). Neuro: The new brain sciences and the management of the mind. (p. 165). Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Who can fathom the thoughts of a notorious murdering gangster? Who can fathom any thought that does not stem from their own brain in the present moment? I picture a team of neuroscientists, suiting up as they prepare to enter into a dead mind that once thought dark thoughts. They are going to shrink to the size of brain cells and venture into the mind of Carl Williams like hikers venturing into wilderness. “What is there to find?” they wonder as their latex gloves began to coax sweat from eager, clammy hands. They will find dim and endless forests, pools of love at the base of extraordinary mountains and mazey caves without exits leading into them. They will see the cancerous growth of violence protruding from the earth like the head of a stone giant aroused from buried sleep. They will see the tense expression of anger and sadness, his behemoth fears, the innocence that fuels his rampant trample over the beauty around him. He sculpted a criminal mind with looming silence and the pounding of his massive fists.

“It appeared that this challenged the conventional, rationalist accounts of ascription—that we understand the intentions of others by creating theories about what lies behind their appearance or their acts, on the basis of our own commonsense psychology about their desires and their beliefs about how to achieve them. It was not through theorizing about others, but through feeling what they feel, that we understand the mental states of others. I really do ‘feel your pain.’”

-Rose , N., & Abi-Rached, J. (2013). Neuro: The new brain sciences and the management of the mind. (p. 146). Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

“We have a social brain in that the brain has evolved to favor a certain type of sociality manifested in all the interactions between persons and groups that come naturally to humans in our social lives. And we have a social brain in that this organ in now construed as malleable, open to, and shaped by, social interaction—shaping sociality as it is itself reshaped by it.”

-Rose , N., & Abi-Rached, J. (2013). Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind. (p. 163). Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

The masses dethrone the mind so that we wake up at night and hate ourselves and hate our lives and reach out for flesh and LED screens and the bottles and the needle and the scalpel that’s only purpose is to divide and divide and divide. Now I picture a brain surgeon alone in a sterilized space, dressed in pale green garments with a scalpel raised about his naked brain. I wish that for a moment I could hold my mind in the cup of my hands. To turn it over like the heavy weight it is and to mold what I am told is malleable. So this is why my heart beats and where it pumps most of its blood. Oh my mind, my mind, you’re a thirsty beast aren’t you? Thanks for the daydream; something in me was parched for some poetry.