Neuroscience Is Blind

Researchers in England claim they are beginning to understand why love is “blind,” that is, why people tend not to see faults in their romantic partners and children. The answer, according to British psychiatrist Raj Persaud’s report on the research, is that, for evolutionary reasons, “strong emotional ties to another person…affect the brain circuits involved in making social judgments about that person…. So love really is blind and there is a biological basis for the blindness.”

Persaud is impressed by the work of researchers Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki:

This is a profound finding in the history of our attempts to understand this most profound and powerful human emotion. It means neuroscience finally explains a puzzle that has flummoxed artists from Shakespeare to Sinatra attempting to interpret love, which is why we can't see the faults in our partners or children which others can clearly perceive, and as a result find our affection mysterious. It also explains why we take so long to finally see the flaws in those we idealise because of our love, and which means we can end up choosing the wrong person to commit to. (Emphasis added.)

A profound finding that explains a puzzle? How could it be, when in fact it is no explanation at all for why people behave a particular way? It’s reductionism, not explanation—like"explaining" why houses are built by reference to the physics of hammering nails into wood and other such processes.

Undoubtedly parts of the brain activate and de-activate when we look at our romantic partners and our children. And at some level it’s interesting to know which parts do which. But having that information is not the same as understanding love; nor does it explain the alleged “puzzle” over why we “can’t see” our lovers’ and children’s faults. Is that generalization even true? Are we blind to the faults, or do we simply accept them as the price paid for greater perceived benefits? The entire research program seems to be based on a flawed premise. Whatever the case, what is the puzzle? Strong emotions can influence or cloud judgment, although with effort people are capable of achieving a reasonable degree of objectivity. They do it routinely.

It’s not so much the neuroscientific findings that I’m interested in challenging, but the interpretation of the findings, which is not a matter of neuroscience at all. Bartels and Zeki put the cart before the horse. Obviously we use our brains when we act or think or feel emotions. And that’s the point. We use our brains. Our brains don’t use us. Of course we don’t directly activate or de-activate this or that area of our brains in the same way that we move our limbs. But we indirectly do so when we engage in various activities. When a man thinks of his wife or children, no doubt he causes some parts of his brain to change from their previous state. But the changes do not explain what he has done, what he experiences, or why, no more than the laws of electricity explain why I wish to illuminate my house. Nor do the changes explain why he ignores or fails to notice their faults. The words relevant to an explanation are “intend,” “choose,” “value,” and the like, not “pre-frontal cortex” and “magnetic resonance imaging.” That is, the explanation lies in the realms of praxeology (the study of the formal features of human action qua choice), psychology, and biography, not neurophysiology. We cannot hope to understand persons (as opposed to bodies) if we bypass the first three disciplines and focus on the last.

This has important ethical and political implications, because the more that neuroscience eclipses praxeology and psychology in “explaining” human action, the more individual liberty is threatened. After all, it is the pseudo-explanations of bad behavior via mental illness/brain disorder that permit state-deputized physicians to preventively detain and/or drug persons who have committed no crimes and to excuse from responsibility others who have. (For more see Thomas Szasz’s books Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences and The Meaning of Mind: Language, Morality, and Neuroscience.)