The Synaptic Self

This book comes from an impeccable source. Joseph LeDoux is the Director of the National Institute of Health in Washington USA and thus a powerful figure in American research and funding. Not only that, he is a widely known and respected neuroscience researcher who has a department which is at the cutting edge of neuroscience. It is not surprising, therefore, that he writes a book which gives a lucid account of brain synapses and their function, how these are combined into systems and how these systems lead to and vary behaviour. If you want an accessible, simple account of modern neuroscience then this will be a good one to read. But it is quite clear that the book is written from a completely reductionist point of view and as such it is weak and the author makes statements which he could never back up in any rational face to face discussion. For example he talks about the way the brain loves. What a thing to say! Brains don't love, people love. Love includes much more than just synaptic weights. The example he gives of the brain 'loving' is that of the mountain and plains gerbil. The mountain gerbil gets a pulse of oxytocin during copulation and so pair bonds, whereas the plains gerbil does not get this pulse and so does not pair bond. It's an interesting study but a million miles away from people loving, and light years away from the Greek concept of agape. He ends his book by saying that we are just our synapses. How simplistic can you get. These books written from the standpoint of naive scientific realism should carry a clear health warning.