According to neuro-enthusiasts, Steven Rose is "neuroeducation skeptic". Being a skeptic just means that you have formulated a set of well-considered reasons for declining to drink the Kool-Aid just yet. One of Rose's most interesting arguments is not even an argument so much as it is a semantic quibble.
To a girl who believes semantic quibbles lie at the heart of everything from peace in the Middle East to craft beer preferences, Rose's description of the mereological fallacy is rather exciting and fraught with possibility. After dismantling the left/right brain "neuromyth", Rose writes:
Children from poorer families (or as the literature more demurely puts it, of low socioeconomic status) may generally have a more restricted vocabulary than their wealthier peers – although this has been vigorously contested – but subjecting them to imaging or measuring their electrical event-related potentials (ERPs) to demonstrate that this difference may be reflected in brain processes might seem to add insult to injury. And when cognitive neuroscientists claim that poverty impedes cognitive function (the title of a recent paper in Science) or that one way to lift people out of poverty is to use cognitive behavioural therapy to improve their “mental capital” (“conceived metaphorically”, according to psychologist Cary Cooper, “as the bank account of the mind, which is debited or credited throughout the life course, from childhood to old age”), it shows a certain disconnect with the economic forces currently driving people into poverty.
There’s another problem here, a manifestation of the common tendency among neuroscientists to commit what philosophers call the mereological fallacy, which broadly means ascribing the properties of the whole – in neuroscience terms, the living, conscious human being – to a part of that whole, ie, the brain. Thus, an accessible and widely read introduction to the brain and its study by two leading researchers, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and Uta Frith, is called The Learning Brain: Lessons for Education (2005), and its chapter heads include “the mathematical brain” and “the literate brain”. Common usage, but as I am sure both authors would agree, it isn’t brains that learn, are mathematical or literate; it is their owners who use their brains to learn, do maths or whatever. (I know I am putting my own head on the block here – many years ago, in the early 1970s, I wrote a book called, in my youthful certainty, The Conscious Brain. But I have reformed.) This is, I think, more than a semantic quibble, because such titles reflect the way that we neuroscientists tend to think and encourage others to think likewise.
Professor Rose is clearly out of fashion. Acknowledging the extent to which the reigning pet scientific theory drives the selection of questions and research results is not common practice among scientists hoping to score research grant funding.
Ultimately, I agree with Rose's skepticism. But it's more than intellectual accord. You see, I admire the way Rose wears the chartreuse mottled tie tucked into his dress-shirt pocket in a room filled with elegant men and women modeling various shades of gray. I like the way he stands out and keeps it shameless.
