Exactly 20 years ago, Tom Wolfe wrote one of the most influential articles in neuroscience. Titled Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died, the 1996 article explores how ideas from brain science were beginning to transform our understanding of human nature and extend the horizons of our scientific imagination. It was published in a mainstream magazine, written by an outsider, and seemed to throw open the doors to an exhilarating revolution in science and self-understanding. Looking at the state of neuroscience and society two decades later, Wolfe turned out to be an insightful but uneven prophet to the brain’s future.
In some ways, the article was a surprising turn for the American writer. Since his early work, the best known being The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, he was a keen observer of human behaviour and how people jockey for status among their peers, but he tended to focus on unusual or exceptional subcultures. Hippies, upper-class radicals, car freaks and astronauts all featured in his searching and, occasionally, eviscerating reporting. An interest in neuroscientists – brain geeks – must have seemed like an enthusiasm for paint salesmen to much of the mid-90s public but Wolfe saw a genuine cultural subversion emerging from the field.
Not all of his predictions hit the mark; some now seem quaint or even ridiculous. He describes Richard Dawkins as “earnestly, feverishly, politically correct”, allowing us a nostalgic look back to a gentler time, before Twitter revealed that Dawkins’s inner monologue is like listening to Donald Trump on a day out to the mosque. More scientifically, Wolfe’s assertion that brain scanning would have a greater impact on everyday life than the internet is one he has had to recant in many subsequent interviews. Other predictions seem to have been swayed by his conservative politics. In one particularly odd section he talks about an “IQ cap”, which could apparently test your intelligence just by measuring brain waves. Wolfe claims the technology was developed but suppressed because “nobody wanted to believe that human brainpower is … hardwired”. In reality, the technology just didn’t work. Measuring complex human abilities from simple features of brain function has long since been abandoned as a non-starter.
But Wolfe’s political biases may have served him well when considering one of the most contentious debates of the day: the role of biology in understanding violence. He mentions the Violence Initiative, a US government project to study the genetics of violent behaviour in inner cities. Already controversial, it was abandoned after the lead researcher gave a jaw-dropping speech that referred to the evolutionary basis of violence in monkeys and compared inner cities to a “jungle”. Wolfe rightly described this as being “the stupidest single word uttered by an American public official in 1992”. The racist overtones compounded legitimate concerns about the project but it strengthened a long-held liberal suspicion that any research on the biology of violence was eugenics in disguise, something Wolfe thought absurd. Twenty years later, he has largely been proved right and the neuroscience of violence is now relatively uncontroversial, a matter of debate not protest. The pendulum swung in the other direction for a while, with overblown claims about a “warrior gene”. Now, biological factors are accepted as present but so complex that attempts to make political capital out of them quickly stumble. These days, anyone using simple reductionist biology as either an axe or a foil marks them out as scientifically naive.
Perhaps Wolfe’s most astute observation was cultural: how the collapse of Freud and Marx had pushed people into using the language of cognitive science for explanations of human behaviour. He also noticed that the link between the actual science and the conclusions people drew from it were often tenuous, and his article foreshadowed an explosion of dubious media stories about brain centres for infidelity, neural circuits for political orientation, and chemical imbalances for mental illness.
Much of this continues despite something Wolfe didn’t predict: a period of soul-searching in the late 2000s after the realisation that much of the brain-scanning research that fuelled the hype was oversimplified and tainted by false positives. As a result, the last decade has seen a steady scientific focus on more trustworthy methods and less hubristic conclusions.
More profoundly, Wolfe wondered whether neuroscience would eliminate the popular notion of the soul – nothing but a poetic name for “the self”, he admitted – as he feared we might lose our moral compass unless the discoveries were accompanied by an understanding that brain science does not “diminish the richness of life, the magic of art, or the righteousness of political causes”.
In the 20 years since Wolfe wrote about neuroscience it’s perhaps most remarkable that questions about the meaning of life have started to take a back seat as the big developments have shifted towards reading, modifying and extending the brain’s capabilities: controlling brain cells with fibre optics, connecting robots to neural implants, and using electrodes to alter brain circuits. Contrary to what Wolfe predicted, your soul hasn’t died, it’s being transformed, and the fear is that no one knows where the limits are.