Perfectibility of Our Brain

Perfectibility – the Mixed Blessing

The idea of the brain as plastic has appeared in previous times, in flashes, then disappeared. But even though it is only now being established as a fact of mainstream science, these earlier appearances left their traces and made possible a receptivity to the idea, in spite of the enormous opposition each of the neuroplasticians faced from fellow scientists.

As early as 1762 the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), who faulted the mechanistic view of nature of his time, argued that nature was alive and had a history and was changing over time; our nervous systems are not like machines, he said, but are alive and able to change. In his booke Émile, or on Education – the first detailed book on child development ever written – he proposed that the “organization of the brain” was affected by our experience, and that we need to “exercise” our senses and mental abilities the way we exercise our muscles. Rousseau maintained that even our emotions and passions are, to a great extent, learned early in childhood. He imagined radically transforming human education and culture, based on the premise that many aspects of our nature that we think are fixed are, in fact, changeable and that this malleability is a defining human trait. He wrote, “To understand a man, look to men; and to understand men, look to the animals.” When he compared us with other species, he saw what he called human “perfectibility” - and brought the French word perfectibilité into vogue – using it to describe a specifically human plasticity or malleability, which distinguishes us in degree from animals. Several months after an animal's birth, he observed, it is for the most part what it will be for the rest of its life. But human beings change throughout life because of their “perfectibility”.

While we may rejoice at the thought that the brain and human nature may be “improved”, the idea of human perfectibility or plasticity stirs up a hornet's nest of moral problems. Illustration by Elena.

It was our “perfectibility”, he argued, that allowed us to develop different kinds of mental faculties and to change the balance among our existing mental faculties and senses, but this could also be problematic because it disrupted the natural balance of our senses. Because our brains were so sensitive to experience, they were also more vulnerable to being shaped by it. Educational schools such as the Montessori School, with its emphasis on the education of the senses, grew out of Rousseau's observations. He was also the precursor to McLuhan, who would argue centuries later that certain technologies and media alter the ratio of balance of the senses. When we say that the instantaneous electronic media, television sound bites, and a shift away from literacy have created overly intense, “wired” people with short attention spans, we are speaking Rousseau's language, about a new kind of environmental problem that interferes with our cognition. Rousseau was also concerned that the balance between our senses and our imagination can be disturbed by the wrong kinds of experience.

In 1783 Rousseau's contemporary Charles Bonnet (1720-1793), also a Swiss philosopher and a naturalist familiar with Rousseau's writings, wrote to an Italian scientist, Michel Vincenzo Malacarne (1744-1816), proposing that neural tissue might respond to exercise as do muscles. Malacarne set out to test Bonnet's hypothesis experimentally. He took pairs of birds that came from the same clutch of eggs and raised half of them under enriched circumstances, stimulated bu intensive training for several years. The other half received no training. He did the same experiment with litter-mate dogs. When Malacarne sacrificed the animals and compared their brain size, he found that the animals that received training had larger brains, particularly in a part of the brain called the cerebellum, demonstrating the influence of “enriched circumstances” and “training” on the development of an individual's brain. Malacarne's work was all but forgotten, until revived and mastered by Rosenzweig, and others in the twentieth century.

Though Rousseau, who died in 1778, could not have known Malacarne's results, he showed an uncanny ability to anticipate what perfectibility meant for humanity. It provided hope but was not always a blessing. Because we could change, we did not always know what was natural in us and what was acquired from our culture. Because we could change, we could be overly shaped by culture and society, to a point where we drifted too far from our true nature and became alienated from ourselves.

Perfectibility means that we can no longer be so certain about what it means to perfect ourselves. Photo by Elena.

(The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, M.D., excerpt).