My blog friend Frank in Florida writes
No doubt you’ve seen the latest humoral news in the New York _Times_, where we’re advised that “it’s worth listening to serotonin no matter what it has to say.” Would love to see you weigh in on your blog. Here’s the link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/03/science/03angier.html
Actually, I hadn’t seen it. But now I have. And someone has made the mistake of encouraging me. So.
First, let me say that Natalie Angier is one of my favorite science writers. And that’s not only because she selected one of my articles for inclusion in one of those Best American anthologies. It’s also because she writes sentences like this:
Other researchers have determined that serotonin in the gut helps orchestrate the remodeling of bone, the lifelong buildup and breakdown of osteoclasts and osteoblasts that make the human skeleton such an exciting organ system to own.
I mean, talk about making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, or, in this case iambic pentameter out of clangy biojargon. Which is nothing compared to what she has done for the vagina (not that the vagina isn’t already a silk purse or anything). And it (the passage, not the vagina) is funny too.
But I see Frank’s point. It’s not that the article is inaccurate, although this also nicely wrought sentence
Five years later, scientists found serotonin in brain extracts as well, and they soon learned that the recently invented hallucinogenic drug lysergic acid diethylamide worked by tapping into the brain’s serotonin system and that if you took too much LSD you might end up wearing hair garlands and overusing the word “wow.”
as everyone who’s memorized my book knows, is not quite accurate. LSD was discovered pretty much when serotonin was (late 40s, although serotonin had actually been identified in the 30s), and the connection was made not by figuring out that LSD “tapped into the serotonin system” but by recognizing that LSD had a molecular structure related to serotonin (both are tryptamines; LSD contains within it the serotonin molecule) and deducing that its consciousness-altering effects must be somehow related to the fact that there is serotonin in the brain. But whatever. It’s a nice, cracky sentence, and it manages to convey a little Angier bio (as she does later when she talks about her psychiatrist) even as it gets across the rudiments.
So the article didn’t quite get under my skin like it evidently did Frank’s. Maybe that’s because my underskin is already full up with all the breathless neurotalk out there, the latest fMRI finding that proves that our mental life isn’t just a figment of our imaginations. But I see his point. Like here
For all the intricacy, serotonin in the brain has a basic personality. “It’s a molecule involved in helping people cope with adversity, to not lose it, to keep going and try to sort everything out,” said Philip J. Cowen, a serotonin expert at Oxford University and the Medical Research Council. In the fine phrase of his Manchester University colleague Bill Deakin, “it’s the ‘Don’t panic yet’ neurotransmitter,” said Dr. Cowen. Given serotonin’s job description, disturbances in the system can contribute to depression, anxiety, panic attacksand mental calcification, an inability to see the world anew — at least in otherwise vulnerable people.
A basic personality? A job description? A fine phrase? It’s one thing to be breezy and entertaining when dealing with eyeglazing content, and in the process informing people of something interesting and maybe even important about themselves and their world. It’s another entirely to deepen misunderstanding by, to borrow from Dr. Hyman, committing the error of reification. It’s a molecule, Natalie. Not a personal assistant. Its “involvement” (and someday I’ll get to the evasions neuroscientists commit in their language, the way they cover up their lack of understanding of just exactly how all those molecular events give us conscious experience by using imprecise verbs that still somehow manage to convey a linear causality) in our conscious lives is no smarter or more personal than, say, bacteria’s “involvement” in digesting our food.
One could as easily say, “We use serotonin to keep ourselves calm.” Of course, there would be a metaphysics involved, as blog friend Matthew recently reminded me. And indeed there is some kind of dualism lurking in that statement. But, and this is my point, there is metaphysics at work in the scientists’ formulation as well, one that I find more distasteful than my own, as it cancels out human agency and replaces it with neuromyth. And Angier makes like the question of which myth to believe doesn’t even exist.
Actually, this reverence for serotonin reminds me of somethign Homer Simpson once said. It’s in the monorail episode, just after he saves Springfield by lassoing the runaway train to a huge donut sign. “Is there anything a donut can’t do?” he asks.
