Review: Books about the human brain from Books news, reviews and author interviews | guardian.co.uk by Steven Rose

Against these reductionist claims, the Jesuit philosopher Andrew Gluck attempts a spirited, but to my mind ultimately unsuccessful, rebuttal. His title makes reference to the neurologist Antonio Damasio, whose major book Descartes' Error and its succeeding volumes laid two charges against Cartesian philosophy. The first, the one that concerns Gluck, is Descartes's dualism, in which an immaterial soul interacts with a material brain through the pineal gland. Not so, says Damasio, and neuroscientists overwhelmingly agree: we are, and have to be, materialists. The world is made of one stuff, not two. Gluck demurs, accepting materialism for the physical sciences, idealism for the mind. Damasio's second charge is perhaps more interesting - if not to Gluck, then to cognitive neuroscientists who see the brain as a problem-solving machine. On the contrary, brains are not primarily cognitive devices designed to solve chess problems, but evolved organs adapted to enhance the survival chances of the organisms they inhabit. Their primary role is to respond to the challenges the environment presents by providing the cellular apparatus enabling the brain's owner to assess current situations, compare them with past experience, and generate the appropriate emotions and hence actions. It is this evolutionary imperative within the particular line of descent leading to Homo sapiens that has resulted in our large and complex brains. As feminist sociologist Hilary Rose points out, Descartes's famous "cogito ergo sum" should be replaced by "amo, ergo sum."

Read the rest of the Guardian review, here.