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Twenty 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. 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.
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.
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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. 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.
Read full, original post: Neuroscience and the premature death of the soul
