Reductionism and Psychology: not everything is in the brain

Many of the discussions that take place within psychology are not, technically, psychological discussions, but rather philosophical ones. Philosophy provides an epistemological and conceptual framework that we use to interpret and produce data, and that previous phase is not a scientific task; rather, it has to do with defending a point of view and arguing why it is better than other philosophical positions.

This is something that happens in all sciences, because all of them are based on philosophical foundations that have normally been discussed for decades. However, something happens in psychology that does not usually happen so much with hard sciences such as Physics: the scientific debate and that of ideas are mixed a lot and can become confused easily. This occurs, in part, because of the popularity of a philosophical stance known as reductionism. Let's see what it consists of and what implications and risks it may have in the field of psychology.

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What is reductionism?

Reductionism is a framework for interpreting reality through which everything that happens in a system (whatever it is, from a company to a human brain) can be understood by studying individually its “pieces”, its components.

In addition, from reductionism it is assumed that the connection between these pieces and the properties that these pieces express is less debatable. than the relationship between the system as a whole and the properties it has, so that the general arises from the individual and the contrary. For example, the characteristics of a complex phenomenon, such as the movements of a swarm of ants, arise from the sum of the individual behaviors of each of these insects.

In turn, if we study the components of a phenomenon, we will come to the conclusion that this phenomenon can only change in a determined and limited number of ways, since its components determine the paths of change through which the set can pass. Ants will not be able to survive without a queen ant, because their genes bind them to living in a colony totally dedicated to reproduction.

reductionism in psychology

The reductionist perspective can be very useful, and yet it entails a danger to take into account: it can generate frames explanatory circular when trying to understand what happens in a complex and changing phenomenon, such as we will see. Specific, when reductionism is applied to psychology or neuroscience, this risk is relatively high.

The result of this inconvenience is that reductionism is often used due to technical and methodological limitations and when interpreting the data. obtained through that investigation, it “forgets” that the decision to isolate a problem into its relatively simple parts was a philosophical action, and not objective or scientific. Let's look at an example related to cognitive science and the study of the brain.

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the study of intelligence

The intelligence It is a concept that is as interesting and popular as it is controversial, since there is not a very clear and exhaustive definition of what it is or what it is not. In fact, the most abstract definitions of this characteristic already suggest why it is complicated. limit it to a definition: it is about the ability to adapt quickly and effectively to problems new. Since "new problems" is a necessarily open concept (you cannot know in advance what a new problem is for someone), intelligence can only be understood as a complex phenomenon and whose back room is constantly changing, just as all our conscious and unconscious mental activities are all the time. a while.

How to identify the biological processes on which the intelligence of each person exists? Being such a complicated task, many researchers opt to analyze activation patterns of specific parts of the brain. and compare the combination of these parts of the nervous system with the scores each person gets on a test of intelligence. By doing this, it has been discovered that the main biological differences that distinguish the most intelligent people from the less intelligent are found in the frontal lobes, the parietals and the anterior cingulate of each cerebral hemisphere.

From a reductionist perspective, this can be interpreted as showing that these parts of the brain are the main involved in the intelligence of the person, which trigger the entire process of reasoning and keeping information in the memory of work etc The rest of the encephalic structures may be essential, but in any case they are auxiliary members, they participate helping in the work of the others.

This explanation sounds very natural and convincing., with which it can be taken as an objective fact alien to philosophy, but in reality it is far from explaining the neurobiological basis of intelligence.

What if this mental capacity were not the task of parts of the brain each working on its own and "pooling" their work from time to time? What if intelligence were based on the coordinated work in real time of millions of neurons distributed throughout the brain, in turn maintaining interactions with other nerve cells and with the substances that reach them through the vessels sanguine? If this explanation accurately described the logic of biology behind intelligence, would previous research have detected it?

No; because of reductionism, a description of the effects that a global system has on the pieces would have been confused of the brain with the causes of what is seen in that global system. In the same way that it is not the sad or expressionless face that causes depression in people with this type of disorder.

Conclusion

Psychology is a field of research that seeks to explain many things: from the behavior of buyers to the methods of learning more effective, going through the way in which drug use affects social relationships and an infinity of topics that do not have much to do with these. Basically, any plot of reality in which there is a living being learning certain habits and behaviors (voluntarily or involuntarily) psychology has a hole.

But the psychology does not claim to explain everything in the sense that physics could explain everything, since all kinds of very complex phenomena intervene in human actions, both genetic and historical, cultural and contextual. That is why reductionism should only be taken as a tool, and not as a philosophy that allows generating simple explanations about facts that are not.