El mito del cerebro creador

The brain has become the center of explanation of human affairs. Suddenly, it is as if everything depended on the brain and we were nothing more than a bunch of neurons. Neuroscience has become the queen of science, with the complicity of the social sciences, the humanities and philosophy. Popular culture has assumed brain-centrism as the most natural. Neuroscientific popularization, already a whole literary genre, only fuels this trend. But do the methods and findings in the study of the brain force us to think this way? Does the greater knowledge of the brain today correspond to a greater and better knowledge of issues such as, for example, psychological disorders, the self, freedom, love, ethics, justice, the economy, etc. ? Isn't braincentrism a fad, a myth and an ideology after all? This book, which we present here in its second edition, raises these questions and thus unmasks the neuroscientific seductions due to its methods and findings (in particular, neuroimaging), criticizes the uses made of the brain in the explanation of human affairs and offers an alternative in terms of the body-behavior-culture trinomial. Brain plasticity, according to which the brain is capable of changing as a result of experience, goes to show that, more than neurons, we depend on behavior and culture and, for that matter, on the soul, according to Aristotle, consistent in the actions that make up the life of organisms.