Book. “On average, the most socially disadvantaged people are also the most genetically disadvantaged. » These remarks, devoid of scientific basis, are not those of a phrenologist or a eugenic theorist of the 19th century.e century. These are those, reported by The World in 2017, a research director at the CNRS, researcher in the cognitive sciences laboratory of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and member of the Scientific Council of National Education.
Returning to this statement, and others, drawn from the same barrel, the neurobiologist François Gonon (CNRS) attempts to respond, in Neuroscience, a neoliberal discourse (Social field, 232 pages, 20 euros), to this thorny question: what the hell has happened in recent years in the scientific field, and at its interface with society, for such ideas to resurface in public conversation under the veneer of a learned discourse?
Struck by the great media popularity of his discipline, François Gonon has been interested for more than ten years in the discursive uses of neuroscience and the way in which they contribute to forging representations of the world and to generating, or legitimizing, policies. public. This unique status of neuroscience is based, according to him, on an implicit promise, that of elucidating human behavior through the analysis of brain functioning.
Report of failure
This “discourse of neuroscience”, which François Gonon distinguishes from neuroscience itself and its contribution to knowledge, has an eminently political significance. Examining the brain alone obscures, by definition, the social and economic determinants known to have a major effect on individual behavior.
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In such an analytical framework, psychiatric illnesses, school failure, delinquency, etc., tend to be reduced to the biochemistry of the central nervous system, itself determined by the genome. Individual stories, life paths and societal dysfunctions disappear in the face of images of the brain reacting to this or that stimulus, nourishing what the author calls a “neuro-essentialism”.
François Gonon’s essay is distinguished by the great clarity of the presentation and by the concern to return to the scientific literature, on each critical point of the argument, to support his argument. This opens with an acknowledgment of failure: contrary to what certain leaders of psychiatric research anticipated in the 1990s, it is still not possible to base diagnoses of mental disorders on biomarkers.
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