His defence is that he was drunk and/or high. Which from the video he fairly obviously was. But here's an interesting quote from his lawyer:
Some things may have come out of his mouth that didn’t come from his brain.So where did they come from, then... hmm. Don't answer that.
I doubt that the lawyer was actually trying to say that Galliano's mouth was moving of its own accord or under the control of some other organ. Rather she was expressing the idea that "my brain" in this context doesn't mean, literally, the whole of the grey blob of neurons in my skull.
Rather "my brain" means, roughly, "that part of my brain responsible for rational thought".
My grandmother once talked about a friend who'd had a stroke. She said, as far as I can remember, "Sometimes the stroke means you can't talk or walk, which is bad enough, but sometimes it gets into your brain and that can be really nasty."
Of course she knew that all strokes happen in the brain. What she was saying was that some strokes, but not all, affect the part of the brain responsible for "me" as a person - thoughts, emotions, and so forth.
So, this is all anecdotal evidence, but there seems to be a popular, common-sense temptation to believe in the "me part" of the brain, a tendency which neuroscientists are not immune to and which can lead to dubious conclusions.
I'd love to see someone do a proper study of what non-neuroscientists, ideally people with little exposure to neuroscience like children, think about the brain. A bit like this, but really in depth. I suspect that you'd find that many of the ideas underpinning today's neuroscience had their origins in pre-scientific, common sense intuitions.
We neuroscientists are human, and we have neuro-intuitions too. But if neuroscience has taught us anything, it's not to trust those.
4 comments:
I think your Grandmother is correct to seek a distinction with regards to culpability, though.
People will often do things that are completely "out of character" when high on PCP, and people who have taken Ambien can sometimes do pretty crazy things with no recollection of what happened. Suppose that someone is unknowingly slipped some PCP in a drink, or takes Ambien on doctor's orders and has a bad reaction -- this person then strips naked and cuts the head off of the neighbor's dog.
When assigning culpability, we might say "it was the drug; it wasn't the person". That's a perfectly reasonable argument to make.
I've seen this firsthand with stroke patients, too.
And of course most of us still locate our emotions in the heart, or other viscera (and the gut is full of neurons). We do have to vent our spleen from time to time... though people seldom seem to be "liverish" these days, there is plenty of bile out there.
I've written about insanity and culpability in early Buddhism on my blog is anyone is interested.
Jayarava: Very nice! Well done!
My grandson, aged about 4, committed some misdemeanor, and told his Mom it was his BRAIN that made him do it; he seemed to have a clear idea that his brain was not HIM. He would also talk about using his brain to think, clearly identifying it as a tool, somehow separate from the essential HIM.
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