The story of brain research is somehow the continuation of
the ancient search for the magic stone or the life elixir. Trapped
somewhere between laboratorial meticulousness, sentimental
tradition, and regardless obsession, contemporary neuroscience
demonstrates a very slow pace of advancing, and the only
indisputable fact is that the questions at stake are of crucial
importance for the improvement of life quality, intellectual
satisfaction, and the discovery of real human limitations.
To a young scientist, it seems very often that he has to
choose between entering the chain of small discoveries leading to
a great revelation after ten generations of hard work, or, on the
other hand, starting to observe phenomena in a synthetical way,
learning from all disciplines and directly speculating on. "cardinal
questions." Unfortunately, the cruel scientific community does
not encourage the latter choice, except in the case of
neurophilosophers, which can never verify their ideas, and the
so-called "authorities," who sometimes gained their reputation
precisely from the coincidence of being at the end of a chain of
"small" scientists and discoveries.
One side of the medal suggests that one has only to bear
practical sense for practical solutions always in mind. When one
cannot any more explain the immediate practical implications of
one's research, even if ephemeral, the sense of research is lost,
the chain of fruitful discoveries is interrupted, the perspective of
this kind of science is zero. "To get to know more about," as it is
often the only argument of research papers, is only a sad
deformation of science towards a hunt for grants and a
comfortable status quo. Cognitive neuroscience can offer its
contribution to two major fields: to technology, which can have
profit from the models imitating neural networks and therefore
facilitate human labour, and, par excellence, to medicine, where
"practical sense" means application in therapeutic procedures.
One is not obliged to test his findings directly or to convey them
to industry or clinicians: it suffices if one knows in each moment
what is the place of his work in the "chain" and what is the next
step he (or somebody else) has to commit in order to reach that
final "practical" scope. Studying one particular area of the
brain-the way we have chosen-means to connect very specific
disorders to very specific sites in order to become able to predict
the outcome of human brain damage and to organise the
adequate rehabilitation of debilitated skills. In our case, the
chosen areas are located in the posterior superior parietal cortex
and the defects observed primarily consider reaching, grasping, and orientation detection. Since, as yet, no efficient way of
regenerating cortical tissue has been discovered, the only hope
for regaining deteriorated functions is empirical rehabilitation,
probably based on different manners of compensatory activities.
In our case, it would be interesting to test whether the
rehabilitation of one lost ability (for instance, orientation
detection) would positively influence also the other skills
(grasping and reaching). This and other possibilities should be
the landmarks of the "chain" we joined.
Nevertheless, there is another side of the medal. It is
hardly known in natural sciences, but implicitly accepted in
"humanities" (i.e., the group of disciplines called so because they
allow human spirit to develop in its natural dimensions).
According to this approach, one does not live to produce
materially, but to form himself, to find out solutions to the
questions he is confronted with, to narcissisticly enjoy his
increasing knowledge without feeling remorse, and to make use
of this know ledge by speculating and bringing sense in this way
to everything around him. This state of limitlessness, which is
not given to be felt by everyone, is probably in our case what
Semir Zeki (1993, p. X) calls the "great fun the study of the brain
can be."
