Comment on Rob Boddice, 'Neurohistory'

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Citation Smail, Daniel Lord. "Comment on Rob Boddice, 'Neurohistory'," in Debating New Approaches to History, ed. Marek Tamm and Peter Burke (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 313–318.

Citable link https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37366512

Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Open Access Policy Articles, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#OAP Preprint MS version 15 April 2018. Published as Daniel Lord Smail, "Comment on Rob Boddice, 'Neurohistory'," in Debating New Approaches to History, ed. Marek Tamm and 1Peter Burke (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 313–18.

When I first suggested the idea of a neurohistory some years ago it seemed obvious to me that history could learn something from neuroscience and vice versa. It still seems obvious to me. One of history’s great contributions to the human sciences springs from the historian’s instinct to suppose that nearly everything in the human world is subject to change. Looking around, it would be easy enough for a casual observer to imagine that things like the nation-state, sex roles, and ketchup are timeless givens. The work of history is to show that the modern instantiations of these things, appearances notwithstanding, actually came into being in the past, have present-day forms that are different from those of the past, and will continue to change in the future. Once upon a time, it seemed perfectly obvious that the brain-body system was one of those timeless givens, and therefore uninteresting to practitioners of a discipline concerned only with things that can change.

Then came the revolution. Over the last two or three decades, cognitive neuroscience and related fields, by virtue of what they have demonstrated about the plasticity of neurons, receptors, and other features of the central nervous system, have made it possible to add the brain-body system to the list of things that we can usefully historicize.

The brain-body system, in the neurohistorical approach, is a system whose form can change significantly over time even as the components remain stable. The changes to the form are not random; they emerge instead from a complex dance involving the body on the

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2one hand and human society and culture on the other. As individual bodies continuously adapt and respond to their surroundings from one era to the next, the aggregate body, something we can define heuristically as a statistically averaged set of bodily traits characteristic of a sub-population, is different from the aggregate body of eras both before and after. Crucially, the human brain-body system, in its actions and reactions to its cultural surroundings, is not simply passive, like clay in the hands of a potter. Neurohistory instead treats the body as an actor in history. Through interactions with cultural forms and social practices, the body constantly generates unpredictable new patterns or historical trajectories. The body, therefore, is one of the sources of contingency in the human past.

Since On Deep History and the Brain was published in 2008, the theoretical resources available for the framing of neurohistory have grown apace. Approaches or bodies of theory including epigenetics, Actor-Network Theory, the history of emotions, microbiomics, and the archaeology of entanglement, some of which have been synthesized in the emerging field known as the New Materialism, have transformed the theoretical grounds on which we can base a neurohistorical approach to the past (Coole and Frost

2010; LeCain 2017). Understandably, certain ideas or phrases used in the book no longer sit well with current scholarship. Metaphors such as ‘wiring’ were inapt even at the time, and although I used the word ‘brain’ both in the title and in the book, this was a too- convenient shorthand for a much more complex and interesting entity, the brain-body system. From time to time, I have used small thought-pieces to make piecemeal adjustments to the basic model (e.g. Smail 2014). But it is clear that neurohistory is overdue for the kind of theoretical overhaul proposed by Rob Boddice in his contribution.

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In this response, I will summarize some of the highlights of Boddice’s own approach to neurohistory and the challenging and interesting revision he proposes, and will use the occasion to amplify or extend some of his important observations. As I shall suggest, the approach he has laid out here runs the risk of removing the keystone that supports the edifice of neurohistory. That keystone consists of a materialist understanding according to which the body is a complex assemblage of electrical impulses and chemicals, all of which influence mood, feeling, emotion, and behavior. This assemblage, by virtue of its material properties, is susceptible to environmental influences. Recent work has shown that our own microbiome is not the least of these factors (Cryan and Dinan 2012). In this materialist understanding, neurohistory should be seen as a branch of environmental history, allowing the brain-body system to be viewed as a node in a complex entanglement of historical actors. Ultimately, I believe it may be more appropriate to interpret Boddice’s model not as a revision to neurohistory so much as a necessary and useful complement that expands the approach to include forms of historical explanation that operate at microhistorical scales.

Boddice has proposed the possibility of reframing neurohistory in a way that will allow it to harmonize with the history of experience and the history of emotion. His approach is designed in part to solve one of the crucial methodological problems associated with neurohistory. Any approach to the past informed by neuroscience runs up against the fact that we cannot actually know anything about the movement of chemicals or the action of synapses in the bodies of actors in the past. Even if we could devise a way to assemble such evidence, perhaps via chemical analyses of bone or tissue, it is difficult to imagine how any of these findings could be meaningful, given the fact that neurohistory treats only with

3 aggregates and never with individuals. What ‘evidence’ we have, therefore, is rarely more than suggestive, and one is reduced to constructing plausible scenarios or models grounded in very little that any would regard as evidence. The modern evidence generated by neuroscientific research is robust, but extrapolating from this to the past in a simple- minded way would violate the very premise of the approach.

Boddice has offered an intriguing way to skirt this methodological pitfall, namely, by taking experience itself as the subject of analysis. If we proceed from the assumption that human experience is shaped by context, then we can take the changing forms of individual experience as the direct subject of historical inquiry without the need to worry overmuch about whether that change has any measurable material dimension. To use Jeremy

Burman’s terminology, we can seek to develop a ‘history from within’ (Burman 2014).

Boddice’s fascinating discussion of pain offers a useful model of this approach. Pain research in recent years has shown that the relationship between an injury and the experience of pain is not nearly as automatic as the commonsense understanding suggests.

Pain can be experienced in very different ways, including (sometimes) not at all. To some degree, individuals are capable of managing their own pain. To the extent that people take their cues from culture, this research suggests that whole cultures may have tools or devices that modify the pain thresholds of those who participate in the culture.

Furthemore, cultural norms can associate experiences of pain with stimuli that vary from one society to the next. Given these insights, we can take historical accounts of pain that seemed bizarre or inexplicable to previous historians and treat them as reasonably accurate reports of individual experience.

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In an important section, Boddice appropriately locates neurohistory’s grounding principle in the understanding that the human brain-body system, far from being fixed or hard-wired in some genetic way, is partially open to environmental or developmental influences and permeable to culture. That he chose to label this section ‘Genetics’ rather than ‘Epigenetics’ is something of a misdirection, in my view, but the ensuing discussion conveys well why it is that most historians have ceased to use the word ‘biology’ as if it were synonymous with ‘universal’, ‘unchanging’, and ‘hardwired’. One of the problems with this syllogism, which used to be widespread, always lay in the fact that this is not what

‘biology’ means to evolutionary biologists, a group whose opinion on the matter is worth listening to. As conceived by Charles Darwin, evolutionary biology is the science of change.

The Darwinian revolution challenged the received idea that species and phenotypes were timeless givens, created by God and incapable of change. The putative distinction between biology and culture, in other words, should never have been framed as the difference between fixity and changeability. It should have been understood instead as a matter of difference at the level of temporal scales, distinguishing the deep time of genetic change from the short time of recent human history.

The difference in temporal scales, of course, is not insignificant. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, some scholars in the fields of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology developed an approach based on the assumption that the human brain and body undergoes adaptation over time but at a pace so slow as to be irrelevant for short-term historical analysis. But we now know that this assumption was at best incomplete and perhaps just simply wrong. Fields such as epigenetics have demonstrated how genetic expression itself, in the aggregate, can be turned on and off in response to

5 changing environmental circumstances (in addition to the literature cited by Boddice in his contribution, see Jablonka and Lamb 2014; Niewöhner 2011; Roth et al. 2014; Brooke and

Larsen 2014). Scholars working in fields such as dual inheritance theory have argued, moreover, that the genome itself is not the only medium for preserving and transmitting information (Richerson and Boyd 2005). Culture, both animal and human, is another such medium. So, for that matter, is the ecological niche itself, as proposed by the theory of ecological inheritance, an idea that has emerged from the larger field of niche-construction theory (Odling-Smee 2003; Laland, Matthews, and Feldman 2016). As Boddice concludes very appropriately, we now recognize that human life constantly responds to environmental factors on both macro-evolutionary and micro-evolutionary time scales.

Biological adaptation, in short, is not just genetic. It operates in multiple temporalities, using different mechanisms. An example that I find useful describes the adjustments made as an individual travels from lower to higher altitudes. As you ascend, your body copes with the lack of oxygen by panting—a reaction that takes place within a matter of minutes. This is a temporary adjustment. If you remain at a high altitude for a long time, your body’s metabolism will gradually adjust—a matter of weeks or months.

This adjustment is not remembered in the genome; the memory is coded instead in a different location in the body. Finally, if you and your descendants settle down to live at

10,000 feet, selection pressures may cause your distant descendants to adapt genetically— a matter of generations.

All of these responses operate on different times scales. All of them are ‘biological’.

From a theoretical perspective, even the oxygen canister and mask that you might bring with you for the ascent is biological, for it has long been understood that behavior,

6 including learned behavior, forms part of the repertoire of mechanisms that some organisms use to adjust to changes in life circumstances. To put this differently, the body is indifferent to the mode whereby an adaptation is preserved or remembered, whether through genetic changes or cultural adaptations or anything in between. This understanding of the multiple temporalities of biological response has made it possible for us to think about collapsing the distinction between culture and biology and therefore between history and evolution. This collapsing has been pursued systematically in the post- genomic literature and by an approach known as the extended evolutionary synthesis; both approaches seek to overcome the distinction between culture and biology (Richardson and

Stevens 2015; Pigliucci and Müller 2010; Laubichler and Renn 2015).

This understanding shapes my response to Boddice’s critique. He declares that we can and must extricate neurohistory from a model in which predispositions, moods, emotions, and feelings are understood to have a deep evolutionary history, and in which certain responses can be theorized as being relatively automated. I have no objection to reworking the language and removing things that are problematic in this formulation; it would violate the very premise of my historical philosophy to imagine that a model first proposed in 2008 should not be allowed to change with the times. Among other things, it makes perfect sense to say, as Boddice has done, that the brain necessarily constructs experience. But in welcoming this move, I will continue to insist that the brain is constructing experience out of embodied changes that arise because of the body’s material properties. For neurohistory to be interesting, we need recognize that the body has innate features.

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In theorizing this, I have found it increasingly helpful to understand neurohistory as a branch of environmental history (Smail 2012). Over the past half-century or so, the relational or interactionist perspective on communication that grew out of cybernetics and system theory has suffused a number of fields of inquiry (Bateson 1972). Among historians, the approach has taken root most explicitly in the field of environmental history. Studies in environmental history take it for granted that humans and the environment are equal players in complex relationship of give-and-take (Cronon 1991). Rather than offering a history in which humanity is the only agent in creating change, the field assumes that change emerges unpredictably from this relationship. But this is where the fun begins: for what, exactly, is the range of eligible partners in this complex theoretical dance?3 In the case of environmental history, the dance partner typically takes the form of water, climate, sources of energy, disease, and so on. But there are others, ranging from material culture and the built environment to books and computers, as proposed by the theory of material engagement (Malafouris 2013).

When neurohistory is reformulated as a branch of environmental history, it allows us to treat the human body, in the aggregate, as one of these actors. As noted earlier, in the postgenomic world of current scholarship, we think of the body as an entity that is relationally produced through complex and ongoing developmental processes. Where

3 The idea of a ‘dance’ is a rather inadequate metaphor inasmuch as it suggests the existence of a relationship between two, and only two, actors. In fact, interaction takes place across a complex network of exchanges, where every actor is entangled with a range of other actors (Latour 2005; Hodder 2012)

8 history is concerned, the aggregate body responds to changing cultural and environmental factors in much same the way that rivers and water tables have responded to the building of channels and dams or that the atmosphere has responded to rising levels of carbon dioxide. That is to say, it responds contingently, in accordance with some of its innate properties, and it responds in ways that can have long-term, unanticipated consequences for human culture and society.

Examples offering theoretical grounds for this move abound. To take a recent case, rates of violent crime in the United States dropped significantly between 1990 and 2000.

The phenomenon was so noticeable that it immediately prompted a number of studies by scholars who sought to explain it. One of the most interesting explanations was offered in

2007 by the economist Jessica Reyes, who suggested that the removal of lead from gasoline between 1975 and 1985 was an important factor in the decline in crime (Reyes 2007).

‘Childhood lead exposure’, she argued, ‘increases the likelihood of behavioral and cognitive traits such as impulsivity, aggressivity, and low IQ’, factors that are in turn associated with criminal behavior. Reyes was not trying to argue that children lead exposure ‘caused’ any specific act of violence. You cannot say that O.J. Simpson killed his wife because he suffered from lead exposure as a child. Instead, the causal factor that is visible in the data is probabilistic in nature. Being probabilistic, the result is visible only across an entire sub- population. To put this differently, it was a feature of the aggregate body, which, according to the argument, suffered slightly more from lead poisoning than the aggregate body before the introduction and widespread use of leaded gasoline. Crucially, the effect of the removal of lead on violence, if Reyes is right, has been entirely indirect and contingent. There is nothing in the way that human society operates that could have allowed us to predict in

9 advance that lead poisoning could have rendered people, in the aggregate, slightly more impulsive. In other words, it makes no sense to explain either violence or its decline only in terms of some hardwired propensity toward violence, as Steven Pinker, to take an obvious example, has done (Pinker 2011).

The probabilistic nature of effects such as lead poisoning are crucial, in my view, for the kind of theoretical overhaul of neurohistory that I hope to see in coming years. In his contribution, Boddice has emphasized the importance of understanding the historical variability of individual experience. This feels right to me. But this is a different kind of neurohistory from the one I conceived, which is concerned only with landscapes of probability and which understood outcomes only in the aggregate.4 Boddice’s model will be more appealing to historians who prefer the particular to the general and are more inclined to study the exception rather than extrapolate the rule. Historical explanation is always particular to the scale at which it is conceptualized. What Boddice has recommended here is a model for doing neurohistory that operates closer to the microhistorical end of the spectrum. Rather than a revision to neurohistory, it might be more useful to see this model as providing a complement to the macrohistorical version, thereby allowing branches of neurohistory to operate across the full spectrum of historical explanation.

4 In hindsight, one of the major flaws of On Deep History and the Brain lies in my failure, at the time, to adequately describe the probabilistic nature of neurohistorical explanations.

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