- Email: [email protected]
Doctor
Agapito Sanche
Perspectives
For more on David Eagleman see http://www.eagleman.com
Lunch with The Lancet David Eagleman
Historical keyword Doctor
David Eagleman is the first Possibilian I’ve met. The Texasbased neuroscientist and writer is in London to talk about his latest book, and over a hefty pasta lunch, he tells me that he invented this twist on agnosticism to mull over the different possibilities the universe holds. Eagleman’s stance mirrors that of his childhood hero Carl Sagan, the astrophysicist, whose genius for popularising science Eagleman adored while growing up in New Mexico (his mother was a biology teacher and his father a physician). “Science lives too often in the confines of university walls”, says Eagleman, which is why his new book Incognito deconstructs the neuroscience that underpins human behaviour by delving into the influence that our murky subconscious has on our free will. The snap decisions that seemingly pop fully formed out of our brain, he argues, actually arise from a complicated tug of war between our conscious and subconscious selves. In Eagleman’s own brain, his neuroscientist persona timeshares with his writer avatar. A literature undergraduate, Eagleman was seriously thinking about going to film school before he decided on a PhD in neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston. His 2009 book, Sum, a collection of fictional musings on what an afterlife might look like, is a sort of manifesto for Possibilianism. Incognito is more downto-earth, but Eagleman’s prose remains poetic. When our brain interprets nerve signals to construct vision, he writes: “your brain is in the dark but your mind constructs light”. All of this prodigious writing—his other books include Why The Net Matters and Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia—happens at night, however. During the day, Eagleman runs a laboratory at Baylor College of Medicine that studies how our brain constructs reality, for example, by studying time perception. His team found that the reason it feels like time slows down before a terrifying event—a car crash, say—is because the brain seems to store memories of these moments more densely than usual. This neural trickery may also have implications for understanding fragmented cognition in schizophrenia and autism. According to Eagleman, the future is bionic. His next book, Livewired, looks at brain plasticity. “We should be building machines that are not hardware or software but ‘liveware’ that learns how to optimise things. Eyes and ears and fingertips are like ‘plug and play’ peripheral devices that evolution has figured out. Why not plug in infrared and ultraviolet vision, or stock market and weather data?” he asks. “Our perception of the world will be so different in 50 years; we’ve already seen [a revolution] with the Internet, but just wait until we see it with biology.”
Strictly speaking, “Doctor” is a word incorrectly applied to most medical practitioners trained in the British tradition. Few are doctors in either the etymological or formal sense. The custom is the successful product of professional advancement tactics. Etymologically, doctor derives from various Latin words meaning teacher or to teach. Its history is closely tied to the rise of universities in medieval Europe when church licences to teach (licentia docendi) were replaced by higher degrees—doctorates in theology, law, and medicine. In written English, the word meaning teacher appears in the 14th century. Less common nowadays, it could be used without ambiguity in this way in the 19th century. In 1864 John Henry Newman writes: “St Augustine…is the doctor of the great and common view that all untruths are lies.” More broadly, it meant anyone with recognised intellectual competence as in Alexander Pope’s question in 1733: “Who shall decide, when Doctors dis-agree?” In 14th-century English the title also designated a medical practitioner with a doctorate. Geoffrey Chaucer notes in The Canterbury Tales “With us there was a Doctour of Phisyk.” But until the late 19th century few medical practitioners had any university degree at all— most had licences acquired from guilds of apothecaries, surgeons, or physicians. George Eliot’s Middlemarch of 1872 recurrently refers to country doctors with no sense that they have higher degrees. Gradually in the 19th century the modern general practitioner was created and although few were formally doctors the public began to designate them thus and, relishing the dignity of the title, practitioners happily adopted it. In its long career doctor has acquired rich figurative usages, including an agency bringing health (a sea breeze), anything beneficial (“what the doctor ordered”), an angling fly, a ship’s cook, and all manner of tools. Compounds abound (doctor’s mandate) as do derivatives (doctordom). As a verb doctor made a comparatively late entry into English (in 1599) meaning to confer a degree, later still to administer medicine, and in the 20th century to castrate an animal. But doctors have long been regarded as agents of ill as of good. To doctor something, as in to adulterate or falsify, was coined in the 18th century. In fiction (Batman) and reality (Harold Shipman), Dr Death is never far from public consciousness.
Christopher Lawrence Priya Shetty
[email protected]
[email protected]
1910
www.thelancet.com Vol 377 June 4, 2011
Perspectives
For more on David Eagleman see http://www.eagleman.com
Lunch with The Lancet David Eagleman
Historical keyword Doctor
David Eagleman is the first Possibilian I’ve met. The Texasbased neuroscientist and writer is in London to talk about his latest book, and over a hefty pasta lunch, he tells me that he invented this twist on agnosticism to mull over the different possibilities the universe holds. Eagleman’s stance mirrors that of his childhood hero Carl Sagan, the astrophysicist, whose genius for popularising science Eagleman adored while growing up in New Mexico (his mother was a biology teacher and his father a physician). “Science lives too often in the confines of university walls”, says Eagleman, which is why his new book Incognito deconstructs the neuroscience that underpins human behaviour by delving into the influence that our murky subconscious has on our free will. The snap decisions that seemingly pop fully formed out of our brain, he argues, actually arise from a complicated tug of war between our conscious and subconscious selves. In Eagleman’s own brain, his neuroscientist persona timeshares with his writer avatar. A literature undergraduate, Eagleman was seriously thinking about going to film school before he decided on a PhD in neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston. His 2009 book, Sum, a collection of fictional musings on what an afterlife might look like, is a sort of manifesto for Possibilianism. Incognito is more downto-earth, but Eagleman’s prose remains poetic. When our brain interprets nerve signals to construct vision, he writes: “your brain is in the dark but your mind constructs light”. All of this prodigious writing—his other books include Why The Net Matters and Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia—happens at night, however. During the day, Eagleman runs a laboratory at Baylor College of Medicine that studies how our brain constructs reality, for example, by studying time perception. His team found that the reason it feels like time slows down before a terrifying event—a car crash, say—is because the brain seems to store memories of these moments more densely than usual. This neural trickery may also have implications for understanding fragmented cognition in schizophrenia and autism. According to Eagleman, the future is bionic. His next book, Livewired, looks at brain plasticity. “We should be building machines that are not hardware or software but ‘liveware’ that learns how to optimise things. Eyes and ears and fingertips are like ‘plug and play’ peripheral devices that evolution has figured out. Why not plug in infrared and ultraviolet vision, or stock market and weather data?” he asks. “Our perception of the world will be so different in 50 years; we’ve already seen [a revolution] with the Internet, but just wait until we see it with biology.”
Strictly speaking, “Doctor” is a word incorrectly applied to most medical practitioners trained in the British tradition. Few are doctors in either the etymological or formal sense. The custom is the successful product of professional advancement tactics. Etymologically, doctor derives from various Latin words meaning teacher or to teach. Its history is closely tied to the rise of universities in medieval Europe when church licences to teach (licentia docendi) were replaced by higher degrees—doctorates in theology, law, and medicine. In written English, the word meaning teacher appears in the 14th century. Less common nowadays, it could be used without ambiguity in this way in the 19th century. In 1864 John Henry Newman writes: “St Augustine…is the doctor of the great and common view that all untruths are lies.” More broadly, it meant anyone with recognised intellectual competence as in Alexander Pope’s question in 1733: “Who shall decide, when Doctors dis-agree?” In 14th-century English the title also designated a medical practitioner with a doctorate. Geoffrey Chaucer notes in The Canterbury Tales “With us there was a Doctour of Phisyk.” But until the late 19th century few medical practitioners had any university degree at all— most had licences acquired from guilds of apothecaries, surgeons, or physicians. George Eliot’s Middlemarch of 1872 recurrently refers to country doctors with no sense that they have higher degrees. Gradually in the 19th century the modern general practitioner was created and although few were formally doctors the public began to designate them thus and, relishing the dignity of the title, practitioners happily adopted it. In its long career doctor has acquired rich figurative usages, including an agency bringing health (a sea breeze), anything beneficial (“what the doctor ordered”), an angling fly, a ship’s cook, and all manner of tools. Compounds abound (doctor’s mandate) as do derivatives (doctordom). As a verb doctor made a comparatively late entry into English (in 1599) meaning to confer a degree, later still to administer medicine, and in the 20th century to castrate an animal. But doctors have long been regarded as agents of ill as of good. To doctor something, as in to adulterate or falsify, was coined in the 18th century. In fiction (Batman) and reality (Harold Shipman), Dr Death is never far from public consciousness.
Christopher Lawrence Priya Shetty
[email protected]
[email protected]
1910
www.thelancet.com Vol 377 June 4, 2011