A particular mental pathology?

Anyone who has been lucky enough to watch other human beings grow from those little mewling animals that reel from the womb knows that they arrive with a surprising amount of pre-installed software[12]. Babies don't just hoover up what is around them (though they do that too) but they have mental slots to put it all in to, and stuff they seem to know already. They don't learn to smile--or make fists, or crawl, or keep their eyeline level when you tilt them--through example or by discovery: they perform these tricks regardless of their environment. What is more, they all do them (or apparently figure out how to do them) at more or less the same time, this being the biggest clue of all that there is something prescheduled about this. The neonatal developmental schedule is uncontroversial and all authorities will agree that developing humans sit, master local idiomatic phonemes, undergo puberty etc. in a particular order and largely in unison with age-mates unless their are Mendelian-inherited reasons not to. It is also relatively uncontroversial that many psychological traits appear in sequence and in step--acquisition of Theory Of Mind, various stages of language competency, and expressions of Human Universals such as core concepts of morality, for example--and this is indicative of pre-programming or potentialization or universal aspects of the childhood experience or, more likely, combinations thereof.

We get uncomfortable about all this machine-like, un-free, predestined path to humanity when it comes to personality development though. Surely the thoughts, emotions and behaviours unique to us (in combination) as individuals aren't connectable to biology! They float free of the substrate, yes? They are mystically indivisible, eh? Wrong. This is merely our current popular version of the boring old mind-body dualism, with some aspects of mind now acknowledged as arising from the horribly biological body with its odours and secretions. At least (say some) the other bit, the essence of us, is still separate and pure and closer to the immanent. Meanwhile, psychologists and biologists are annexing yet more territory on behalf of the body, while those free-floating elements that make up the thing we call personality are also on their list of legitimate targets.

Born different

As soon as babies get the hang of their facial muscles you can see the nascent personality; they are all different and you don't have to wait for them to grow up and loudly proclaim political opinions different from your own to know that. Is this reckless anthropomorphism, given that any species that fails to recognize its offspring's normal behaviour as a sign of value won't be around for long? Very possibly, but since there isn't really a decent definition of personality, subjective impressions, with all their cognitive biases, are all we have. Anyway, anthropomorphism--more precisely taking the intentional stance--is the way we recognize personality in adults too. We're so good at it that we over-apply it and see humanesque emotional ranges in dogs, poltergeists where there are only vibrations, inanimate objects that seem wilful, and weather that wants to ruin our day. Suffice to say that, according to the imprecise way in which we measure these things, babies seem different in their personalities as soon as they are in any way capable of conveying differences at all. That's because personality and predilictions aren't wholly or even mostly learned. The differences continue into adulthood when some ex-babies may become scientists. The question is not whether particular differences guide a person towards or away from science but whether there is a type of person who is, through and through, a scientist.

It seems to me that Occam's razor points towards the possibility of there being a certain subtype of human that is a scientist -- if you accept that there is some pre-environmentally determined component to personality and aptitude and also acknowledge that there may be born leaders, born followers, born sinners and born saints, why not born scientists? Less circumstantially, there are certainly scientists for whom something that, when it is performed in a lab, we call science is their psychological base of operations outside lab environment. These people are the section of the human race who can be, or are, or might have been Compleat Scientists. And they are ubiquitous.

Really though, it's misleading to say they're born scientists. I don't mean to imply that some of the human species has had a genetic hankering to wear a lab coat for millions of years and--phew! at last!--can do so in the modern age. That's like saying dolphins evolved to jump through hoops just because they can do it. I suggest that the panoply of human subtypes includes several that are sensitized towards receiving satisfaction from satisfying curiousity, that thrive in situations where there is sufficient social support for cautious exploration of novelty, that combine the imagination that other subtypes--leaders, artists, whatever-- with a zeal to figure out what it is all about. Such ur-scientists appear in all societies and may in the past have become high priestesses or storytellers or magicians or healers or taken many other roles. They may have been nobodies. Today we have, in some parts of the world, the system and the five hundred years of philosophical and physical work to allow them to become scientists. The process is neither inevitable for those of the "science" subtypes nor one that produces compleat scientists when the other human subtypes encounter it. Nor is this the end-point; this section of the human spectrum will do other things in the future.

The right head for it

Being a scientist in the head and with the heart comes from a combination of mental traits, some of which are inbuilt. A particular scientist won't necessarily be any more questioning or logical than a particular non-scientist, nor will she be more obsessive, more skeptical, less artistic, more or less free-thinking, more timid or more intelligent (or more male, or more European). But taking scientists as a group, an accumulation of extremes in these and numerous other traits will be found (unfortunately this includes more males and more Europeans, this being an accident of history and of no greater significance than that). And each scientist will have undergone one of many possible arrangements of experiences, lost or gained opportunities, good or bad choices, guidance and fortune of all kinds that has led them to be what they are. There are plenty of non-scientists in the world who had the potential but either chose or were led a different way. That's a loss, but not for them - only for science. In the end I've come to believe that scientists are born and made; neither on its own is enough.

Potential-scientist human subtypes don't need a scientific upbringing to become scientists but, if given one of the range of environments that allow development in this direction, will become one. I'm not suggesting there is an irreducible, physical bit in some brains responsible for scientific acumen that is lacking in others. Why should there be such a facile answer? Science doesn't live in a gland that only works in some brains, just as gregariousness or perversity or humour or a spiritual nature or an artistic bent or psychopathy don't reside in one lobe or knot of brain tissue. To think this way is to indulge in a long-discredited but surprisingly current Humunculus-like theory of the brain. It ignores the fact that we are not essences only tenuously and mysteriously connected to brains, cohabiting with but unconstrained by the brain's predilictions and blind spots and limitations. We actually are the sum of those predilictions and blind spots and limitations and nothing more. If you find this notion unpalatable or contrary to your sense of self or impression of humanity, consider that this doesn't mean it isn't true. Must all truths be palatable?

Geniuses and autistics and both and neither. And scientists too

What about other, perhaps analogous human mental subtypes? There is one theory that genius is a pathology or a quirk of cerebral configuration. Another theory suggests that the male brain is a semi-autistic brain[31] (you see this a lot in apologia for the perceived asociality of scientists). One danger of such theories is that we can come to regard certain psychologies as deviations from a norm. While this is trivially true, we must be careful to apply the appropriate disclaimers. Firstly, there is no holotype: the norm exists as a Platonic Ideal and does not have any real counterpart with a physical existence. Secondly, variations from such Platonic norms are not to be characterized as "norm plus" or "crippled norm". Personality is like chess: no two instances are the same and, while it is often useful to understand the commonalities and the differences between instances, there is no special one instance that is the standard by which the other games are measured.

In genius, extreme mental prowess is a diffuse, multi-dimensional difference between the genius brain and the Platonic "normal" brain. It is not a discrete structural difference (a genius gland!). The cliche has it that the genius has no control over their raging intellect, but this is to separate the indivisible, to over-apply the Humunculus fallacy. The person is the brain, arises from the architecture of it like a painting emerges from the shapes and properties of bogglingly complicated arrangements of pigment molecules interacting with boggling complicated arrangements of retinal pigments and neurones and mental imagery and the rest. Mental ability, whether extreme or degraded (norm plus or minus), isn't an extra or adjunct imposed upon an otherwise normal substrate like a wart or a beauty spot on a face. Mozart wasn't a regular guy suffering under a barrage of musical inspirations from some fizzing structure in a corner of his brain that prevented him from otherwise being a successful joiner: he was an integrated unit that produced music of startling quality and, whether he had other mental "difficulties" or not, that was what he was. You couldn't excise the music gland or genius tumour and leave him otherwise unaltered any more than you can take away part of a freestanding arch or take a leg from a stool. And, while you can understand and appreciate Mozart or Einstein or whoever, you can't be them. To claim so is akin to claiming you can be slim and good-looking while maintaining a lifestyle of excess -- it is the ultimate in reductionism (genius, or perfection, as a graftable property). And it's an error of thinking.

The assumptions of empathy

The humunculus fallacy and the intentional stance are inter-related psychological heuristics that we humans perform regularly. On first encounter (and, some argue, forever afterwards) we typically act on the basis that the other person, to a first approximation, consists of a little version of ourself living inside the other head, putting up with different surroundings. Maybe the furniture in that other head is different (more of it? some really weird stuff?) or maybe the view isn't so great (looking out through bad eyes? at a bad life?). This is a useful trick for a social animal, affording us a rapid way to select from our surroundings the things most likely to be our friends, lovers, enemies, siblings, resource competitors or authorities. Unfortunately we have a tendency to over-apply it, particularly if we never go on to interact further with others but continue to rely on our first approximation. But Mozart's brain was not yours but additionally saddled with a never-ending flow of musical ideas appearing from some dark nook. Einstein's brain was not like mine plus handy tools for understanding complex mathematics and a recurring fancy about riding beams of light. We aren't little people (souls) occupying brains of differing prowess. It is the brains that have the different personalities and those with different abilities really are different. My brain is not yours plus a bolt-on or free-floating tendency to be me not you ? we, you and I, fellow humans, are, by this measure, shockingly unalike. The difference is real and is not a deviation from the norm (that is to say, from you, the only calibration you ever do when applying the heuristic). There really are different kinds of people. Some of those kinds are the geniuses, some the Compleat Scientists, some both, some neither.

That is not to say that Mozart, Einstein and myself[11] had something extra that many others do not. Instead, I think we have to get rid of this idea of pathology, of normality, of just-like-me-but-different-in-some-respects. After all, at one level of analysis there are six billion or so different kinds of mind. Counted a different way, there is only one. Somewhere at an intermediate scale between the variance of individuals and the monotony of the Platonic singleton is a place where we sometimes draw a line between "pathology" or "genius" or "Compleat Scientist" and "normal". Sometimes the line is drawn in the wrong place. Sometimes there shouldn't be a line at all.

To be a compleat scientist is not to have something particularly different about the structure of your brain. It is however a vocation, and sometimes an addiction, formed by influences that include those set before birth. You can be a natural questioner and tinkerer, and be trained on any number of courses or in any number of jobs to do science - good for you. But to internalize the scientific viewpoint, to use science as your way of looking at the world as well as your way of getting along in it…that takes desire. I don't think everyone has that prediliction, even if they have the skillset, the training, or the day job. Plenty non-scientists share some of the Compleat Scientist's traits, prejudices, formative experiences and all the rest. But to be a person of any kind--scientist or not, compleat or not--is to be a sum of parts and then some. Each of us is normal; each of us is different. Some of us cannot help but be scientists. And none of us has only one single reason for being what we are.