According to Thierry Ripoll and Sébastien Bohler, the ecological ravages linked to the overconsumption of planetary resources would be due to individual behaviors determined by our brain. A structure, the striatum, would pilot through a neurochemical molecule, dopamine, the desire for ever more, without self-self, they recently indicated in an interview with the world.
This thesis has political consequences: our biological programming would condition possible socio-economic organizations. The economic growth model would be the only one compatible with human brain functioning. This disqualifies the political projects of decrease or stability based on democratic deliberation. Possible consequences: change our nature as defended by transhumanists, or force to consume less in an authoritarian way.
This thesis, which has not been the subject of contradictory expertise, is without scientific foundation. It is based on a misuse of neuroscience, a misguided psycho-evolutionist reading and a ignorance of the human and social sciences. Here we highlight the non-neuroscience nonsense (the other scientific weaknesses are described in a Longer version of this platform ).
First of all, the striatum does not produce dopamine (he receives it), and dopamine is not the “pleasure hormone”, which Roy Wise, author of this hypothesis in 1997 in 1997 1970s. The absence of a “stop function” of the striatum, for which it would always be necessary to “increase doses”, is an invention of Sébastien Bohler (resumed without retreat by Ripoll) in the wrongsing with scientific studies. More broadly, the localizationist vision of the XIX e century consisting in attaching a psychological function (pleasure, desire, ingenuity) to a brain structure is completely obsolete. The functioning of a brain area is therefore rarely transposable in psychological terms, a fortiori sociological.
Nothing justifies an opposition between a “recent” (and rational) brain part and another “archaic” (and emotional, therefore responsible for our desires). The striatum, the dopaminergic system and the frontal cortex, regions of the brain present in all mammals, have evolved together. In primates, whose humans, the prefrontal cortex has experienced unparalleled development and complexification. But this evolution also corresponds to the increase in links with the rest of the brain, including the dopaminergic system and the striatum, which have also become more complex. The archaic striatum is therefore a neuromythe.
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