In this appendix, we explore the issue of the brain's coding system in more depth. As noted in the main text, Uttal (2016) makes a key distinction between signs and codes. Signs are merely neurophysiological phenomena that appear to correlate with psychological processes; a code is the actual mechanism by means by which the brain ‘works’. The event-related potential (ERP), the subject of the first author's PhD research, provides a pertinent example of this distinction. The ERP is a slow perturbation in the ongoing EEG activity of the brain which is evoked by a single stimulus, such as a click or a flash. A typical ERP is shown in figure 5: it consists of a series of waves which unfold over the half second or so (500 ms) after the stimulus. By convention, negative is shown upwards, and the waves are accordingly known as P1, N1, and so on.

At that time, the dominant model of human cognition was to see the brain as an information processing system, typically represented as a block diagram involving a number of modules: for perception, attention and memory (figure 5). It was naturally tempting to think of the block diagram as a functional model of mind–brain architecture, and when juxtaposed with the ERP to speculate that perhaps the orderly progression of peaks and troughs in the waveform reflects the sequential activation of ‘cognitive modules’ in the brain.

The PhD examined the relationship between the amplitude of the N1–P2 complex of the ERP and the amount of information conveyed by the stimulus. In a key experiment, the research showed that when the quantity of (temporal) information in two stimuli was equated, no amplitude effects were found (Wastell, 1979a). The evidence was seemingly convincing. However, in that experiment, there was a further condition; the subjects were asked to relax and ignore the stimuli completely, rather than produce a reaction time response as in the main condition. Under these circumstances, the amplitude of N1–P2 was actually greater, even though no information was being processed at all. The seductively appealing idea that the amplitude of peaks in ERP waveform reflects the degree of information processing by ‘brain structures’ was thus contradicted by an inconvenient empirical result.

We have argued throughout the book that attempts to fathom the depths of life by examining our flesh and blood create new opportunities and imperatives for the State. Through developments in biotechnology, the moral domains of deviance, normality, crime and punishment, even the making of socially useful human capital, can potentially be turned into technical matters to be sorted and shaped. Prevention and surveillance go under the skin and into the womb. We have shown how processes within scientific communities affect the ways in which findings from animal studies may be applied to human populations. Citation practices, for example, critically affect what is asked in subsequent research, and contestable findings can become rewritten as fundamental truths. Thus, research becomes ‘path dependent’, a furrow is ploughed, cow-paths are paved and commitment to a particular knowledge quest escalates. The research funding follows and makes the rut longer and deeper, the ‘facts’ get made, told and retold; the memes reproduce themselves. The structures that are created, constrain more than they enable.

In this final chapter, we raise questions about whether the neurological and molecular levels, the actions and processes within and between cells, are the most rich and appropriate domains to guide the actions of the State. The consequences of the prevailing moral and scientific settlements, we will argue, are that preferred policy responses are individualised and increasingly medicalised. A preoccupation with prevention, early intervention and particular forms of evidence are squeezing out conversations about different, and potentially more desirable and sustainable, actions to make people's lives better. Choices are being made about who to help, who needs to change and how money is spent on creating a better world. Notions of vulnerability and damage are double edged; possibly more resources flow, but these dispensations are conditional on ‘compliance’, ‘engagement’ and surveillance.

In this chapter, we begin with a brief introduction to the recent developments in the biological sciences. We go on to examine how these are joining with older projects to improve the human condition. We review the origins of these projects in the natural yearning for a utopia, free from misery, disorder and disease. We then trace the ascendency of developmental psychology and ‘infant determinism’ which has always been a key part of the project of human improvement.

The application of molecular biology and neuroscience to the treatment of diseases such as cancer or Parkinson's disease may be relatively morally uncontroversial, but we are seeing a shift in the range of matters to which biological understandings are being applied. This is why the exploration of their translation into policy and practice is so pressing. The ‘neuro’ prefix, for example, is now applied to disciplines as disparate as economics, the law, aesthetics, pedagogy, theology and organisational behaviour. The term ‘neuromania’ has been coined (Legrenzi and Umilta, 2011; Tallis, 2011) to refer to this proliferation.

Although some critics have lampooned this ebullience, speaking flippantly of parts of the brain ‘lighting up’ in overly simplistic laboratory experiments, there are many, very real implications in seeing the human condition in this way. Social policy is making increasingly significant use of neuroscientific evidence to warrant particular claims about both the potentialities and vulnerabilities of early childhood, and the proper responses of the State to these. Neuroscience is also making its mark in the area of criminal justice, where it often appears to offer ‘liberalising’ benefits: developmental neuroscience has been used, for example, to make the case for raising the age of criminal responsibility. However, alongside these apparently progressive trends, there lies the seductive (and somewhat sinister) idea that violent crime can be attributed to a small group of intrinsically aggressive individuals, and that neuroimaging (or genetics) can yield ‘biomarkers’ which may be used to identify risky people and to ‘target’ interventions at them. This potentially prefigures a future in which new biological technologies play an increasing role in pre-emptively isolating risky subgroups and identifying how to prevent their predicted deviance.

The definition is extracted from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website (http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/hcp-dsm.html).

In this first chapter of Part II, we switch register and examine the way biological thinking is merging and melding with the project of human improvement. Here, we review recent policy, tracing the ways in which neuroscience, in particular, has been invoked to relocate an older moral project on the high hard ground of scientific rationality. The previous chapter reviewed the fields of biological psychiatry and examined the potential impact of a neuro-developmental thought style. We argued that, for all its sound and fury, surprisingly few killer insights have been produced. In this chapter, we explore the emergence of a preventive mindset in social policy: if only we could get things right in the first few years of life, madness, badness and all manner of vexing social problems, including poverty, would be effectively nipped in the bud. In chapter one, we referred to Valentine, Valentine et al's (1975) critique of the theory of sociogenic brain damage. Despite such critique, the idea of impairment to the infant brain has proved appealing and very hard-wearing to politicians, policy makers, academics and reformers of both conservative and liberal mindsets, as it promises to explain intergenerational social disadvantage. It has been a potent myth.

The Valentines’ trenchant objections to the thesis of sociogenic brain damage, and its associated theology, took place at a time when neuroscientific understandings of the impacts of environment on brain development were alluringly novel. Since the 1970s, there has been an explosion of brain science and, as we have noted, it is now exerting a strong influence on mainstream social policy. Significant use of neuroscientific evidence is being made to warrant claims about the irreversible vulnerabilities of early childhood and the proper responses of the State. There is a particular emphasis on the promotion of ‘targeted early intervention’ to enhance the lives of disadvantaged children. Sociogenic brain damage is back in the technicolour, bewitching detail of fMRI imagery. The ‘damaged’ infant brain, or rather the promise of social improvement implied by the optimisation of its development, is popular across the political gamut.