Is Psychology Becoming Too Neuro-reductionism?

By Aanuoluwapo Akande

Neuro-reductionism is the argument that the mind can be reduced to the brain.  As neurologists conduct more studies about the brain, they begin to understand more about the mind. This has then made some to suggest that psychology may be equivalent to neuroscience but is it? 

There have been ongoing arguments on this interesting topic and we are going to look at them from different angles. 

For example, some have argued that the emphasis should not be on psychology becoming too neuro-reductionistic. Instead, we should view psychology and neuroscience the same way we would compare philosophy and the disciplines in the hard sciences. The argument states that disciplines like physics and chemistry evolved from philosophy and that's how the relationship between neuroscience and psychology should be viewed.

Neuroscience evolved from psychology and it's still growing. However, because neuroscience is less speculative and gives more reliable results than psychology, it may be in more demand in the future than psychology. However, this doesn't mean that psychology won't be just as important to understanding human behaviour and the treatment of mental disorders. This is because it has fewer constraints, which means that it allows one to study more topics and concepts. 

Another argument states that science has so much being emphasized in psychology that it strives to find a scientific explanation to everything. Although the mind and the body are related, they forget that man is a complex individual whose behavior cannot be completely explained through the use of scientific methods. Anxiety and depression cannot be said to be caused by an imbalance in serotonin alone. For as much as these hormones have a role to play in the causation of these illnesses, the social, environmental, and personality factors also have a role to play. So, yes, they admit that there's a need for psychology to thrive to be as scientific as disciplines in the hard sciences but it just can't. Because that would mean that man can be understood like matter in the hard sciences.

Neuroscience and Psychology can never be equivalent because they both have their different approaches and methods; some have said. Psychology makes use of the "top-down" approach where it observes human behaviour in different circumstances while neuroscience makes use of the "bottom-up" approach where it dismantles the brain into its components to understand the brain and human behaviour. So, they both meet in half to contribute their quota to understanding human behaviour. Therefore, psychology can never be quite the same as neuroscience. 

Another argument is that Psychology studies the mind and neuroscience studies the brain since the brain and the mind are quite connected. It makes it seem like there's an overlap between the two disciplines. But that's not quite so as psychology also involves therapy. So, neuroscience may give us shortcuts like drugs and may help us to understand the brain but it can never replace talk therapy. So, psychology and neuroscience may be integrated in some way as some aspects of neuroscience can be used to explain Psychology but they can never be equivalent.

 From the above arguments, it can be deduced that although significant studies from neuroscience have given us a better understanding of the mind, that does not mean that the mind is just a product of neural activities. Thinking otherwise relegates the influence of man's experiences, and man's story, and just views mental illnesses as a disease that needs to be labeled, diagnosed, and most likely to be suppressed by the use of psychotropic drugs alone. But, that is not what Psychology stands for.