Opinion: Can the inner workings of the human brain save us from Donald Trump?

To the editor: Professor of neuroscience Robert M. Sapolsky blathers on about what “we” imagine as the course of our lives, which he speaks of as “evolving,” when properly, despite new cells in our bodies constantly being formed to replace worn-out ones, he might have used the notion of development. (“Will you be the same person you are today in 2027?” Opinion, Jan. 1)

He fails to account for the unknown quality of a consistent consciousness, clearly visible in the eyes of 6- or 7-month-old babies in strollers passing by daily. My neurons may be in constant process of exchanging old for new; but I for example am the very “same” person who resigned from the Cub Scouts at the age of 10 when I was told to wear a uniform and be like Sapolsky’s “we.”

As though his subject wasn’t our physical processes, Sapolsky concludes with propaganda based on his resolution to resist our political future under Donald Trump, saying he feels despair and wants “us” to struggle with him alongside the elites of the routed Democratic Party. He himself will not change, so I leave him to his “despair,” poor man.

Let him learn proper intellectual modesty from T.S. Eliot, who wrote in 1922, “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

Jascha Kessler, Santa Monica

..

To the editor: Sapolsky’s “end of history” illusion and the neuroscience of the hippocampus shows the complexity of development and its classic dilemma of nature versus nurture. The concept of change was aptly addressed by psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis in “How People Change”:

“We must affirm freedom and responsibility without denying that we are the product of circumstance, and must affirm that we are the product of circumstance without denying that we have the freedom to transcend that causality to become something which could not even have been provisioned from the circumstances which shaped us.”

In addition, the socio-emotional selectivity theory has shown that as we get older, we become increasingly selective, including who we want to spend time with. According to the theory, we show motivational changes in cognitive processing, whereby as we age we prefer positive over negative information. So I am confident in the future we will remove the tattoos our society acquired on Nov. 8.

Jay Slosar, Irvine

The writer is a clinical psychologist.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook