Bringing Science and the Humanities Together to Decipher the Human Being: Discover the Second Edition of the Master’s Degree in Neuroscience and Humanities
What are we, really? Is it possible to understand the human mind by looking solely at the biological activity of the brain? At the intersection where cutting-edge neuroscience meets some of the deepest questions of philosophy, the second edition of the Permanent Education Master’s Degree in Neuroscience and Humanities has emerged, promoted by the International Centre for Neuroscience and Ethics (CINET) of Fundación Tatiana and the International University Menéndez Pelayo (UIMP).
This programme is at the forefront of university education, as a pioneering international initiative with only three other comparable programmes currently offered anywhere in the world.
As the programme director, neuroscientist and philosopher Javier Bernácer, pointed out: “when we ask ourselves the big questions, there is no way of addressing them through hyper-specialisation alone”. Bernácer stresses that, in order to properly understand the brain, it is essential to consider it as part of the person as a whole, integrating biology, the mind and the individual’s life history.
An International Programme Connecting Disciplines
Delivered online and in English, the programme stands out for its agile structure, designed to bring the scientific and humanities fields together. Students with a background in science or medicine acquire the foundations needed for philosophical reflection, while humanities graduates gain the knowledge required to understand how the nervous system works. Once this common foundation has been established, the group explores major contemporary dilemmas together, including the limits of artificial intelligence, consciousness and the ethics of neurotechnologies, guided by internationally renowned academics and researchers from universities such as Oxford, Heidelberg and California. This interdisciplinary training opens up opportunities in research, ethics committees, the technology sector and science communication.
For José Ignacio Murillo, Professor at the University of Navarra and lecturer responsible for the Philosophical Anthropology module on the Master’s, current scientific research suffers from a serious problem of fragmentation.
Murillo warns that “science is often reduced to compiling the results achieved by specialists in particular fields, while lacking a genuinely integrated perspective that puts each element in its proper place and assigns each question and discovery the significance it deserves”.
Against this tendency, Murillo emphasises that “it is absolutely essential to develop a broad — synoptic, as Plato would have put it — view of the human being, taking into account the different approaches used to study humanity in order to avoid reductionism and oversimplification”.
At the same time, Murillo clarifies that “it is extremely important to take this broader, wisdom-oriented perspective into account when conducting research, but it is equally important that the anthropology offered to scientists and philosophers who wish to engage in dialogue with them should be open to experience, including scientific experience; in other words, it should not become confined by preconceived ideas or ideological frameworks”.
As for the ideal student profile, Murillo believes that all neuroscientists and philosophers would benefit from undertaking a programme of this kind, demonstrating that scientists “do not shut themselves away within their own discipline” and that philosophers “do not settle for a view of philosophy as supposedly pure knowledge, separate from everything else”.
Finally, reflecting on the first edition of the programme, the professor highlights how pleasantly surprised he was to see that the students, “despite the fact that the teaching is online and therefore they were not physically together, formed a genuine group of friends and developed friendships that are extremely important for the development of knowledge, particularly the most important and profound forms of knowledge”.
Ethics and Neurotechnology: “Not Everything That Can Be Done Should Be Done”
Professor Luca Valera (University of Valladolid), who teaches ethics on the Master’s, highlights the mutual contribution of the two fields, explaining that while neuroscience provides philosophy with “practical questions and real-world challenges to reflect upon”, the humanities offer neuroscience “a solid theoretical foundation, as well as new and innovative questions that can broaden and enrich research”.
Valera emphasises the rigorous nature of moral reasoning, stating: “I would like students to understand that ethics is not arbitrary; it is based on serious and rigorous reasoning. Moreover, it is not useless or secondary knowledge; it is central to human action, since every decision involves values and principles.” For this reason, he argues that “ethics should not be considered only at the end of a process, but from the very beginning”.
This requirement takes on particular urgency in the face of the rapid development of tools capable of intervening in the brain. As Valera explains, “new neurotechnologies are creating unprecedented scenarios and increasing the temptation to allow technology to govern every aspect of our lives; however, not everything that can be done should be done”.
In this context, interdisciplinary education makes it possible to critically assess these technological developments and reflect on their moral implications.
En este sentido, la formación interdisciplinar permite evaluar críticamente estos desarrollos tecnológicos y reflexionar sobre sus implicaciones morales.
The Student Experience: Martín Aisa Gómez and the Search for Truth
For students in the first cohort, their experience in the virtual classroom has been deeply transformative. Martín Aisa Gómez, a psychologist specialising in cognitive neuroscience, explains that one of his main reasons for enrolling was his desire to confront the question of human existence, observing that “few questions, in my view, within research — and even within human existence itself — can match the question ‘What am I?’, and few are so far from being answered”.
Reflecting on the balance between different methodologies, Aisa Gómez states that “science without philosophy can end in dogmatism; philosophy without science can end in speculation”. He adds that “having the courage to explain what, for me, represents the most profound and difficult question to answer today was something extraordinary, and that is precisely what I found”.
After completing the Master’s, Aisa Gómez says that his understanding of the brain and mind is now “much more sceptical and critical”, having realised that “the results produced by science can mean much less — and on other occasions, much more — than they may initially appear to”.
For this student, “only by perceiving science and philosophy together, and giving both the importance they truly deserve, can the human being be understood in a genuinely sincere way”.
Looking ahead to his research career, Martín Aisa Gómez hopes that the knowledge he has acquired will serve as a “beacon of truth and priority throughout my life as a researcher”.
The student reflects on how “today it is very easy to become lost, to be carried along, to become comfortable… and even more so within the restrictive and demanding boundaries of research”, where “funding, prestige and bureaucracy seem to be obscuring what has always been defined as ‘the search for truth’”.
For this reason, he hopes that this training will help him “always see the direction that should be followed” and “not become dissolved among interests that have little to do with knowledge itself”.
Aisa Gómez concludes by wholeheartedly recommending the programme to those seeking to be “at the forefront of what the science that seeks to explain the human being should be”.
