Your brain on pseudoscience: the rise of popular neurobollocks

[salvorhardin]

An intellectual pestilence is upon us. Shop shelves groan with books purporting to explain, through snazzy brain-imaging studies, not only how thoughts and emotions function, but how politics and religion work, and what the correct answers are to age-old philosophical controversies. The dazzling real achievements of brain research are routinely pressed into service for questions they were never designed to answer. This is the plague of neuroscientism – aka neurobabble, neurobollocks, or neurotrash – and it’s everywhere.

In my book-strewn lodgings, one literally trips over volumes promising that “the deepest mysteries of what makes us who we are are gradually being unravelled” by neuroscience and cognitive psychology. (Even practising scientists sometimes make such grandiose claims for a general audience, perhaps urged on by their editors: that quotation is from the psychologist Elaine Fox’s interesting book on “the new science of optimism”, Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain, published this summer.) In general, the “neural” explanation has become a gold standard of non-fiction exegesis, adding its own brand of computer-assisted lab-coat bling to a whole new industry of intellectual quackery that affects to elucidate even complex sociocultural phenomena. Chris Mooney’s The Republican Brain: the Science of Why They Deny Science – and Reality disavows “reductionism” yet encourages readers to treat people with whom they disagree more as pathological specimens of brain biology than as rational interlocutors.

The New Atheist polemicist Sam Harris, in The Moral Landscape, interprets brain and other research as showing that there are objective moral truths, enthusiastically inferring – almost as though this were the point all along – that science proves “conservative Islam” is bad.

...

Illumination is promised on a personal as well as a political level by the junk enlightenment of the popular brain industry. How can I become more creative? How can I make better decisions? How can I be happier? Or thinner? Never fear: brain research has the answers. It is self-help armoured in hard science. Life advice is the hook for nearly all such books. (Some cram the hard sell right into the title – such as John B Arden’s Rewire Your Brain: Think Your Way to a Better Life.) Quite consistently, heir recommendations boil down to a kind of neo- Stoicism, drizzled with brain-juice. In a selfcongratulatory egalitarian age, you can no longer tell people to improve themselves morally. So self-improvement is couched in instrumental, scientifically approved terms.

Full essay: http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2012/09/your-brain-pseudoscience

[longship]

2. Good read.

Takes down neuroscience flapdoodle.

R&K

[bananas]

3. I'm just realizing that neuroflâneurship was a key element in the new Resident Evil movie.

Neuroflâneur and neuroflaneur (with and without the circumflex) are both good descriptions of zombies.

A flâneur is someone taking a stroll,
so neuroflâneur is a good description of a zombie.

A flaneur is a connoisseur of flan.
Brains probably taste like flan to zombies,
so neuroflaneur is also a good description of a zombie.

Of course, Steven Poole, the author of the article in the OP, was probably talking about philosophical zombies, not scary movie zombies.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flan_%28custard%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/

http://www.thelemming.com/lemming/dissertation-web/home/flaneur.html

[Odin2005]

4. Sturgeon's Law, 95% of everything is crap.

And that applies to popular science books just like anything else.

[eppur_se_muova]

5. Damn ! I thought it was 90% ...

now I've got to clean out my brain.

[caraher]

6. Must be inflation, though...

90% of all statistics are just made up