Is the age of mindless brain research already over?
By Daniel Engber
Slate
Originally published July 29, 2013
Brain-bashing, once an idle pastime of the science commentariat, went mainstream in June. At the beginning of the month, Slate contributor Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld published Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience, a well-informed attack on the extravagances of “neurocentrist” thought. We’re living in dangerous era, they warn in the book’s introduction. “Naïve media, slick neuroentrepreneurs, and even an occasional overzealous neuroscientist exaggerate the capacity of scans to reveal the contents of our minds, exalt brain physiology as inherently the most valuable level of explanation for understanding behavior, and rush to apply underdeveloped, if dazzling, science for commercial and forensic use.” In the United Kingdom, the neuro-gadfly Raymond Tallis—whose own attack on popular brain science, Aping Mankind, came out in 2011—added to the early-summer beat-down, complaining in the Observer that “studies that locate irreducibly social phenomena … in the function or dysfunction of bits of our brains are conceptually misconceived.”
The entire story is here.
Thanks to Tamler Sommers for this story.
