On Mon, 24 Jun 2013, Mike Palij went:
I haven't read Satel's and Lilienfeld's book "Brainwashed" so I have a
couple questions for anyone who has read it:
(1) Is the basic argument against "pop neuroscience" as reported
in the mass media (see Payne's comment on the American Conservative
website) or against all of neuroscience?
(2) Is the basic argument against neuroimaging research or all of
neuroscience (e.g., do they demolish Hubel & Wiesel and Sperry
& Gazzinaga and other researchers who use, say, single-cell recording)?
If just neuroimaging research, isn't the presentation a little broad?
I finished reading the book this weekend. Yes, my biggest beef with
it is that it uses the term "neuroscience" to refer almost exclusively
to "human neuroimaging." I suppose that's forgivable insofar as fMRI
is the part of neuroscience that makes headlines and generates a lot
of pop psychology. The major mischief that might result from the
book's focus on neuroimaging, I think, is that readers who do
preclinical neuroscience will become sensitized to the pitfalls of
human neuroimaging without being sensitized to the pitfalls of their
own approaches. :)
Apart from that, I'm favorably impressed overall. Sally Satel's
politics, which have been distasteful to me in the past, are not in
evidence within the pages of this book, so I'm relieved to be able to
lay *that* aside.
The first couple of chapters mostly recapitulate warnings about
statistical and interpretational errors in neuroimaging, the same
warnings we've been seeing in peer-reviewed journal articles. Satel
and Lilienfeld explain these errors in terms that are never strident
and are usually not sweeping. They maintain respect for what
neuroimaging can do when it's used well.
Next there's a chapter about addiction, which mostly contains the same
sort of warnings that *I* often make about a "brain disease"
conception of addiction. Here and there, very briefly, Satel and
Lilienfeld argue against a strawman version of the "brain disease"
idea; for example, they say it can't accommodate the complexity of
choices that addicts face. (Of course it can. Neuroscientists can
study how a healthy brain and a compromised brain process competing
sets of choices.) But mostly, they're on target about (1) the
unhelpfulness of thinking about addiction at the neural level only,
rather than incorporating all levels of explanation and intervention,
and (2) the illogical assumptions about etiology and prognosis that
usually accompany the "brain disease" idea, even in the minds of some
scientists.
After that, Most of the chapters are about misunderstandings and
misuses of neuroimaging by *nonscientists* in marketing research or in
law.
An intelligent lay reader who reads the book attentively will not be
misled into dismissing neuroimaging research (or the rest of
neuroscience) altogether, and has a good chance of coming away with
more nuanced views. The question is whether that nuance will make it
into paraphrases by David Brooks or other mass-media mouths.
--David Epstein
[email protected]
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