Pop Neurology as Pseudoscience

I wrote in early August of Jonah Lehrer, and of the circumstances that led to his departure from The New Yorker.

Briefly, he invented Bob Dylan quotations with which to fortify his thesis in his book, Imagine, about the neurology of imagination and creativity (two terms he uses as synonyms).

I said in that post that I hoped this scandal would prove "a setback for the cause of contemporary neuroscience or for its prestige with the broader public." It now appears I may have had that wish granted.

My evidence is a piece in a recent issue of The New Statesman, "Your Brain on Pseudoscience: The Rise of Popular Neurobollocks." (For those who don't know the Anglicism, "bollocks" literally means "testicles," and is used as a general term of exasperation. One of the Urban Dictionary's definitions for it is "unfathomable rubbish," which seems to fit.)

Steven Poole, the author of this article, couples Lehrer with Malcolm Gladwell and says they write "self-help books dressed up in a lab coat."

Near the end, he discusses the "This is your brain on" meme, on which of course the title of the article is a play. Scientists get people to do something (drink diet soda, listen to music) or even just think about some activity while getting an MRI image of their brains. Some section or other is sure to "light up," though real scientists are reluctant to say much about what the lighting-up means. The pseuodo-scientists don't get any money outof epistemological reluctance, so they write as if the regionalization of that image is itself a profound discovery. Hence headlines or chapter titles, "This is your brain on diet soda."

Poole bravely volunteers "to submit to a functional magnetic-resonance imaging scan while reading a stack of pop neuroscience volumes, for an illuminating series of pictures entitled This Is Your Brain on Stupid Books About Your Brain."

The only thing I really don't get about the article is the illustration with which it begins. I have reproduced that illustration above. The caption reads "This is a metaphor." And I 'get' the suggestion that the pseudoneurologists misuse and overuse certain metaphors, such as the hardware/software dichotomy drawn from computers.

But is there something more specific to it? A rainbow behind a palm tree is a metaphor of...?

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