Brain Science Podcast discussion

Another wonderfully insightful piece by Prof Tallis, who again reminds us why science without philosophy is lost.

Raymond C. Tallis, F.Med.Sci., F.R.C.P., F.R.S.A. (born 1946 in Liverpool) is a polymath from Great Britain. He is a philosopher, poet, novelist, cultural critic and a retired medical physician and clinical neuroscientist. Specializing in geriatrics, Tallis served on several UK commissions on medical care of the aged and was an editor or major contributor to two key textbooks in the field, "The Clinical Neurology of Old Age" and "Textbook of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology."

Ginger, Prof Tallis would be a very interesting interview for your podcast.

"The smile-worthy prediction, reported in the Huffington Post, by Kathleen Taylor, Oxford scientist and author of "The Brain Supremacy", that Muslim fundamentalism "may be categorised as mental illness and cured by science" as a result of advances in neuroscience is not especially eccentric. It does, however, make you wonder why the pronouncements of neuroscientists command such a quantity of air-time and even credence.

It would be a mistake to assume their authority is based on revelatory discoveries, comparable to those made in leading-edge physics, which have translated so spectacularly into the evolving gadgetry of daily life. There is no shortage of data pouring out of neuroscience departments. Research papers on the brain run into millions. The key to their influence, however, is the exciting technologies the studies employ, notably various scans used to reveal the activity of the waking, living brain.

The jewel in the neuroscientific crown is functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), justly described by Matt Crawford as "a fast-acting solvent of the critical faculties". It seems that pretty well any assertion placed next to an fMRI scan will attract credulous attention. Behind this is something that goes deeper than uncritical technophilia. It is the belief that you are your brain, and brain activity is identical with your consciousness, so that peering into the intracranial darkness is the best way of advancing our knowledge of humankind.

Encouragingly, some scientists have started to sound the alarm, beginning in 2009 with Ed Vul and his co-authors' savage attack in a paper initially called "Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience". They found serious problems with the localisations observed in such studies. The links between brain regions and feelings such as social rejection, neuroticism and jealousy used methods that artificially inflated the strength of the connection. Katherine Button's more recent review of the field in the prestigious Nature Reviews Neuroscience is even more devastating. She concludes that the statistical power of most studies is very low. On top of this, there is publication bias towards picking out positive correlations, with little incentive for checking for repeatability after the excitement has died down."

Read the full article here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfr...