Neurosilliness

Image via WikipediaNeurosilliness: Here's one of the best examples of what I call neurosilliness that I have ever seen. It's a news item from Science Daily, a useful online source of science news. The headline for the item is this: "Baby's Smile is a Natural High," and here's the lead sentence:

The baby's smile that gladdens a mother's heart also lights up the reward centers of her brain, said Baylor College of Medicine researchers in a report that recently appeared in the journal Pediatrics.

And to this I can only say, with all due respect: No Shit! Next, are we going to have people running fMRI studies showing that, when people are looking at stuff, the visual cortex "lights up"??? All this breathless writing about areas of the brain "lighting up" in accordance with what we already know about certain aspects of brain function is really going overboard... And it tends also to feed into a naive reductionism, in which some folks become convinced that a phenomenon (like, for example, loving your kids) that involves the functioning of the brain (and, what doesn't???) is fully explained by and reducible to the organic, biolectrical processes of the brain...

And, on a similar topic, Stephanie West Allen (of Brains on Purpose) has an excellent post today about the gigantic and unsupported over-extensions that are being made from neuroscience to all kinds of speculation (presented as if it were proven) about everything from business applications to politics to... well, everything! As I said: Neurosilliness.