File under "hilarious, not surprising"

From science blog Cognitive Daily:

...David McCabe and Alan Castel have taken this work on the acceptance of
neuroscience to a new level: now they've got pictures! They asked 156 students
at Colorado State University to read three different newspaper articles about
brain imaging studies. The articles were completely fake, and they all discussed
brain imaging, but one of the articles included only text, one included a bar
graph showing brain-scan results, and one showed pictures of brains. The
articles were about three different topics, but an equal number of students saw
each article with text only, the graph, or the brain image...
The articles accompanied by brain images were rated significantly higher than the other articles, despite the fact that the fake claim in each article wasn't actually
supported by the fake evidence, in whatever form it was presented.

OK, I am generally hostile to studies based on how undergrads perform in lab studies, blah blah, etc., but this kind of stuff still cracks me up.

The Limits of Neuro-talk (from New Atlantis)

An article by Matthew B. Crawford concerning the misapplication of neuroscience in psychology and popular culture. I was glad to read this article (and its use of "scientism"), particularly after damage done to my brain while watching sports commentator Skip Bayless hypothesise on Sportscenter that LeBron James lacks a "clutchness gene." Sigh.

Anyway, this was a particularly interesting paragraph to me:

[Arizona State University psychologist William] Uttal suggests that the
perennial need to divide psychology textbooks into topic chapters—“pattern
recognition,” “focal attention,” “visual memory,” “speech perception,” and
the like—has repeatedly induced an unwitting reification of such terms,
whereby they come to be understood as separable, independent modules of
mental function. The ad hoc origin of such mental modules subsides from the
collective memory of investigators, who then set out to search for their
specific loci in the brain.

There are many more great things said in this article concerning what the author refers to as "scientism," many of which can be applied to evolutionary psychology and its popularization, and the author specifically addresses the attempt to locate "emotion" squarely in the brain, disconnecting it from the conceptual, ethical (as he says) and social (as I'd say) networks of meaning that give it life.

I'm also quite fond of this move made by the author:

I would like to make the case for giving due deference to ordinary human
experience as the proper guide for understanding human beings. Such deference
may be contrasted with the field of “neurophilosophy” (most famously, the work
of Paul and Patricia Churchland), which is intent on replacing “folk terms”—such
as “reflection” and “deliberation”—with terms that describe brain states.
Needless to say, brain states are objective facts, whereas our introspective
experience of our own mental life is inherently subjective. But this divide
between the objective and subjective, between the brain and the mind, does not
map neatly onto cause and effect, nor onto any clear distinction between a layer
of reality that is somehow more fundamental and one that is merely
epiphenomenal.