AREA OF BRAIN THAT CAUSES OVERREACHING CLAIMS IN COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE FOUND IN NEW STUDY, BOOK
Also shows definitive evidence for pop science writers’ tendency to produce trite books that distort cognitive scientists’ findings
BY MARK SCHEISSKOPF
An eminent researcher in the field of cognitive neuroscience has published a work demonstrating significant evidence that the writers who popularize cognitive neuroscience through mass marketed books almost universally make unwarranted claims on the subject.
“‘Significant evidence?’ I think not,” the study and book’s author, UCLA professor Dr. Yisrael Yahudi said, “No—I’ve got ironclad, irrefutable proof they do, jack.”
While he admits that the subject of his new book Neurofraudians: How fMRI Studies Distinctly show an Absolute Causation between Amygdala Activity and the Tendency to Pronounce Gnomically on Everything from Sexual and Criminal Behavior to Turn Signal Abuse, Nose Picking, Causing World Wars, Neuroscience Itself, and Lots Else risks paradox, he’s hardly concerned. Dr. Yahudi studied hundreds of psychologists, neurologists, cognitive scientists and bestselling science writers such as Jonah Lehrer and Malcolm Gladwell in his extensive 10-year project. His conclusions are sure to cause deep controversy in his field, particularly regarding the biases he discovered with respect to scientific motivation.
“$,” he said.
While concentrating on pop science writers, most interesting is his finding that the cognitive scientists themselves demonstrated the same breathless bouts of unwarranted conclusions and invalid leaps of logic as the journalists. Dr. Yahudi discovered that most neuroscientists felt not just secure in making pat pronouncements on the biological bases of all human beliefs and behavior—they were also downright haughty about doing so, early and often, without a shred of real causation having been demonstrated.
“Establishing causation between a physical brain event and concurrent or subsequent behavior can never actually be proven,” he explained, “but these experts never let a basic scientific principle like that get in the way of some cheap ink, and thus funding. We all need the scratch. Sometimes, yeah, I feel more like a circus barker. Attacking my fellow scientists may appear cynical, but show me the money? Heh.”
Utilizing a battery of fMRI, PET scans, multiple questionnaires, control subjects, and double-blind conditions, Yahudi discovered startling evidence in his subjects, of motivations having little to nothing to do with the practice of sound science. Quite prominent was anxiety over career futures and recognition beyond even the standard publishing in peer-reviewed journals: “The neuroscientists’ amygdalas lit up like Christmas trees when grant money contracts were mentioned, especially when it was suggested the grants were tied in with bonuses from MRI supplier companies and pharmaceutical conglomerates. Further, the effects were most robust when these contracts hinted that certain results were expected to be obtained in the studies’ conclusion, guaranteeing a continued largesse from those companies.” Can do, the participants’ brains said: “Simply put, the more experts like myself can show that human behavior is entirely reducible to brain area functions, the more the pharma and MRI companies can make the lettuce with their products. Ka-ching! Paid.”
Brain stimulation of the scientists’ prefrontal cortex was most prominent when images of Nobel medals were shown in conjunction with their own fMRI images. Yahudi, in fact, used himself as one of the test subjects in this series and found correlations in his own brain for nearly every trial far exceeding the statistically significant. “Stockholm, here I come. Woof.”
Studies of the journalists were equally damning. Yahudi maintains that writer Jonah Lehrer’s proven journalistic infractions, which included manufacturing quotes, data, plagiarizing, and “recycling” his old work as new were the least of his crimes. “The guy sprinkled half-digested and dubious studies into his chapters like pixie dust to back up pre-chosen conclusions. The front-loading startled even me. The promissory materialism and false equivalences he and other writers of his kind deal in is mostly fallacious. But again, he’s helped spawn a cottage industry that can’t now distinguish between algorithm as a logico-mathematical concept and the brain’s almost infinitely complex co-factors that throw wrenches into direct causation. What was once just a computational metaphor to guide modeling has become the reigning template for neuroscience. Show me the money. Pop science books like his generate uncritical consent and assent in the elite business and academic class alike, ever attuned to self-confirmatory biases as spurious as they are tenacious.”
Yahudi likened the situation to the medieval concept of the Great Chain of Being: “The backscratching never ends. It’s now the great chain of funding, publishing, and tenure on the corporate dime for us lab-coats, and we get to churn out studies showing the efficacy of near-placebo horse pills for the corporate side. Popularizers like Lehrer and Gladwell get the general population onboard the physicalist boat by the thousands. Again, ring-a-ding-ding all around.”
On publication, Yahudi believes breathless New York Times bestseller prose will be feverishly deployed in trumpeting his findings, minimizing critical objections and maximizing hype that exploits the public’s near-total scientific ignorance. And the book will sell. “I’m willing to make a scientific prediction. In fact, I’ve put in $20,000 with my bookie: Expect all the complexities of my argument to be flattened out, any ambiguities washed over, and probably dozens of confounding factors unmentioned so the book sells. Lab monkeys like me are in the synapse-dendrite-neuron religion business. fMRIs, the CAT and the PET scans are our bible, our sorcerer’s stones, and now the ticket to our sole raison d’etre—Fort Knox. Again, we’re lettuce-makers.”
“Neurofraudians” will be published next week.
