This Is Your Brain on Stupid Books About Your Brain.

[westprog]

This is an interesting article dealing with the misuse of Neuroscience. Sam Harris is specifically picked out.

 

[angrysoba]

This is an interesting article dealing with the misuse of Neuroscience. Sam Harris is specifically picked out.

Quite an interesting read. In particular, I think it is widely accepted now that Harris made a bit of a fool of himself with the Moral Landscape. I have no idea whether the neuroscience bit of the book was accurate or not as it had no real relevance to his major claim which was that you can derive oughts from is's.

I notice that Jonathon Haidt appears in that article and certainly the quote sounded silly but I don't know very much about his work.

I also thought that the "Smart Thinking" section at Waterstone's is cringe-worthy.

 

[blobru]

"Pseudoneuroscience" was the subject of the excellent keynote address by Carol Tavris at this year's TAM as well:

 

[HansMustermann]

While "neuro" is misused and Sam Harris may be wrong -- indeed every scientist who ever lived was wrong, to various degrees -- I'll point out that Steven Poole is a guy who only has a degree in English, and whose only experience includes writing editorials for magazines like New Statesman, a consumer magazine, not a science journal, and composing music for films. Also, there is just that: the New Statesman is not a peer reviewed journal.

I.e., the baseline we're starting at is kinda like taking Ron Jeremy as an authority on why Sagan was wrong. (Not that Mr Jeremy ever did such an article, to my knowledge.) Or Kent Hovind on why Darwin was wrong.

Now he may still be right, of course, but he'd still have to present the research data and cite his sources. Or at least point out what fallacies are committed. Or, you know, SOME kind of addressing the actual arguments. Other than some vague quotes from someone not saying much more than "it's more complex", we're left in the dark as to exactly which actual argument of Sam Harris's, or indeed anyone's, isn't addressing the full complexity.

Indeed, the article doesn't actually address any argument or research data that Sam Harris uses, nor for that matter any particular author. Sam Harris is only mentioned in a list of authors who have published stuff based on neuroscience, and a whole different section is talking smack about how to do pseudo-science with neuro-imaging. But there is no explicit connection between the two, nor any authority or data to contradict any particular author. Even when authors or claims are mentioned, there is no actual explanation of what they did wrong, what arguments of theirs don't add up, what data is inconclusive, or indeed any connection to the rest of the text.

You're just left to do the connection yourself, because the author doesn't even have the balls to just say out loud who he considers to be wrong or why. So he's just hoping you'll be stupid enough to do a Cum Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc fallacy for yourself, and assume that if the two are mentioned in the same article, it's because there is a supportable connection. But again, the author doesn't actually make that connection. In PR bullcrap style, he just hopes you're stupid enough to do it for yourself.

But all in all, all I see is a piece of PR fluff, and for the thread, it's the same old lemming buying anything as an authoritative smackdown, if it's against something that opposes science to religion.

 

[angrysoba]

Yeah, I agree with lots of that Hans, but I tend to think that some of the brain talk is designed to make very trivial or obvious things seem somehow amazing or groundbreaking. I expect it is fascinating for people in the labs to discover various things about the brain that can also have far reaching implications but sometimes writers, whether scienctists, journalists or others - especially not from that field or from that field and venturing into other fields - tend to end up writing things that sound very silly. Like this:

Does our enjoyment of music—our ability to find a sequence of sounds emotionally affecting—have some neurological basis?

Dale Purves, a professor at Duke University, studied this question with his colleagues David Schwartz and Catherine Howe, and they think they might have some answers. They discovered that the sonic range that matters and interests us the most is identical to the range of sounds we ourselves produce. Our ears and our brains have evolved to catch subtle nuances mainly within that range, and we hear less, or often nothing at all, outside of it. We can’t hear what bats hear, or the subharmonic sound that whales use. For the most part, music also falls into the range of what we can hear. Though some of the harmonics that give voices and instruments their characteristic sounds are beyond our hearing range, the effects they produce are not. The part of our brain that analyzes sounds in those musical frequencies that overlap with the sounds we ourselves make is larger and more developed—just as the visual analysis of faces is a specialty of another highly developed part of the brain.



Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-...ns-Process-Music-169360476.html#ixzz274g6CmSn

I'm glad those brain boffins came along to explain why our music isn't audible only to bats.

Now, it is written by the lead singer from Talking Heads so it isn't as if he needs to be held to a high standard of scientific rigour. And he does admit that it is stupidly obvious. But I think the main thing is that there are lots of these brain books which end up explaining, with big words, and at length, pretty trivial things really.

 

[Lowpro]

I like the article but the jab is far removed from Sam Harris in the moral landscape; I've never noticed the takeaway the article supposes is there

Anyways, good article

 

[Aepervius]

Yeah, I agree with lots of that Hans, but I tend to think that some of the brain talk is designed to make very trivial or obvious things seem somehow amazing or groundbreaking. I expect it is fascinating for people in the labs to discover various things about the brain that can also have far reaching implications but sometimes writers, whether scienctists, journalists or others - especially not from that field or from that field and venturing into other fields - tend to end up writing things that sound very silly. Like this:



I'm glad those brain boffins came along to explain why our music isn't audible only to bats.

Now, it is written by the lead singer from Talking Heads so it isn't as if he needs to be held to a high standard of scientific rigour. And he does admit that it is stupidly obvious. But I think the main thing is that there are lots of these brain books which end up explaining, with big words, and at length, pretty trivial things really.

The yellow highlighted püart alone make no sense is trivial. But it is an introduction to the next paragraph which speaks on how harmoninc we do not perceive still have an effect. As such it is not stupid and I would probably have written something in similar fashion.