It might seem ridiculous to suggest people believe the budding field of neuroscience, the study of the nervous system, is no longer capable of progress. Indeed, no one will explicitly tell you this is true.
However, this view has become somewhat popular.
Neuroscience has excited us with the idea that studying the brain can tell us many things about ourselves. But the research in neuroscience hasn’t lived up to those expectations. We still don’t know much about the brain, and some have cast doubt on many neuroscientific research techniques. Some have grown impatient and even come to believe progress in neuroscience has stopped.
This excitement and confusion in neuroscience has affected two distinct groups of people.
The first of these is people falling for the nonsensical, commercial mumbo-jumbo that rides the excitement of neuroscience. People bolster the intelligence by claiming we know far more than we actually do about the brain.
They believe neuroscience is established enough now that we can develop churches devoted to it. They use it to create better products like NeuroGum, a supposedly smarter way to chew gum. They wield it as the basis of various self-help regimens and online articles with titles like “Change your Brain, Change your Life.”
But neuroscience is far from being advanced enough to support this. These deceptive marketers use this hype to take advantage of the uninformed populace.
And there’s still the second camp to affected by this neuro-nonsense.
This group, primarily comprised of academics, includes people who’ve actually done reading on the brain and who appreciate how completely clueless we really are. This initially seems to be a much more practical, useful position than the one expressed above — and at a glance it is.
However, a problem is that this crowd is beginning to get skeptical of the field’s progress, and their impatience shows up as the notion that we will never have a complete understanding of the brain.
It’s becoming quite fashionable to doubt neuroscience, even in a day and age in which science is often held to be the gold standard for evaluating the world.
These two groups, for opposite reasons, arrive at basically the same totally warped conclusion: further progress is not likely.
And all of this has its root in the vogue neuro-nonsense that confuses what we really know.
Ultimately then, what must be done is clear — we have to keep nonsense from surfacing in order to render a clearer image of the brain. Luckily, a simple solution exists in the problem as presented.
If academic skepticism of neuroscience were to really take hold, people will begin to notice.
Once they do this, public attention will shift away from neuroscience toward whatever the next fad topic will be and the ridiculous mess surrounding neuroscience will stop piling up.
Then the academic community will resolve its cynicism, and the result will be greater integrity and productivity in the study of the brain.
