This Spiked interview by Tim Black with Raymond Tallis might be useful reading: This sense that our minds are not what we thought they were, that it’s our brains, and the natural-physical causal network of which they are part, that is really calling the shots has been lovingly embraced by politicos on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s a development that worries Tallis: ‘That’s when [neuromania] gets dangerous rather than merely irritating – when people start invoking brain science as a guide to social policy, as a guide to understanding criminal behaviour and so on. You’re then in the same territory as Cesare Lombroso [a nineteenth-century criminologist who believed criminality was physically inherited] and other characters who have since been Read More ›

Non-materialist neuroscience: “You can’t fire your brain but you can retrain it.” Here’s an interview with a non-materialist neuroscientist, Jeffrey Schwartz, who is friendly to ID covers what’s wrong with materialism in neuroscience, and introduces a non-materialist approach to the treatment of phobias, compulsions, and addictions, as used in his new book, You arenot your brain.: For the past six years, Schwartz has worked with psychiatrist Rebecca Gladding to refine a program that successfully explains how the brain works and why we often feel besieged by bad brain wiring. Just like with the compulsions of OCD patients, they discovered that bad habits, social anxieties, self-deprecating thoughts, and compulsive overindulgence are all rooted in overactive brain circuits. The key to making Read More ›

That’s Adam Hanft on the recent The Compass of Pleasure by neuroscientist David J. Linden, who writes at Barnes & Noble Reviews (June 27, 2011):

Disciplines from neuroscience to behavioral psychology to evolutionary biology have created a new cranial transparency that’s unleashed a gush of books like Blink by Malcolm Gladwell; Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior by Ori Brafman and Ron Brafman; Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein; and The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic and Work and at Home by Dan Ariely. (I interviewed Dan about his book for the Barnes & Noble Review.)David J. Linden, a professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins, and the author of The Accidental Mind, adds to this emerging, solipsistic genre with The Compass of Pleasure, a book that focuses entirely on how our brains pursue and process pleasure.

That one word “solipsistic” is  a bullet through the forehead of a writer. More telling: Read More ›

Non-materialist neuroscientists like Jeffrey Schwartz and Mario Beauregard are usually at least sympathetic to ID, just as their materialist counterparts are not. At issue is whether the mind is real or simply an illusion created by the activities of neurons. One argument for the mind’s reality is neuroplasticity, as this recent CBC documentary shows: For centuries the human adult brain has been thought to be incapable of fundamental change. Now the discovery and growing awareness of neuroplasticity has revolutionized our understanding of the brain – and has opened the door to new treatments and potential cures for many diseases and disorders once thought incurable.Neuroscience is past viewing the human brain as a machine, as it once did, where, if one Read More ›

That’s the latest, as Kate Kelland (May 5, 2011) reports, in “Scientist seeks to banish evil, boost empathy”:

Baron-Cohen, who is also director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge, has just written a book in which he calls for a kind of rebranding of evil to offer a more scientific explanation for why people kill and torture, or have such great difficulty understanding the feelings of others.His proposal is that evil be understood as a lack of empathy — a condition he argues can be measured and monitored and is susceptible to education and treatment. Read More ›

Holly Bailey tells us, courtesy Yahoo News, (Apr 11, 11:41) “Will President Obama and the House GOP ever agree? Science suggests no”: Using data from MRI scans, researchers at the University College London found that self-described liberals have a larger anterior cingulate cortex–a gray matter of the brain associated with understanding complexity. Meanwhile, self-described conservatives are more likely to have a larger amygdala, an almond-shaped area that is associated with fear and anxiety. “Previously, some psychological traits were known to be predictive of an individual’s political orientation,” lead researcher Ryota Kanai writes of the study in the latest issue of Current Biology. “Our study now links personality traits with specific brain structure.” A caution is offered: While the London study Read More ›

(My latest MercatorNet column reviews an  attempt to refound morality on a  materialist basis: Commonsense notions of the mind must be abandoned in favor of a purely brain-based approach because we are our neurons: Churchland is partial to a theory that morality originates in the oxytocin-vasopressin network in mammals. One outcome is stunners like this: “The social life of humans, whether in hunter-gatherer villages, farming towns, or cities, seems to be even more complex than that of baboons or chimpanzees.” Now, why in the world would that be? We never get a clear idea how Churchland think morality works, though we do get more than a glimpse of her politics. Go here for more.

In “Idle Chatter: This Is Your Brain on Art – Can neuroscience explain art? (The Smart Set , March 17, 2011), Morgan Meis recounts V. S. Ramachandran’s neuroscience theories that, he says, explains a lot about art: Ramachandran identifies what he calls nine laws of aesthetics. Let’s look at one of them — law number two, which he calls Peak Shift — to get a sense of what neuroscience brings to aesthetics. Peak Shift refers to a generally elevated response to exaggerated stimuli among many animals. Ramachandran refers to a study in which seagull chicks were made to beg for food (just as they do from their mothers) simply by waving a beak-like stick in front of their nests. Later, Read More ›

It is your fault.

In “The Brain Is Not an Explanation,” Wray Herbert (Psychological Science March 23, 2011) tries to bring some rationality to the interpretation of brain science here:

Brain scans pinpoint how chocoholics are hooked. This headline appeared in The Guardian a couple years ago above a science story that began: “Chocoholics really do have chocolate on the brain.” The story went on to describe a study that used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of chocoholics and non-cravers. The study found increased activity in the pleasure centers of the chocoholics’ brains, and the Guardian report concluded: “There may be some truth in calling the love of chocolate an addiction in some people.”

Sure, that’s it. It’s not my fault, it’s Russell Stover’s. As it happens, however, Read More ›

Some guy here not convinced: In “Can the Brain Explain Your Mind?”(March 24, 2011), Colin McGinn notices materialist neuroscientist V.S. Ramachadran’s A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human, Tell-Tale Brain: Neurology is gripping in proportion as it is foreign. It has all the fascination of a horror story—the Jekyll of the mind bound for life to the Hyde of the brain. All those exotic Latin names for the brain’s parts echo the strangeness of our predicament as brain-based conscious beings: the language of the brain is not the language of the mind, and only a shaky translation manual links the two. There is something uncanny and creepy about the way the brain intrudes on the mind, as if the Read More ›

Raymond Tallis, nearly thirty years in clinical neuroscience, diagnoses the problem here (“A mind of one’s own”, 24 February 2011): The republic of letters is in thrall to an unprecedented scientism. The word is out that human consciousness – from the most elementary tingle of sensation to the most sophisticated sense of self – is identical with neural activity in the human brain and that this extraordinary metaphysical discovery is underpinned by the latest findings in neuroscience. Given that the brain is an evolved organ, and, as the evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky said, nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, the neural explanation of human consciousness demands a Darwinian interpretation of our behaviour. The differences between Read More ›

Earlier, I had mentioned the problem created by negative expert opinion, when dealing with children who are missing all or parts of their brain. A friend kindly sent me this in response, from one of the Cambridge Journals. Note the line in the abstract below, “The relative rarity of manifest consciousness in congenitally decorticate children could be due largely to an inherent tendency of the label ‘developmental vegetative state’ to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.” Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology (1999), 41: 364-374 Copyright © 1999 Mac Keith Press Consciousness in congenitally decorticate children: developmental vegetative state as self-fulfilling prophecy D Alan Shewmon MD a1c1, Gregory L Holmes MD a2 and Paul A Byrne MD FAAP a3 a1 Pediatric Neurology, UCLA Read More ›

… this is the result:

The Neuromarketing lesson from this research is that if you want to be perceived as more flexible in dealing with a prospect while at the same time increasing their flexibility in reaching a deal, take these steps:Seat them in a soft chair.

If you hand them anything, avoid hard objects.

As I described in Heat Up Sales – With Coffee! (not coincidentally, based on research by John Bargh), offer them a warm beverage.

The combined effect will let you relate better emotionally to your prospect, and increase the chance of reaching a deal.

On a side note, this topic relates to the broader concept of neuroarchitecture. Will architects and designers begin to formally include findings from neuroscience and behavior research in their projects.

Okay, so now you know, suckers.

Rules for prospects: Read More ›

In the March edition of Scientific American, Gary Stix will explain The Neuroscience of True GritWhen tragedy strikes, most of us ultimately rebound surprisingly well. Where does such resilience come from? Scientific American New Issue Alert here. Prediction: Reading this will tell us a laudable amount of neuroscience and a little about true grit. The latter is difficult to quantify because it is, if you like, a psychological wave function. What caused the Romanian rebellion against Ceaucescu to spread from street to street, after decades of the iron rod? What caused the Montgomery bus boycott, after decades of passive acceptance of segregation? What causes an abuse victim to finally have “had enough” and start fighting back? Multiple causes, to be Read More ›