Your brain on pseudoscience

Pseudoscience and the Paranormal
1

Your brain on pseudoscience: the rise of popular neurobollocks
The “neuroscience" shelves in bookshops are groaning. But are the works of authors such as Malcolm Gladwell and Jonah Lehrer just self-help books dressed up in a lab coat?

2

Very good article and very well written. Love this line.

You then climax in a fit of premature extrapolation, inferring from the scientific result a calming bromide about what it is to function optimally as a modern human being. Voilà, a laboratory-sanctioned Big Idea in digestible narrative form.
The author has some very good criticisms of not only the entire self-help genre, but also of Sam Harris' narrative style and Chris Mooney's take on conservative thinking. While I agree Harris is a polemicist, I'm less sure about his criticism of Mooney. How can we talk to ultra-conservatives as peers if they refuse to think instead of reacting out of fear?
3

Yeah, great find.
I like this one:

Too often, (Paul Fletcher, professor of health neuroscience at the University of Cambridge) tells me in an email correspondence, a popular writer will “opt for some sort of neuro-flapdoodle in which a highly simplistic and questionable point is accompanied by a suitably grand-sounding neural term and thus acquires a weightiness that it really doesn’t deserve. In my view, this is no different to some mountebank selling quacksalve by talking about the physics of water molecules’ memories, or a beautician talking about action liposomes."
Not everything that is labelled 'science' really is science. It might not differ from quantum healing, quantum touch and whatever.
4
Very good article and very well written. Love this line.
You then climax in a fit of premature extrapolation, inferring from the scientific result a calming bromide about what it is to function optimally as a modern human being. Voilà, a laboratory-sanctioned Big Idea in digestible narrative form.
The author has some very good criticisms of not only the entire self-help genre, but also of Sam Harris' narrative style and Chris Mooney's take on conservative thinking. While I agree Harris is a polemicist, I'm less sure about his criticism of Mooney. How can we talk to ultra-conservatives as peers if they refuse to think instead of reacting out of fear?
Good point. We can't. Lois
5

Then we run across a little story of applied science and realize that the presumed difference (gap) between the physical and meta-physical is shrinking.
The only question remains if AI can become a self-aware sentience with a mirror function of human behavior.

Scientists build artificial neuron that mimicks function of human cells
http://www.roboticsspace.com/scientists-build-artificial-neuron-mimicks-function-of-human-cells/
6
Then we run across a little story of applied science and realize that the presumed difference (gap) between the physical and meta-physical is shrinking. The only question remains if AI can become a self-aware sentience with a mirror function of human behavior.
Scientists build artificial neuron that mimicks function of human cells
http://www.roboticsspace.com/scientists-build-artificial-neuron-mimicks-function-of-human-cells/
Read the abstract at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0956566315300610. The author of the linked article took a lot of liberties. The abstract discusses using the cells as therapy to repair brain damage and link prosthetics. That's only a tiny step toward autonomous robots.
7

Yes, now that we are really working at nano scale where we can actually build molecules from scratch, it would seem that the sky is the limit.
But the term autonomous scares me. There has to be a mirror function (empathy) or the robot would just make decisions without any moral considerations.

8

Could be worse if the robots made decisions based on morals. Remember, the Cylons turned on humans after they developed a religion.