Strategy. Innovation. Brand.

inaccurate neuroscience

Brain Porn

This is your brain on brain porn.

This is your brain on brain porn.

I like to think about our brains. The way the brain functions influences our creativity and communication. These influence our ability to innovate. Innovation influences our business success. It’s all linked together in one continuum, though teasing out how the links actually work is exceedingly difficult.

Since I’m not a neuroscientist by training, I read science-for-the-layperson materials. I enjoy Oliver Sacks, Daniel Kahneman, Peter Facione, Christopher Chabris, Daniel Simons, James Surowiecki, Steven Pinker, and James Gleick to name a few. But I often wonder just how much of what I read is accurate. Is some of it dumbed down for the non-scientist? What can we trust and what should we be suspicious of?

It turns out that there’s a lot of “brain porn” out there. Also known as “folk neuroscience”, this stuff oversimplifies and gives a false sense of certitude. It seems so clear, for instance, that a man who is short on oxytocin will have a rocky romantic life. After all, oxytocin is the “love hormone”. If you don’t have enough, how good a lover can you be?

We humans love to make up stories to explain cause and effect. Some of our stories are even true. In many cases, however, we don’t really know what causes what. It’s complicated. Still, we have a deep-seated need to create backstories that explain why we are the way we are. Neuroscience fits our need perfectly; it appears to give ultimate explanations. We behave a certain way because we’re “hardwired” to do so. We have an imbalance in our brain chemistry and therefore we behave antisocially (or immaturely or irrationally or generously, etc.)

Our desire for an explanation is also a desire for a cure. If an imbalance in our brain chemistry causes antisocial behavior, then all we have to do is learn how to rebalance our brain chemistry. As in A Clockwork Orange, we might turn ultraviolent criminals into well-behaved citizens. All we need to do is understand the brain better and we can make ourselves “better”.  A fundamental question is: who gets to define “better”?

So how wrong is brain porn? Vaughan Bell wrote an excellent article in The Guardian that itemizes some basic misunderstandings. For instance, it’s not true that the left-brain is rational and the right-brain creative. We really do need both sides of our brains if we want to be either rational or creative. Similarly, video games don’t “rewire” our brains into some permanently demented state. The brain is constantly changing. Video games may contribute some new connections but so does everything else we do. We can’t get stuck in video game dementia any more than our eyes can get stuck when we cross them.

Despite the brain porn out there, we can still learn a lot about behavior and creativity from neuroscience. In the next few days, for instance, I’ll review an article titled “Your Brain At Work” that really can teach us how to be more effective leaders and managers. I’ll do my best to write about neuroscience that’s well documented and substantiated. I believe there’s a lot of wheat out there. We just need to separate it from the chaff.

 

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