Jonah Lehrer, popularizer of neuroscience, has an editorial in the Wall Street Journal about willpower that illustrates nicely something that I find silly about (some unknown, seemingly large proportion of) neuroscience. To wit, neuroscience is largely, if not completely, irrelevant to the argument being made. The willpower piece primarily cites behavioral research, with a couple physiological-ish studies and a few brief mentions of the prefrontal cortex thrown in for good measure, to support the argument that it takes real effort to exert willpower.
While it’s undoubtedly true that all of the people in the relevant behavioral studies had brains, and that these brains played important roles in determining their behavior, this just doesn’t seem, in any important sense, to be neuroscience. It’s psychology, plain and simple (the relatively recent renaming of a prominent psychology department notwithstanding).
Other examples of irrelevant neuroscience in Lehrer’s oeuvre are readily available. Consider, for example, his recent Wired piece on ‘The neuroscience of screwing up.’ In this one, there is more neuroscience, but it’s still not clear to me what it buys us in terms of understanding. It seems to me that all the neuroscientific evidence discussed in this piece could be replaced by cheaper and easier to obtain behavioral evidence. This (old-ish) review of Lehrer’s book “How We Decide” makes it sound like more of the same.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m just bitter that fMRIs, EEGs, and MEGs are trendy, expensive scientific accoutrements that are not part of my research armamentarium. And I should be clear that I’m not condemning all neuroscience.
Lehrer’s essays reminded me of Jerry Fodor’s take on the issue, wherein he writes,
It isn’t, after all, seriously in doubt that talking (or riding a bicycle, or building a bridge) depends on things that go on in the brain somewhere or other. If the mind happens in space at all, it happens somewhere north of the neck. What exactly turns on knowing how far north? It belongs to understanding how the engine in your auto works that the functioning of its carburettor is to aerate the petrol; that’s part of the story about how the engine’s parts contribute to its running right. But why (unless you’re thinking of having it taken out) does it matter where in the engine the carburettor is? What part of how your engine works have you failed to understand if you don’t know that?