Rationally Speaking #50 - Neurobabble

Rationally Speaking Podcast

New York City Skeptics

Society & Culture, Skepticism, Science, Philosophy

4.6 • 787 Ratings

🗓️ 18 December 2011

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The media is increasingly bombarding us with reports of advances in neuroscience which claim all sorts of amazing feats, like allowing us to read our thoughts and intentions. It sounds like neurobabble. Most of these reports though are either based on bad science, reach false conclusion, or are based on conceptual misunderstanding of how our psychology works. To be fair, much of this is manufactured by the popular media but, unfortunately, some of it comes from the neuroscience community itself. So, what information can we really get from fMRIs? As with the misunderstanding of what genes are (like whether there is a God or a conservative gene), are there really parts of the brain dedicated to categories of thoughts like some of these reports claim? And, perhaps more importantly, what are the ethical implications of this neurobabble, should we arrest people who we can tell, based on this research, will be committing a crime?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.
0:22.6	For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptics.org.
0:36.1	Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.
0:41.1	I am your host, Massimo Pilucci, and with me as always is my co-host, Julia Galev.
0:45.7	Julia, what are we going to talk about today?
0:47.8	Mathimo, today we're going to discuss a phenomenon, sometimes known as neuro-babel.
0:52.9	So essentially this refers to people concluding things from neuroscientific evidence
0:58.5	in a way that's either jumping to false conclusions or misinterpreting the neuroscientific evidence
1:04.8	or even coming to logically incoherent conclusions about neuroscience or about how our consciousness or our
1:12.6	psychology works based on neuroscience.
1:15.2	We touched a little bit of that with a guest that we had not long ago, Cordelia Fine.
1:20.6	That was focused on neurosexism, I suppose.
1:23.8	Yeah.
1:24.4	So actually there's, I mean, there's two components, there are two main components to this phenomenon. There's, um, just interpreting results wrong because of, uh,
1:34.6	the, you know, the studies being conducted poorly, like, because of methodological sloppiness.
1:38.9	And then there's just this conceptual problem of, of jumping to conclusions that you
1:43.2	realize are either not actually supported
1:45.9	by what you concluded, by what the neuroscientific evidence showed, or at least not supported
1:51.6	uniquely, like that there's other ways of interpreting it that you hadn't been thinking of,
1:56.0	or jumping to conclusions that are just sort of philosophically incoherent. So yeah, I'd say
1:59.7	it's partly methodological and partly conceptual. Yeah, we could talk about both areas and also about...
2:05.6	Oh, and actually, I'm sorry to interview, but I just realized that one of our other recent episodes
	...

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