Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience

The key problem with neurocentrism is that it devalues the importance of psychological explanations and environmental factors, such as familial chaos, stress, and widespread access to drugs, in sustaining addiction.

Those beautiful color-dappled images are actually representations of particular areas in the brain that are working the hardest—as measured by increased oxygen consumption—when a subject performs a task such as reading a passage or reacting to stimuli, such as pictures of faces.

“Three Problems in the Marriage of Neuroscience and Education,” Cortex 45 (2009): 544–545; and Larry Cuban, “Brain-Based Education—Run from It,” Washington Post, February 28, 2011,

For example, there is a delay of at least two to five seconds between activation of neurons and the increase in oxygen-rich blood flowing to them.

Instead, it means simply that one cannot use the physical rules from the cellular level to completely predict activity at the psychological level.

Ultimately, he says, neuroscience will—and should—dictate human values.

see neuroscientists as the “new high priests of the secrets of the psyche and explainers of human behavior in general.”

Studies that suggest a “brain spot for X” are typically misleading because mental functions are rarely localized to one place in the brain.

seem. They are not photographs of the brain in action in real time.