Forget about unreproducible research — you could be falling under the spell of common sense dressed up as brain science.
by Kate Everson
October 29, 2015
Happy birthday, “Mind Over Matter”! It’s been a year since my first post, and almost as if I planned it, this is the last time I’ll be writing for it. First off, thank you to all of the readers who stopped by and/or stayed for the long haul. Second, don’t worry: A new blogger will be taking on the task of bringing you neuro-news.
Before I sign off officially, however, I want to bring up the issue of neurosophisms, or the dressing-up of common sense as scientific discovery. Writers sprinkle words like “neuroscience,” “brain” and “research” among simple concepts, and boom — you’re writing about the super-cool world of psychology and neurology instead of baiting your readers to spend time learning things they already know.
For example, a “no-duh” thought like “People function better when they’re not stressing out” suddenly becomes impressively scientific when phrased as “Neurological research shows that the brain functions better when it’s not experiencing stress.”
I’ve probably been guilty of swaying a few of my past posts in favor of neuroscience and psychology by adding these magical sentence-enhancers, but I always hope to include some physiological or biological evidence to support it. Meditation calms a stressful mind. Great. Here’s how it affects the hippocampus to accomplish such a feat.
So, I’ll leave you with this thought. Look past the shiny science words you see and focus on what’s not there. You’ll probably realize that a lot of this brain talk is just a common sense pig wearing lipstick.
