Despite the adage, there actually is such a thing as bad publicity, a fact that brain scientists have lately discovered. A couple of high-profile opinion pieces in the New York Times have questioned the usefulness of neuroscience, claiming, as columnist David Brooks did in June, that studying brain activity will never reveal the mind. Or that neuroscience is a pesky distraction from solving real social problems, as scholar Benjamin Fong wrote on August 11.
Let’s start with Brooks. Some of his complaints about brain scans, with their colorful blobs lighting up active parts of the brain, are quite legitimate. Functional MRI studies are notoriously difficult to make sense of. In fact, this powerful technology has been used to find brain activity in a dead salmon. Dubious fMRI studies do trickle into the hands of sensationalistic journalists, medical hucksters and marketers, who twist the results into self-serving sound bites. All true.
But Brooks’ essay conflates the entire field of neuroscience with some bad seeds. Some studies should never have been done, others mislead people, waste resources and sensationalize their results. But for every one of those studies, countless others tell us something important about how the human brain works. Serious scientists use a huge variety of techniques — yes, even fMRI — responsibly, and interpret their results cautiously.
Judging the whole enterprise of neuroscience by its weakest studies is disingenuous. There is bad science, just like there’s bad food, bad music and bad TV. Trashing all brain research because a tiny bit of it stinks is like throwing your new flat screen off a balcony because you accidentally turned on Jersey Shore.