The seductive charm of fMRI

Neuroimaging is widely regarded as the key to understanding everything we do, but the authors of a controversial new book, Brainwashed, claim this approach is misguided and dangerousYou've seen the headlines: This is your brain on love. Or God. Or envy. Or happiness. And they're reliably accompanied by pictures of colour-drenched brains – scans capturing Buddhist monks meditating, addicts craving cocaine, and students choosing Coke over Pepsi. The media – and even some neuroscientists, it seems – love to invoke the neural foundations of human behaviour to explain everything from the Bernie Madoff financial fiasco to slavish devotion to our iPhones, the sexual indiscretions of politicians, conservatives' dismissal of global warming, and an obsession with self-tanning.Brains are big on campus, too. Take a map of any major university and you can trace the march of neuroscience from research labs and medical centres into schools of law and business and departments of economics and philosophy. In recent years, neuroscience has merged with a host of other disciplines, spawning such new areas of study as neurolaw, neuroeconomics, neurophilosophy, neuromarketing and neurofinance. The brain has wandered into such unlikely redoubts as English departments, where professors debate whether scanning subjects' brains as they read passages from Jane Austen novels represents: a) a fertile inquiry into the power of literature, or b) a desperate attempt to inject novelty into a field that...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Tags: Psychology Biology UK criminal justice Health, mind and body Medical research Media Higher education Law Neuroscience Features Crime University teaching The Observer Medicine Science and nature Source Type: news