Psychobabble-Neurobabble. Debunking popular Psycho-myths and Neuro-myths (Intro)

As a Neuroscience freak I will entertain you with some of my main beefs with the fields of psychology and even (cognitive) neuroscience. Before you proceed any further accussing me about ignorance in regards to psychology I have to say that I am one of those fools who wasted time (and maybe some money) to do a degree in psychology. I can't believe that I was exposed to that great amount of bullocks and nonense and even took the academia (of the psychological sciences) seriously. Don't get me wrong, psychology is great, when it comes to cultivating the mind, when you are sitting with a few armchair philosophers under the summer starry night discussing about existential issues, psychoanalysis and evolution but its a different story when you spend entire fortunes to untap your hidden quantum energy, to reshape your subconscious and improve your memory via subliminal messages, to visualize your future and then sleep on it. Actually, as a student there is a great chance that 90% from what you know from all the academic books you bought now being considered pretty much a myth from more modern up-to-date research. Books need to be rewritten and facts rechecked. And again, I am not dismissing the great efforts of many clinical psychologists and clinical researchers who some of them are really responsible in what they do and they try to be ethical. I will cover the problems with counselors and psychologists and even CBT therapy in a further post.

Unfortunately, the field of psychology is inherently problematic because of the fact that psychologists are not studying something solid and concrete like the square root of 9, or the chemical composition of progesterone. They are studying something very plastic, highly unpredictable, complicated; human behavior. Come on, let's be frank: How many things can you tell about people by merely inviting them to the campus for a 30 min-experiment? Isn't it disgraceful to the human dignity and to someone's personality to rate him using such as superficial tool such as the Myers-Briggs personality test? Don't you find it offensive to self-diagnose based on an online 10-minute test on bipolar disorder designed by 'professionals'? What about when someone assesses your 'intelligence' or your many 'intelligences' based on some arbitrary, ambiguous measure of performance. I find it insulting to the human existence. I even turned-down jobs where the selection process required an IQ/ability testing. I cannot imagine my self sitting in a room with a bunch of competitors where some random guy will assess my whole existence and determine if I am good for a job or what my personality is like and if I am smart enough based on a sheet of paper and some numbers where they were designed by 'professionals'. I find this commercialization of human behavior and human suffering nothing more than 'whoring', obnoxious and nauseaeuting.

Psychology is everywhere. Its a part of our lives now. Anywhere you go you hear common people discussing psychological principles and concepts. Armchair psychologists. Anywhere you go someone is ready to psychoanalyze you , talk about your personality, you can read columns in any magazine about what women want, how men think, how to behave in the workplace, how to succeed, how to become a millionaire, how to be a successful entepreuner, how to read people's minds, how to read someone's body language, the 101 laws for a happy life, how to remain positive, how to pick-up women and so forth and all of them 'supported by studies and evidence'.

I can't think of any other 'science' which has been subjected to so much 'whoring' and rape. How many crooks and charlatans who call themselves psychologists, counselors, life coaches, gurus, parade in the media and bombard people with so much misinformation and psychobabble and sadly, many of them are graduates from top institutions around the world. A PhD in positive psychology? A PhD in Clinical Hypnosis? Even the top institutions and prestigious universities produce an extreme amount of published nonsense. All you need to do is go through a professor's publications and only realize how much money are wasted on sustaining a field which definetely needs a reform and which produces mostly junk science. With the pressure for publishing we are sacrifizing quality over quantity. Give them money and they can pretty much come up with anything.

Despite its enormous contribution Cognitive Neuroscience has expanded the pseudoscientific dictionary of woo-woo and jargon even further and now psychobabble includes neurobabble as well. With the rise of Neuro-technology such as the TMS or the fMRI scientists now try to link activations between brain regions with cognitive functions. The fMRI is not only the tool of Neurologists, Neuro-actinologists or someone else with a medical background. Its now used by psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists, linguistics, sociologists, marketers and it has incorporated a wide range of disciplines which want to study non-medical phenomena such as the brain on music, the brain during praying, the brain when thinking about concepts like God, our brains during moral decisions, etc. Hence, we can now discuss the higher mind using medical technology. And a major problem that emerged from this is to what extent can someone study the mind by merely watching at brain regions lighting-up in different colours under a scan? How can complex cognitive processess such as thinking, recalling, retriving information can be comparmentalized in particular brain areas? How can someone link function A with let's say the posterior cingulate cortex or the locus coeruleus?

The same goes when someone attempts to study psychological disorders. When someone tries to point-out particular brain regions underlying a psychological disorder she is assuming that the brain 'causes' a disorder. You have a shrinked hippocampus and this is why you have a poor memory. Taxi-drivers have a larger hippocampus and larger centers of spatial-memory and navigation centers in the hippocampus because of the fact that they drive all day. I am not going to argue. Some behaviors have been directly linked with particular brain regions and there are consistent evidence about this. But this create a circular logic. Does the brain cause or reflects a process? Is someone bipolar or severely depressed because his brain 'caused' it? or what we see in the fMRI is merely a reflection of something else?

Furthermore, many scientists still propagate the myth that the brain is pretty much like a swiss army knife, where every brain area is responsible for some function e.g., the left hemisphere for language and writing, the right hemisphere for doing maths, calculation and numbers, your left part of the brain is the analytical part, the right part of the brain is the intuitive part and even linking hemispheries to personality traits etc, etc. The same goes for 'hemispheric dominance'in which the two hemispheres of the brain are portrayed as housing opposing (or complementary) personality traits and skills. Anyone who still holds these views have an over-symplified understadning of how the brain functions. The modular theory is pretty much outdated and controversial and mostly a part of pop-pseudoscience Hollywood fashion of an attempt of science-popularizers to simplify the brain. Even though there is some truth that brain regions are responsible for certain functions, we only know that you can talk about strong correlations and associations between regions and functions, not causal relationships.

fMRI scans are coined as the new-phrenology where you make inferences about particular skills, personality traits and functions based on in-direct evidence. An individual simply lays down remaining in a confined place with his head immobile in the MR scanner and is asked to pefrom a task. As it turns out, an area can be lighted-up for a variety of different reasons that have nothing to do with what a brain area is responsible for or unnrelated to the task. It is currently believed that when a cognitive task is performed, the area of neural activation becomes more perfused as a result of an increased need for oxygen and that cerebral blood flow and neuronal activation are coupled. Since then we have a burst of sensational articles about the 'god spot' in the brain, about 'racism being embedded in the human brain or the brain region for racism' about morality having a special place in the brain, about conservatives or religious people being less 'intelligent' than liberals and atheists because their brains signified fear and threat more often and all these merely by exploring blood flow in certain brain areas (???). This is nothing more than modern voodoo science.

https://www.wired.com/2009/09/fmrisalmon/
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2009/09/16/fmri-gets-slap-in-the-face-with-a-dead-fish/#.WV-BMYSGPcs

The concept of 'plasticity' has been tremensoudly raped as well by science crooks. The brain is highly plastic indeed, probably more plastic and reactive to the environment than any other species known on the planet since we are a species which its far more able to adapt than any other species but it does not get 'rewired' to certain behaviors when you exercise, play video-games, watch porn, watch violent movies, dieting, festing, meditate or listen to Mozart or listening to binaurial frequencies, chants, repeat Mantras, exosed to subliminal messages or relaxing music and apparently someone needs to be very cautious with the word 'neuroplasticity' and 'rewiring' in cases of stroke or when talking about 'prosopagnosia' and 'spatial neglect'. Obviously the brain does not 'rewire' that easily and is not so plastic in many cases. The word 'rewire' is another example of neurobabble.

We use only 10% of our brains: This actually was a metaphor coined by William James and a major ball-buster since then. William James simply said that we are not deep thinkers. The brain functions 24/7 and functions even more as we sleep. Of course brain activity changes from moment-to-moment with activations and de-activations of brain regions, some are activated more than others depending on task but there is not a brain part which just sits there silently and there is no hidden potential to be unlocked not the silent superpower parts of our brain nor the hidden percentage of the unused brain that spiritualists want you to uncover through hocus-pocus rituals.

What else? Alcohol kills brain cells, playing classical music to the unborn fetus makes it smarter, that we cannot grow newer brain cells after a particular age even claims that women are 'wired' more for empathy and social skills but males for maths, enginnerring and science and all these myths stem from another controversial field, evolutionary psychology which tries to explain modern psychological predispositions based on our ancestors' behavior. If women have a larger hippocampus than men then this apparently explains why they are so emotional or why they remember pretty much, right? Women are better in social and verbal skills (and why not) natural gossipers and small-talkers because men used to hunt and women used to stay home to take care the children and socializing with their female neighbours. Their left hemisphere says so and men are better in spatial cognition because they used to rely on navigation ro hunt.

Caution: I am not questioning (only) if these claims are true or not. I am questioning about the field's research methods at hand and the ability of evolutionary psychologists to do science.

The amount of popular, easy-digestable of fast-food science myths surrounding the field of psychology and neuroscience are actually more than the known facts. The whole field is becoming indeed a joke and the line between science and pseudoscience is rather blurred. Need to go on? Bullies have low self-esteem and problems with their manhood, rapists come from very poor backgrounds, they are usually less intelligent people and underachievers living in isolation and social exclusion, fidget spinners help with anxiety and ADHD (that's a new one), expressing anger will always make you feel better, some people are visual, others are auditory and others learn via kinesthetic cues, visual imagery really works, mentally-ill people are violent and dangerous, incompetent, unreliable and less intelligent or let's try the opposite, it really works too, highly intelligent people are more likely to exhibit traits of mental illness, enhanced creativity, abuse drugs, are more lazy and stay-up at night because they are too 'wired' to fall asleep wondering where the quantum vacuum comes from and why is there something rather than nothing?

I will tackle each one of these myths indepenndently and elaborate further in future posts since discussing all these myths and misconceptions sufficiently and with proper evidence in a single post will be exhausting to the readers.