Brain Porn (!?)

Came across this interesting (and quite funny) article in THE NEW STATESMAN today.
It's about the proliferation of brain science - or shall I say, pseudoscience - in the past five years or so. U.S. authors like Malcolm Gladwell and the recently dethroned king of accessible neuroscience, Jonah Lehrer, have led the trend. But many others from the U.K. as well as the U.S. have jumped on some sort of bandwagon. The bookstore shelves are full of them, and I'm sure many are soon to be published.

Lehrer's Proust Was a Neuroscientist (and you can be, too!)

I have to say that I'm glad people are publishing articles and books about one of the most fascinating things in the universe, the human brain. (For one thing, I hope to turn this blog into a book one day, and I have another [smaller] book in the planning stages.)
However, I am alarmed that, like many fashions that pop up overnight like mushrooms after a rain, this one could be easy-come, easy-go. Once people catch wind of the insubstantiality of most claims, they will lose interest and move on to something else - something less solid underneath. After all, neuroscience on its own isn't exactly snakeoil, it's a perfectly respectable study of a highly challenging subject, with plenty of legitimate results. The trouble is, many of these so-called science writers don't bother to weed out the flimsy findings (that may sound wonderful) from the well-supported ones.
I like how this writer describes how neuro-everything is spreading throughout popular culture, largely due to the use of brain imagery, or "scans."

In The Invisible Gorilla, Christopher Chabris and his collaborator Daniel Simons advise readers to be wary of such “brain porn”, but popular magazines, science websites and books are frenzied consumers and hypers of these scans. “This is your brain on music”, announces a caption to a set of fMRI images, and we are invited to conclude that we now understand more about the experience of listening to music. The “This is your brain on” meme, it seems, is indefinitely extensible: Google results offer “This is your brain on poker”, “This is your brain on metaphor”, “This is your brain on diet soda”, “This is your brain on God” and so on, ad nauseam. I hereby volunteer to submit to a functional magnetic-resonance imaging scan while reading a stack of pop neuroscience volumes, for an illuminating series of pictures entitled This Is Your Brain on Stupid Books About Your Brain.

 I wish someone would pay me to read a pile of these books (without the scan, thank you) and do a compare-and-contrast for a magazine - after I check some of each book's central thesis with a trusted source, of course.
I'm all for caveat emptor: but how would the average consumer ride out this latest tsunami of fashionable cure-alls?

Abundance & Waste

Went to the local farmers' market the other evening. In one of the regular fruit stands, a woman was cutting up pineapples, a nice service for those of us afraid to cut ourselves in the process. But the waste piled up - some of which could have been eaten.

 It reminded me of the frightening statistics concerning food waste. Every year, in a single country like Canada, millions of tons of food are discarded. Some of it is household refuse - you know, the stuff at the back of the fridge that is starting to move - and the rest comes from restaurants, outdoor venues, etc. etc. The richer the country, the larger the waste of otherwise usable material.
No surprise there. But since so much money could be saved, not to mention the ever-diminishing available area in landfills, you have to wonder how this problem has gotten so out of hand.
Abundance must do something critical to the human brain, more than just causing us to salivate, in the case of fresh food. It causes us to take chances, which we wouldn't dare do in times of scarcity. (Wasteful people in famines get hungrier faster, and probably die sooner.)
I wonder if the sight of multiple items of the same category - such as the squashes below - creates different responses from , say, an all-you-can-eat buffet with a variety of items?

The Omnivore Goes Shopping

One reason I started this blog was to discuss the brain - one of my favorite subjects. I certainly enjoy talking about food as well! The study of food involves almost every university course you can think of - from economics to physiology. Being a generalist, this suits me perfectly.
The omnivore brain evolved, I believe, to find us food in the best way possible - but the results have had influences in every other or almost every other part of our behavior. I hope to be discussing these in future posts.
One came to mind this monring, while I was reading Grist.org, a U.S. environmental news site. Have a look: http://grist.org/living/h-ahem-cheap-clothing-hurts-the-planet-the-economy-and-your-style/The subject was clothing - how cheap clothing harms the planet. Adjusted for inflation, the price of most clothes has never been as low as it is now. So everyone, rich or poor, can have a wardrobe packed with many, many clothes. Unfortunately, these items may be low quality. They don't hold up after several washes, the sewing is inadequate, and the colors are cheap. The more a person has packed in her drawers and closet, the less she is likely to wear any particular item - in fact, she may forget she even has it at all! That's false economy - for her. (Anything she paid - even if she got the dress at 75% off - is 100% wasted if she never wears it.) For the businesses and the workers who labored to get that item to the store, it's also a kind of waste. And the rivers polluted with textile effluence, the cotton and flax fields loaded with pesticides ... enough said.
Why do we buy many cheap things instead of a few good quality things that look better and cost about the same or even less than the total paid for the garbage? It's not simply a "bargain-seeking gene" at work. It's not simply the fact that many people do not add up how much they spend. It's the matter of the omnivore brain: it delights in abundance. Like the way it overeats fat, sugar and salt when the opportunity arises, because these nutrients were always in low supply in nature, it goes a bit overboard when anything seems easy to gather all at once - a rack of tank tops marked down twice could be a field of ripe blackberries to that part of our brain.
If we know the brain has these built-in tendencies, it's easier to control them. It involves self-awareness, for one thing: realize that you lose your common sense when you see a SALE sign, and maybe leave your credit card at home! Education also helps: my mother taught me from an early age to wait to buy one pair of good shoes instead of blowing a few dollars on a cheap pair that would hurt my feet (and end up in the trash). More education in the schools about sustainable fashion (teens go through these cheap-and-disposable clothes more than anyone) would help. However, my personal environmental agenda aside, I think that putting the emphasis on fashion instead of sustainable would convert greater numbers of buffet-style shoppers into wardrobe-building style mavens. Bring in someone who looks terrific on a small number of stylish, high-quality, long-lasting clothes and accessories, and let the class judge with their own eyes.
Meanwhile, society has to change as well. We are allowing business and its emphasis on high turnover to tell us how to shop - at the expense of low-paid workers in other countries, and the land where everything comes from and returns to....