In even just a few years, we will look back at our assertions about the brain and be amused at our degree of certitude. There are many reasons people forget that we are still in neuroscience infancy: need for closure about how the world works, desire to make people behave as we want, impulse to make our client's problems easier to solve and conflicts quicker to resolve, plus many other motives. Unfortunately, we still don't know enough to accomplish more than minimally, if at all, any of those goals by using brain science.
When you compare the brain's detectives, neuroscientists, to other detectives, the neuroscientists seem to fall short in solving mysteries. After all, Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple needed only about 250 pages each to get to the bottom of their cases. Ditto for Nancy Drew. ...
...
The workings of the brain, however, determine such fundamental questions about personhood that we may never know everything about what's going on. That doesn't mean we can't speculate, though. While we may not be able to solve these capers with clues that point to Colonel Mustard in the library with a revolver, we can dive into the current thinking on some of the brain's famous unsolved mysteries. ...
Click on over to the site to read about five mysteries: Nature versus nurture, why the brain stops functioning, sleep and dreams, memory, and consciousness.
For people who insist that we do know a lot about the brain that can be used in conflict resolution, I recommend reading Psychology's Ghosts. Don't have time to read the whole book? Then just read the chapter titled "Missing Contexts" to understand why much that is learned in the laboratory is not necessarily applicable in, or even relevant to, our world beyond the research lab.
Comments