With this impressive book, Satel & Lilienfeld (practising clinicians in psychiatry and psychology respectively) have achieved a timely and balanced work on the limits of contemporary neuroscience. Brainwashed is an exposé of ‘mindless neuroscience: the over-simplification, interpretive license, and premature application of brain science in the legal, commercial, clinical and philosophical domains’, and a damning critique of our now dominant assumption that a biological/neural explanation is the best way to understand human behaviour.
The authors acknowledge neuroscience as a hugely important and influential field but emphasise its fledgling status. They focus particularly on the fMRI, the hallmark tool of neuroscience, and misapplied neuroscience, outlining the dangers of stretching paradigms beyond their appropriate use. The potential results are not only ‘neuroredundancy’ (fMRIs telling us things we already know about the world and contributing little or nothing in terms of useful data or knowledge) but also real societal harm.
Brainwashed is a cautionary tale on the dangers of reductionism and the central question running through the book is whether we can ever understand the psychological through the neurological. This is, of course, nothing new, it is one of our oldest philosophical debates - the mind/body (brain) divide and the resultant explanatory gap, i.e. how we comprehend our felt experience with reference to our neural activity. Brainwashed, however, has much to add not only by presenting authoritatively and clearly the philosophical issues at stake but in choosing to focus on the practical (mis)applications of neuroscience such as neuromarketing, addictions (and the brain disease fallacy), lie detecting and the errant use of neuroimaging within the criminal justice system, the rise of neurolaw, and issues of moral responsibility.
Satel & Lilienfeld write with a rare clarity and economy of language. Their intended audience is wide and they seamlessly bridge the gap between popular-science book and academic essay on the important challenges facing current neuroscience. The book is well referenced and up to date, and they write authoritatively on all the disparate topics they cover. That said, the succinct nature of the book is also a weakness. Given the complexity of the subject matter, I did feel at times it might benefit from a more in-depth analysis. This is, I imagine, a necessary trade-off to reach the wide-ranging audience this book deserves.
Brainwashed is ultimately about what neuroscience can and cannot tell us about ourselves and a thought-provoking plea for the understanding of human behaviour on multiple levels, including the psychological, cultural and social.
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