Please see my comment on the Valentine’s Day post.  Sorry to keep going, but here’s another bit of a rant.  It’s not entirely pertinent to my thesis, at least not in the sense of clarifying my argument and conclusions.  Rather, it’s a bit of thought on the validity of neuroscience even now.

I think it hit a nerve, so now I’m thinking a bit maniacally about the role of neuroscience in our society.  Bear with me please.

The ability to discern a person’s mental state seems to violate some basic tenet of human interactions.  Understanding someone else’s life experience without actually being that person seems to violate some primitive form of trust.  This has been a big issue since the birth of neuropsychology’s antecedent, phrenology.

While I must say a phrenology bust would make an AWESOME addition to the pile of odd and nerdy stuff on my shelves and desk, those things have a very dark history.  Because we thought we understood behavior, and thought that it correlated with bumps on the surface of the head, horrible atrocities were justified.  People were deemed criminals at birth, insane, and whole ethnic groups were deemed psychologically inferior–phrenology and eugenics were easily entwined.  What’s scary is that this type of behavior, thinking your opinion is valid and hurting people with your misguided conclusions, has happened countless times throughout history.  What’s even scarier is that it’s really hard to see that happening as it occurs, hindsight is 20-20, but foresight is sadly near-sighted.  Can you imagine how many things we have wrong now?  Imagine how horribly we could be botching things up with our day-to-day lives, imagine what science is wrong!

I think it was Feyerabend that said science has the potential to be as oppressive as any medieval church.  If it wasn’t him that said that literally, whoever did say it was heavily influenced by him.  What if our conclusions are wrong about the brain, it’s not that hard to imagine.  The role of neurotransmitters was only discovered in the past century, and the folding patterns of RNAs were within the last decade!  That means that a good deal of our modern neurological medicine is based on relatively new conclusions.  Imagine the costs if we’ve got it wrong.  What about savants, or autistics, schitzophrenics or sociopaths?  Imagine if we’ve got it wrong and the solution to their problems is a simple one that our science has us blinded from seeing.  I must wonder, in ten years or a century, will some uppity undergraduate look back and see the work that I did and scoff, citing the flaws in my logic that would be clear years from now.

I need to think about this more.  I promise I’ll organize my thoughts better before posting here next time.

Just a parting thought and story.  Sir Ronald Fisher was a statistician who came up with something called the f-statistic and the f-test (both major pillars of modern research analysis).  There is a commonly held story of how he came up with the chosen values for something statisticians call alpha levels (they are the real basis behind drawing a conclusion in most research).  Basically and alpha level sets an arbitrary threshold for the likelihood that experimental results result form chance.  The story goes that after he gave a lecture about his new f-statistic and the concept of alpha levels (named differently at the time–he had some modesty it would seem), a reporter or a student (depending on the version) asked him before getting into his coach (or onto his horse) what level alpha should be set to.  Fisher then replied ‘One in twenty’, and forever since, science has rejected conclusions based on 1/20th certainty, and accepted others.  Don’t worry, the most important stuff (like industrial research) gets a 1/100, and if you’re lucky a 1/1000 certainty level–pharmaceuticals often go up ten times that.  Imagine though, all the half-correct theories, or even correct ones, that were simply unlucky.  By that logic, one of every twenty rejected hypothesis could still be right (one in ten if you consider two-directional alpha levels, but that’s for another time).  How true is science then?  Is it really safe to reject an idea based on beautiful, yet oversimplified mathematics?