Saturday, May 28, 2011

More neuroscience porn


 We noticed below the tendency of some neuroscientists to leave their last  and to issue pronunciamentos that teeter far beyond any base of evidence, straining after shock-value, which is accordingly welcomed by the fevered media.

Here is the latest heavy-breathing, from today’s update of the otherwise often-useful site Arts & Letters Daily:

Music hits the brain like sex. So can neuroscience distinguish between hearing an organ played and having one’s organs played with?

If it cannot, one wishes to say, worse luck to neuroscience.
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Notice too how the bastardizing of science spreads its contagion to the breathlesss press:   Begin with a false protasis (no, most music is not at all like sex **); next conjure up a non-sequitur, culminating in  some titillating absurdity.  Then the servers heat up  at the click-throughs of panting masturbators.

Fortunately, the review indexed in this case  brushes the potboiler off, rather than standing mesmerized before the idol of science.


[**It is just possible that there is indeed some resemblance between the atavistic throbs  and extramarital thrusts  favored by nihilists and neuroscientists;  but this certainly does not apply to D. 960, nor to embraces hallowed by sacrament.]
 

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