Having occasionally permitted ourselves an unkind word, we hasten to celebrate the monumental achievements of neuroscience. Thus, to quote Steven Pinker, in The Blank Slate (2002), p. 79:
A network of neurons can represent different concepts depending on which ones are active. If neurons for “yellow”, “flies”, and “sings” are active, the network is thinking about a canary; if neurons for “silver”, “flies”, and “roars” are active, it is thinking about an airplane.
Actually this rather recalls that fad of “grape jokes” from a while back. As: “What’s purple, huge, and lives in the sea?” Answer: “Moby Grape.”
But let us not mock their titanic achievement. Thus, in parallel fashion, when my neurons fire on “hunchback”, “bad breath”, and “knuckles drag on ground” … I am thinking of a neuroscientist.
~ ~ ~
Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist and developmental linguist, is very well-versed in the neuroscience literature; and doubtless has found much to admire. But he too is repelled by its bastardization in the yellow press. From p. 86 of the same work:
Nowadays any banality about learning can be dressed up in neurospeak and treated like a great revelation of science. … “Scientists have found that the brain is capable of alterning its connections. … You have the ability to change the synaptic connections within the brain.” Good thing, because otherwise we would be permanent amnesiacs.
(A propos of not much -- cf. this and this re transient global amnesia.)
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