The Neuroscience Behind Bad Decisions

"When Glimcher would remove all the choices except the Snickers and the selected candy, participants would wonder why they hadn’t chosen their favorite."

Check out "The emotional life of your brain" by Richard Davidson and Sharon Begley.

It is applied neuro-science. A refined version of the "big five" character traits along with scientifically verified explanations where they originate in the brain and how to change them.

I don't know about neuroscience, but it seems when Psychologists/Psychiarty fails they fall back too frequently on, "Well, it's an art too?".

I don't think I've met an older Psychiatrist who isn't secretly completely dissalusioned with their career. They won't admit it. I can just see it on their faces. It's ironic they know so much about denial, but they appear to really repress?

I really hope these professions attract the best students/minds in the future, and brings in enough research money so that won't be an excuse.

If you are in mental agony, you need to go through the dance--you might be the person they help. I'm not trying to be funny; you just need to go, and see if they can help.

If all you get out of it is bills, bad side effects, and no results--leave. There's a part of me that wished I never seeked out their help, but will never know if I made the right decision.

(My heart, and complete sympathy goes out to anyone hit with mental illness. I can offer this, with enough time you will feal better. Don't ruin your health by self-medicating. And I know, drugs like alcohol seem beneficial, but just don't overdo it. And again, give your brain/body time to heal. I'm an older guy who did get better. My life went down the tubes, but a lot of it was my fault--I guess? When I was in my twenties and blindsided by a malady, I held onto hope by a thin string. Every day became, just getting through it. My symptomology impoved with age. I will give good Psychologists/Psychiatrists this, they are the only professionals who seemingly truly understand what you are going through. To the rest of the world, the way you feel is a complete mystery, even family members, loved ones just don't quite get it. In the end, when you pull out of it, you might view the world a bit differently. There will be less black/white issues. I guarantee you will be a more understanding/sympathetic person. I sometimes think I became too liberal. To the point of being taken advantage of, but just don't know. I'm not the guy I used to be--for better, or worse.)

That said, implying that psychology isn't legit science is troubling. It's certainly harder to do than other sciences, due to limitations in our technology for observation, but you can absolutely be rigorous and careful in your methodology, and come to well-supported conclusions.

It's probably way too big a course for someone only casually interested, but it's probably the best (free, but maybe overall) course available on the Internet for an introduction into the subject. Mostly because the professor is great.

The TL;DW is that neuroscience is mostly about your "bio-electrical hardware". So nothing soft there at all. Do review it, this is such an interesting field. A good course for even more fundamental fundamentals is this (pretty big and still free) multimedia course from Harvard, which I'd say is aimed at high-school level students: https://www.mcb80x.org/

What you have to understand on the medical side is that there is not much they can do for brain conditions. Surgery is mostly about stopping bleedings and "cutting away stuff". I took a little clinical neuroscience course and it was mostly "we don't know where this comes from", "here we can only treat side-effects", and actually nothing about actually healing anything at least for the various disorders covered in that course. "Brain issues" have the disadvantages that it's harder to do anything since a) it's much more risky (compared to trying and failing fixing a skin condition), b) it's much harder to get drugs there, c) it's harder to do surgery in the brain.

So the science is pretty solid on the very low level, but on the scale of a full human brain there it gets way too complex. So the higher-level you go the more it's (interpretable) statistics, the lower you go the more it's (pretty solid) (cellular or molecular) biology, (bio-)chemistry and/or physics (electricity). They find new but essential things all the time even now, the field still feels "fresh" as in you have no difficulty finding things that need research and still are somewhat basic. The problem is that the really interesting stuff, the things that matter because it's needed for actually doing something about disease or malfunction, all are high-level, and knowing well what goes on in "a" (i.e. one) neuron (or even a group) does not help you that much in clinical practice.

So on a clinical level neuroscience is as much "science" as most of medicine as a whole.