Revenge of the lizard brain
blogs.scientificamerican.com
blogs.scientificamerican.com
Also, even though the brain appears on a high level to function as a coordinated whole, there are certainly situations where, for instance, the ancient FFFF[1] responses compete with whatever the neocortex wants to do. Indeed, there's even a plausible-sounding hypothesis[2] that subjective experience itself arises from conflicts between the different modules.
[1] Fight, flee, feed, reproduce
Credit to the author, he wrote an (equally well received) apology after he was corrected in this.
We all spend most (all?) of our time being driven by impulses and habits without realizing that we're doing so and without any choice in that matter.
Moments of mindfulness are the exception, typically caused by some "unusual" event - like somebody you know dying.
It's quite a sad state of affairs (IMHO anyway). More like living the live of an extremely sophisticated robot, rather than a conscious, living being.
Everybody should spend a few minutes every day reflecting on exactly how decisions throughout the day were made.
It is sorta misleading, in fact, because a lot of good authors and speakers assume it as a well known fact and add their leaps of imagination to it. It is OK at best as a pop culture thing, maybe a poetic spin off.
Why does it have no place on Hacker ... oh, you know what, scratch that. No point entering that debate. Thanks.
It's not so much about whether the stance is true or not and whether we should debate that. It's that articles that discredit something as trivially untrue by way of a trivially small statement. In the extreme it would be like discrediting [insert pseudoscience topic] by simply mentioning a copy of Nature. There's some degree here, sure. But tabloid-style takedowns, regardless of whether they are right, seem almost out of place.
I am wrong to say this has no place, though, which is in itself a pretty big claim with no substance behind it.
The onus is not on anyone to disprove the theory, the onus is on the theory's proponents to prove it, they haven't done so, not to the slightest degree.
The incentive could exist for scientists who want to write books and be more public facing. However, I think most neuroscientists want to write something that relates to their professional work and is more interesting to them. Triune brain theory just isn't on radar.
Moreover, popular neuroscience is really really hard to do well. You need to find the overlap between the narrow controlled experiments of neuroscience and the messy realm of observable human behavior and experience. Things are that are known in the former are seldom known in the latter. Careful scientists know this and often feel alarmed when asked to talk about things outside the lab.
This leaves much of the writing, by default, to people who aren't concerned about being exact and who are happy to use technical terms as loose metaphors. Many of these aren't neuroscientists, but people who want a little neuro terminology to make their work seem cooler. Accurate neuroscience is not all that important to success in punditry and publishing. For example, psychiatrist Louann Brizendine's books on gender and the brain and economist Paul Zak's oxytocin book The Moral Molecule seem to me to write egregious neurobabble.
(There are certainly modules in the brain -- contemporary work statistically identifies which areas are active at the same time. There's a large cool literature on the default mode network, which is a pretty central concept in neuroscience: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_network ).
(edited to fix a typo)
I read The Brain that Changes Itself recently and it markedly reinforced certain suspicions I had. Which other areas of are most active in neuroscience at the moment that might one day be related to human/computer interfaces?