Thread by @Meaningness

🧠 Why is there so much nonsense neuroblather mixed into current writing about therapy, self-help, and meditation?

Think I might have just figured this out… 🧵

The supposed neuroscience invoked in explanations of meditation, emotional regulation, etc. is almost always false. But that doesn’t even matter!

If we knew the hippocampus or amygdala or whatever caused depression, it would have zero implications for self-help, meditation, etc.

Mind/body dualism is the natural human understanding. OBVIOUSLY your mind is an entirely different sort of thing, separate from the material world, independent of it except for being accidentally trapped in a body.

This is false but we automatically fall into thinking this way…

In a mind/body dualist framework, if your mind is misbehaving, you address that directly, by deciding to have different mental contents. This might not work :)

If it doesn’t, it’s logical to call on disembodied minds (gods, whatever) for aid. This may not work either…

🧐 I suspect neurobabble is genuinely valuable (even though false and irrelevant) because it dispels hope and faith in purely mental/spiritual fixes for problems that are at root relational.

Neurobabble suggests that concrete procedures in the real world can help instead.

Misunderstanding meditation, therapy, etc. as purely mental leads into fantasies that you can skip the hard real-world work they demand and into inventing your own mind-only methods for treating yourself (because who knows your mind better than you?)

Meditation methods can be painful, boring, and may make no sense. The teacher explains that repetitively scanning your body for hours deactivates the hippocampus-parietal pathway (or whatever made-up nonsense), and that gives some students the necessary faith to actually do it.

Two risks here. Neurobabble can make plausible methods that work but make no sense. Unfortunately, it can also make plausible methods that don’t work (and often make better sense). All sorts of harmful woo gets justified with neurobabble too.

🧠 Your brain is involved in consciousness, emotions, thoughts, and dysfunctional behavior. So is the rest of your body. More significantly, so are your physical surroundings, other people, your culture, and your society. 🌞

Neurobabble can blind you to that, unhelpfully.