Writing 5am to 7am

Writing 5am to 7am is not my habit but the former habit of Brit Raymond Tallis and he’s produced a new book about one of the subjects I love to follow in a pop-culture manner:  neuroscience.    He has a dim view of how publishing and pop culture demands have bent research to what he deems ridiculous conclusions.

Those trends, as Tallis sees them, are like “intellectual illnesses” metastasizing from academic labs into popular culture. He sees the symptoms in neuro-economic thinkers who explain our susceptibility to subprime mortgages by describing how our brains evolved to favor short-term rewards. He sees them in philosophers who claim that our primate minds admire paintings of landscapes that would have supported hunting and gathering. He sees it in neurotheologians who preach that “God is a tingle in the ‘God spot’ in the brain.”

Whatever the case, his book’s title is very pop-culture and most amusing for a guy who disparages pop culture: Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis, and the Misrepresentation of Humanity.

Who knew one could have inflammation of the Darwin?