 I'm not so sure about being happy, being the last speaker on the Friday when everybody wants to get out and play, but I'm going to try to give you some ideas that may challenge your familiar way of thinking, and that's always a fun thing to do in my opinion. Well, I've spent my whole life lobbing grenades at PsychoBabble. That's been my business as a psychological scientist. You know, these are the pop-psych ideas that, so these are the ideas, you know, that exist in our culture without any visible means of empirical support, right? So for example, my first book on anger so many years ago, you know, I politely pointed out what was wrong with the Freudian notions of catharsis and how good it was for you to always let it out of your system and so forth. And I found that many people in response wrote to me wishing that I had a pleasant sexual experience by myself. Love in this culture of expressing your anger is so great that not only when I finished debunking it, it got rebunked and then I had to derebunk it. I'm telling you, you cannot dislodge this idea. And we see the result of my efforts, which has been the rise of civility and manners in America. Well, skeptics have long persisted in the quest to replace PsychoBabble with good psychological science and critical thinking. And although this isn't easy, at least with PsychoBabble, we know it when we see it. Its assumptions are right out there in testable form. Somebody says, rebirthing is the way for you to solve all the problems of your life. Somebody says, I can retrieve a memory of yours from the womb or from the 14th century. These are ideas that we can test. Today though, we face a greater challenge because in this era of the medical, pharmaceutical, industrial complex where PsychoBabble goes, can Biobunk be far behind? Pseudoneuroscience, term I use, has the same hallmarks as its psycho sibling. Sloppy research driven by poor to non-existent theory. Data often massaged until it comes out right that is suitable for publication. The results leading to reductionist and oversimplified conclusions all dressed up in sciency language and reliance on expensive technology. I am really pleased to be speaking after Stuart Farstein and Bruce Hood because they are exactly the best examples of what I am not talking about. That is science at its best. But nowadays, journalists get so excited with any study that has a brain in it that they tend to report its findings uncritically to an equally uncritical but eager public. How in the world are lay people supposed to evaluate a news item about yet another FMRI study showing yet another area of the brain that lights up when we think of Hot Fudge Sundays or read a poem or poem by Jane Austen versus a poem by Yates? You know, how about another study claiming that the male brain, it's always the whole entire male brain is different from the whole entire female brain. How do I know what my brain is doing when it's thinking about a Hot Fudge Sunday? How do I know what your brain is doing? How do we as skeptics foster the public understanding of the difference between good science and pseudo science in the realm of neuroscience? Neuron is a neuron, isn't it? Well, no. So to begin, let me just clear my throat and tell you that I am as dazzled as the next person by the biomedical and neuroscientific discoveries that we hear about every week. They're fantastic. The human genome has been mapped. Who is not amazed by seeing the brain in action thanks to dazzling new technologies? Who is not excited by findings of the brain's plasticity? Yes, thank you, thank you. How about discoveries of neurogenesis by the creation of a connectome, a map of neural connections in the brain? Yet, some curmudgeonly caution is called for and reluctantly, I step up to the challenge. When I was in graduate school, back in the Paleolithic era, it was the heyday of behaviorism and B.F. Skinner. And so the operative word you had to use to indicate that you were doing science was to add the word behavior to everything. So you didn't eat or sleep or walk or talk. You engaged in eating behavior, sleeping behavior, walking behavior, and verbal behavior. In their forthcoming book, Brain Washed, Sally Satel and Scott Lilienfeld list some of the many new areas of research that now have the word neuro-attached. This is to indicate today that you're doing science, you've got to throw a neuro in there. So here we have neuro-law, neuro-economics, neuro-philosophy, I love neuro-ethics there at the bottom. Anything you're currently doing, throw a neuro in there and people will really be impressed. Now it is no wonder that they'll be impressed because we now know from research that people regard evidence from brain images as being more real than other kinds of psychological information. A few years ago, bio-ethicist Eric Racine and his colleagues at Stanford used the term neuro-realism to describe this phenomenon. They reviewed over 1200 articles in the press and they identified many examples of neuro-realism in the way these studies are described. For example, brain scans read your mind that they are a window into the brain. They provide visual proof of some phenomenon. Satel and Lilienfeld had some wonderful examples of these hyperventilating headlines such as placebo effect shown as real brain reaction. I guess we didn't know the placebo effect was real until we had a brain. Here's one, anorexia, visible with brain scans. Brain imaging shows the joy of giving. And you thought you knew about the joy of giving because it feels good to give. The brain can't lie, brain scans reveal how you think and feel and even how you might behave. No wonder the CIA and big business are interested. No wonder. So in their paper, the seductive appeal of neuroscience explanations, Dina Weisberg and her colleagues asked experts and non-experts to evaluate explanations of empathy or its failure during negotiations. Sometimes the explanation was smart and plausible and sometimes it was poor and illogical. Now sometimes the explanation was just a straight explanation without neuroscience. The researchers claimed this happens because people have trouble switching their point of view and so forth, okay. Then sometimes they added neuroscience. All they did was throw in the words in blue, brain scans indicate and frontal lobe brain circuitry known to be involved in self-knowledge, whatever that means. And here's what they found. The non-experts thought that explanations with the logically irrelevant neuroscience information were more satisfying than explanations without them. And they had a particularly striking effect on non-experts judgments of bad explanations. So this is what we're up against. Non-experts especially love bad explanations from neuroscience. You don't even have to use words like frontal lobe brain circuitry. You can just throw in an image of brain activity and that will be enough to make a study's conclusion seem more scientific. I love this study. People read some nonsense such as the passage explaining that because watching television and doing math problems both cause activation in the temporal lobe, watching television will improve math ability. People who read a version of this passage accompanied by fMRI images thought it had much better scientific reasoning than those who read a version with no images or even a version with a bar graph. This is why I don't go anywhere anymore without my brain. I want people to know I'm doing science. But I am not alone. You can see in this era of neuro-realism that anyone doing anything vaguely clinical feels obliged to throw a brain in there. Coaching with compassion lights up mentee brains. I don't know what that blob is and I don't know what is supposed to be lit up. We just throw that little colorful thing in there and that will show that our method of coaching is really scientific. Or this one, a workshop for practitioners. It's an exciting time to be a clinician because neuroscience is offering dramatic insights into human development. We've known all along about the importance of love and attachments but now we have the brain to prove it. Is not the only hot word in psychology these days. Another is narrative. In psychology people speak of narrative theory, narrative therapy, narrative identity. I was glad Bruce was talking about the self because that's a big impulse here. How do we talk about ourselves? What is the influence on us of the stories we tell about our lives of how we explain behavior? And so I want to tell you a story about neuroscience and how the narratives, the stories we tell about neuroscience affect us as individuals and as society. Our story begins in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan and a decade that began the rapid rise of biomedical technologies. The deregulation of the pharmaceutical industry and the crumbling of the once impenetrable firewall between research and industry. To understand the scope of this transformation you have only to know what Jonas Salk said when in 1955 he was asked why he didn't patent the polio vaccine. He said, can you patent the sun? A vaccine, he said, was for the public good. And in his time, scientists thought it was unseemly distasteful to be doing research for personal profit. Doesn't that seem quaint? Today our society has moved to the notion that not patenting the sun, if you could, is crazy. So the rising biomedical industrial complex produced three major scientific and commercial developments. Pharmaceuticals, psychopharmaceuticals, genetic testing in the genome, and imaging the brain. Each of these areas of research appeared with great fanfare and exhilarated promises in the media also from some scientists. Listen to Prozac, it means the end to depression. Hey, a study has found the gene for depression. Wait, here's one for schizophrenia. Wait, here's a marker for homosexuality. And wait, we think we found the gene for worrying. Don't worry about that one. Now we're hearing that the genome, that magic thing is gonna give us personalized medicine one day. Your particular genetic pattern will determine the treatment you need for some disease or for some unwanted trait. Well, and the brain, oh my god. If we can screen, we can intervene. Imaging the brain will give us techniques that will make us smarter, work faster, and keep those memories sharp. Soon, please. Okay, that's the tone, isn't it? That we read about all the time in the media this kind of breathless, excited, look what's coming down the pike. Well, history being the best predictor of the future, we do well to note why these excited promises have all proved to be exaggerated, the science becoming more complicated, even as the marketing and reporting became more simplistic. Scientists have moved from the hope of finding the gene to speaking of multiple genes, to looking for gene environment interactions, to doing genome-wide association studies to epigenetics a fabulously interesting new area of research in which we've learned that stable changes in the expression of a particular gene can occur without changes in DNA. This is amazing, but just recently in science, two studies reported that most diseases are caused by rare mutations, thus making them very costly to identify rather than by common mutations which would allow an easy person prediction for an illness. And scientists now are urging caution and skepticism about the pop epigenetic stories in the news. Epidemiologist George Davies Smith has argued that the hope for personalized medicine overlooks the powerful role of randomness and chance in human disease. He called epigenetic explanations the currently fashionable response to any question to which you do not know the answer. This line, of course, went viral immediately. But we're Americans, what are you telling me about randomness and chance? I wanna know, I wanna predict. And, of course, as we have learned, we need to tolerate uncertainty. Oversimplification remains in the way so much of our science is reported. As in the example of this wonderfully scientifically illiterate judge who decided that this guy had to go to prison because he was watching pornography and there is as of yet undiscovered gene for child pornography watching. It's a yet undiscovered gene, but we know it will be there. It's a gene you were born with, it's not a gene you can get rid of. This guy needs to go back to school. To illustrate the problems of pseudoscience in neuroscience, I want to digress a moment to give you an instructive lesson from what happened with the pharmaceutical industry. It may seem a digression, but trust me, I'm gonna come back to my main theme. Within 10 years of its deregulation, the pharmaceutical industry had become the most profitable industry in the United States. And so pharmaceutical companies began a series of commercial procedures to get their products to market fast, especially blockbuster drugs. Blockbuster drugs have a definition. They sell $1 billion a year in profit. So the pharmaceutical companies began to sponsor or conduct their own research to determine when, whether, and where that research would be reported. They embargoed research with negative results. They bypassed peer review by going directly to the public and they manipulated data to create an impression that a drug was more successful than it really was. Here's an example. Eric Turner and his colleagues in the New England Journal of Medicine went to the FDA and asked for all studies that had been done on 12 antidepressant agents involving more than 12,000 patients. The FDA had reviewed 74 registered studies. And this is what we see. These are the studies that were published in professional journals. As you can see, almost all of them reported positive results of the effectiveness of a new antidepressant. Those are the 12 antidepressants along the side there for benefits compared to older antidepressants or other antidepressants. But the researchers had all the data that the FDA had, including the studies that had not been published. And that's what they found this time. These were the unpublished studies. In this situation, actually one of the studies that had shown a positive result, number 49, actually was a negative result. For the public, for mental health professionals, for scientific researchers alike, the rise of Big Pharma had a tremendously important consequence. The virtual abandonment of non-biological explanations of people's problems and of non-medical interventions. With so much money going to medication, that's where the research went. Follow the money. People don't wake up one day and say, I think I will study antidepressants instead of psychotherapy. No, you go where the money is. So consider, for example, the effort to find a female viagra. Which is definitely a billion dollar market. Here's the head of one company saying, listen, boy, guys, we can make a fortune here. And besides, if there's viagra for men, there certainly should be a viagra for women. It's only fair, after all. We don't want to be accused of sexism or anything like that, right? So there began a search for female viagra. And this is what it looks like. All of the pharmaceutical companies tried their damnedest to find a medication for women's sexual problems that would work, presumably as well as viagra. And as you can see, most of them were not approved. Many of them had harmful side effects. Many of them were risky, such as testosterone for women. And this is the picture of it. And the reason, the reason that people have, in this pursuit of the female viagra, people have not stopped to say, maybe our basic assumption was wrong. That most sexual problems warrant medical interventions. The president of BioSante said when the trial for LibiGel failed yet again, the damned placebo effect was just too high. Any sex therapist could have told him is that most people do not have a sex problem just sitting by themselves on a sofa. The problem only begins when another person enters the room. The lessons we've learned from the promises, the failures, and the corruption of scientific research by the pharmaceutical industry provide some guidelines, I think, for detecting signs of pseudo-neuroscience as we read about brain imaging studies. We need to examine them for their basic assumptions are the assumptions right? And we need to consider the way in which data might be manipulated or distorted to get published results. So the first sign of pseudo-neuroscience is what I call technomyopia. This is an excessive dependence on technology that leads to conceptual blindness. There was a wonderful example of this. This is called the technology knows more than I do phenomenon. I remember in Germany when GPS first came out years ago, a BMW driver drove his car into a river because his GPS told him the ferry would be there. He completely ignored the hundred people on the shore screaming at him to stop. But my car says the ferry will be there. There you go. So to continue with an example from sexology, the assumption is that if you merely interview people about their sexual behavior, you're not doing science. But if you wire them up to a machine and measure something, that's science. So for those of you looking for a lucrative career, I wanna tell you there is big money in penis measurement. There is the nocturnal penile to messence monitoring, that's the ridgiscan, selective penile angiography, penile sacral nerve conduction velocity testing, cavernosometry, cavernosography, corpus cavernosum electromyography, and the Doppler color ultrasound monitor for pharmacopenile duplex ultrasonography. Tried saying that in front of the mirror, but I still make mistakes. Forgive me, these are not cockamamie methods. Listen, you write about sex, everything you say is a double entendre. The use of these technologies has informed researchers that sometimes the brain and the genitals are not entirely in communication. I think scientists must be the only people on the planet who didn't know this. So a person could lie to you, but if we could just get the penis to talk, we will know for sure what the problem is. Now I have to tell you something, despite all of this technology, no one can agree on what the gold standard is. How erect does an erection have to be? Will the real erection please stand up? And what's real, by the way, it turns out a man's judgment of what the problem is often does not agree with his partner's judgment of what the problem is. Isn't that a problem? Isn't that something technology can't answer? In House of Cards, Robin Dawes' wonderful critique of psychotherapy, Dawes was a brilliant clinical scientist, and he told a story of his early clinical training when he had to administer the Rorschach to a very depressed patient. The Rorschach is, by the way, the, I mean, it is one of the most unscientific of instruments, you cannot drive a stake through its heart though, people have been trying energetically for decades. So the man replied to the first ink blot, it looks like a bat that has been squashed on the pavement under the hill of a giant's boot. Wow, said Dawes, this guy's depressed. Dawes was so thrilled by the success of the test that it took him a while to realize that the Rorschach had told him nothing that he didn't already know. So in this spirit, we need to ask, what did this FMRI study teach me that I didn't already know? Here's one, a Stanford study of math anxiety in the brain. This is, by the way, a stock photo, it has nothing to do with the researcher's research, but now we know, you see, when you look at this now, you'll know why they throw it in there, won't you? Cause now you'll really think this must be science. And what they find is, when people are anxious, they're anxious, it doesn't matter if they're anxious about math or if they're anxious about giving a talk. How about this one? This is a good one. Political bias affects brain activity. Study finds. Okay, I have a personal interest in this one because there were only 3,000 studies of cognitive dissonance in the years before people were able to do FMRIs, but now that we know we can track it into the brain and see how people's thinking operates, then it must really be true. In another study, combat veterans with PTSD displayed different patterns of brain activity than did veterans without PTSD. Okay, that's interesting. The lead investigator says, said, this shows that PTSD is a brain disease. A brain disease? It shows nothing of the kind. Another psychologist looking at these findings said, this one makes me mad, said the findings offer concrete validation of human suffering. Concrete validation of human suffering? My friends, if we can't recognize human suffering without an FMRI, we are technomaiopic indeed. And so, by letting technology ask our questions for us, what is the brain doing when we are suffering or happy? We let it blind us to the questions we don't ask to what Stuart said before is so important to the expanding questions we need to be thinking about. On his blog, Andrew Sullivan described a show in which they put seven contestants in an FMRI and told, they were told to try to love someone as hard as they could for five minutes. Sullivan said, yeah, it turns out, it's possible for one person to exhibit that they can love someone more deeply than another person can. Duh. But more important, what kind of love is being defined here? What about the love of two people who have been devoted to each other for many years? Long past, my friend Elizabeth Loftus calls the bunny rabbit phase. What about the love you feel for your partner when you're having a quarrel? The clinical neuroscientist Raymond Tallis put it this way, quote, love is not a response to a single stimulus, such as a picture. It's not even a single enduring state like being cold. It is a many-splendored and many-miseried thing that includes jealousy, kindness, lust, guilt, happiness, fury, and moments of not feeling in love at all. An FMRI study gives us none of this. It blinds us to the importance of anything it cannot measure. The second sign of pseudo-neuroscience is methodological, deceptive practices, and the manipulation of statistics. Many people fail to realize that brain images can convey misleading impressions. This is from a book by Joseph Doomet years ago who pointed out that people can color their scans, their brains in any way they want, and this leads to a kind of lively set of notions that we're talking about some real differences here. This is a stock photo from Corbis. I might be having a red brain day, maybe a blue brain day. And he says, one of the important things to understand is that the common practice in these studies of combining individual brains into one average scan masks, and this is really important, masks the significant variability among people's brains, which leads to the false conclusions that everyone's brain responds the same way to a given stimulus. You can show some people chocolate. My brain's gonna be really happy, but someone else might go to sleep. In a questionnaire study, we understand about ranges. We can talk about averages and political attitudes or in beliefs about something, and you can see that there's a range. What is often not made clear is how individual brains also vary. Now we come to the really good part. This is a little statistical here, but stick with me, I think you'll follow this. A few years ago, a study was published in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. It was called Puzzlingly High Correlations in FMRI Studies. Puzzlingly High Correlations. The researchers had retracted their original title, which was Voodoo Correlations in FMRI Studies. That was considered a bit over the top for a journal. So they said a study reports something like this, and FMRI finds a high correlation between part of brain X and some emotion or personality trait or cognitive ability. These authors examined 55 articles and showed how most of them used a statistical computation method that inflated the correlations that do exist and also created entirely spurious ones. Spurious ones. Well, a few years later, once that Voodoo Correlations idea was out, you couldn't get it back. And so by 2011, we had this important paper. Voodoo correlations are everywhere, not only in neuroscience. These investigators pointed out that a typical full brain analysis encompasses more than 130,000 measurement points called voxels, of which only a small subset is included in the final validity test. In most studies, researchers select only those voxels that bear the strongest correlations to the criterion they're looking for. What these researchers wrote, other correlations involving different brain functions and potentially supporting different theories may go unnoticed. And look at this sentence, published fancy correlations. Let me have that slide back. Published fancy correlations, which made it into the highest impact journals, maybe little more than outliers. Notice the similarity here between the effort to get your article and FMRI published and the same thing that pharmaceutical companies were doing to get theirs published. But here, the best demonstration ever of how fancy correlations can mislead comes from a study by Craig Bennett and colleagues in their fine paper with the best title in the entire history of 21st century science. Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic salmon. They did an FMRI on a dead Atlantic salmon. They showed it, photographs of people, and asked the salmon, but emotions the person in each photo was actually feeling. You ask, how could an FMRI detect any brain activity in a dead salmon, but it did. The scan revealed that the salmon was thinking about the pictures and the people in them. Well, that's because FMRI produces a mix of signal and noise, and scientists use techniques to quiet the noise and reveal the true signal. But it's easy to make errors, the researchers explained, because if you don't correct for multiple comparisons, you are virtually guaranteed to get a false positive, a correlation between this part of the brain and that emotion or that thought or that feeling that's totally wrong. When they did the proper statistical controls, the salmon turned out to be dead after. So you see the take home message here as my colleague Mary Ann Gary said is, you have to realize that other studies too, we may not know if the result is real or just another dead salmon. Of pseudo-neuroscience is reductionism. Okay, the failure to recognize individual variation in context, here you go. There is no better example of reductionism than to take a look at the many books out there on the something brain. And of course, especially the male brain and the female brain. So let me just make clear, yes, there are sex differences in the brain. Of course, there are sex differences in the brain. We are mammals, we're primates. There are sex differences in the brain. The problem, as Stephanie Shields has said, the identification of difference is treated as the end of the explanatory story. Finding a difference is equated with explaining the difference. So just take one of those pop neuro books like Luan Brizendine's, The Female Brain, or Michael Gurion's, what could he be thinking? Or it's a baby girl, they all have those kind of titles. You will see reductionism in action. These books all claim that men and women, all men, all women, are hardwired to misunderstand each other, have different interests and skills to learn differently and to different empathy and logic. The author of The Male Factor, a woman, said, the male brain has the enviable ability to essentially switch off emotions when desired, in part because it's hard for a man to think clearly in the face of emotion. I thought it was women who couldn't think clearly in the face of emotion. Wasn't that what it was supposed to... All right, these are the kind of remarks that you get. So you can hear reductionism, it has a tone, there's a hum to it. You can hear the hum of reductionism when writers write this way. They'll say women, women are more empathic than men. Now we have the biological reason, they have more mirror neurons, they have more oxytocin. Okay, so on questionnaires, women are more likely to say, yeah, women are more empathic than men, and that's a nice quality, and we have it. Does anybody think that what people say on a questionnaire about themselves has very much to do with how they behave? Do we think that Sarah Palin is empathic towards scientists? And what about men? Are they lacking in empathy when they rush to help a child who's taken a tumble or rescue somebody in distress? Are women really more empathic toward their enemies than men are, their enemies in their families, or enemy enemies in wartime? No. And by the way, not only is there no sex difference in the number of mirror neurons in the brain, but people's mirror neurons go to sleep when they're observing members of an out group. How about oxytocin, which immediately got labeled the cuddle hormone and marketed to eager buyers? It turns out that giving people doses of oxytocin makes them more likely to favor their own group over other groups and increases defensive aggression against outsiders. So actually we should call oxytocin the cuddle your own kind and the hell with the rest of you, homer. And by the way, high levels of oxytocin in women and men now seem to be biological markers of relationship distress, and also by the way, always and ever, people's love and attachment histories affect how they respond to hormones in the first place. I've been studying the study of sex differences for 40 years, ever since I was four. Saying that number is scary, kids, let me tell you. But I'll tell you, it's given me a vantage point that has really been useful as I read the current crop of these sex difference things. In that time, many efforts to locate sex differences in the brain have come and gone. Decades ago, it was thought that the real reason for sex differences was that the size of the corpus callosum was different in men and women. Those studies weren't replicated. How about differences in hemispheric lateralization? Well, that was sort of an interesting thing, but not only did those studies not predict actual behavior differences between men and women, they, many of them, were not replicated. The one unchanging thing is that the search for differences persists, differences mark you in personality and skills and abilities and human qualities that, as far as I can tell, are evenly distributed across both sexes. And differences which, in turn, depend on context. Of course, that's me as a social psychologist speaking. Ignoring the difference, ignoring the situation in which the tests are done, the importance of the person's class, experience, history, and even the person's own brain's history. When I was writing Anger all those years ago, there was an interesting study I found about how if you stimulated the amygdala of men, it made them more violent. That was in the days when the amygdala was thought to be the anger center. Then it became the fear center, and now it's a more generic all-purpose emotion processor, so that in itself is interesting. But okay, we stimulate the amygdala of men, and it makes them more angry and aggressive. Next part of study. That was only true for men with a history of violence. Come on, little boy. You can see how we do a study. We see how a brain responds in some particular situation. If we ignore the individual's history, personality, experience, and culture, nutrition, what the immediate situation is that they're in, we will often come to the wrong conclusion. It is easy but wrong to assume that a snapshot that we take of men and women at this time in this study is an unchanging, timeless blueprint. And so the fourth sign of pseudo neuroscience is hype and oversell for the sake of marketing or public policy or an agenda. You can buy your own oxytocin now on the net. What is that man doing to that woman? What is he giving her? I didn't hear that. I would humbly suggest that if he were offering her chocolate, he would have better luck. Now, many social critics have raised concerns about neuro policy, applying fMRI studies on the service of some agenda you have. The gambler's brains are different from non-gambler's brains that lies can be detected in the brain. Look out for this one. The police and military, as many of you know, use the polygraph today, not because they think it works. They know it doesn't work. It's very unreliable, especially with innocent people. They use it because they know the suspect thinks it works. You can be sure that they will be using fMRI the same way to induce confession or bamboozle a jury. One interesting group of researchers have already shown that if you educate jurors about the complexities of fMRI, they're not as likely to regard it in as simplistic a way as I've been describing. I have a few more minutes. So today, here's what's coming down the pike. The drive for cognitive enhancement is going to produce not only medication, but things we can do to the brain. Just a few months ago, neuroscientists at the University of Oxford reported that transcranial direct current stimulation, TDCS, might soon be used with healthy people to improve their math skills, memory, problem solving, and other mental abilities. One researcher said, I can see a time when people plug a simple device into an iPad so that their brain is stimulated when they're doing their homework, learning French, or taking up the piano. That sounds good, doesn't it? It would also be a great educational aid for children. Well, sure, sure, but by now, don't we want to ask a few skeptical questions such as, who funded this research? How much research on TDCS has been done? Not much. Has research determined whether there are better or worse ways of using TDCS for different mental abilities? Not yet. Has the method been tested on children whose brains are still developing? Not yet. Is it known whether boosting ability in one arena might affect abilities in another? The dreaded side effect, risk factor problem? Not yet. Has research determined whether the use of TDCS in the laboratory can improve anybody's abilities in real life, or whether its effects last longer than 10 minutes? Not yet, but we can be sure that plenty of entrepreneurs won't wait for answers to these questions before they start trying to market it to whoever is willing to buy. Can we read this? A story? Honey, wouldn't you rather have a mild sedative? I love this cartoon, a story. I started by saying I was gonna tell you a story about neuroscience, and so let us take a step back here in conclusion to ask what are the social, political, and personal consequences of the neuroscientific narrative? Its story creates a metaphor for human behavior that can be illuminating, phenomenally interesting, and also narrowing. My friend and colleague, Leon Ortiefer, who is a sex researcher, puts it this way. Sex involves the brain and the body, thank God. And this is a fine thing. But do we want to see sex only as a biological process like digestion, or do we want to see it as something more like dancing, which is social, and psychological, and cultural, and learned? Notice the consequences of what follows in our lives for how we wish to see sexuality, the story we tell about it. Is it built in? Is there some notion of what's normal? And if it isn't normal, how do I fix it? I assume it stays the same over a lifetime. All people respond the same way, and if they don't respond that way, they're not normal, they're not healthy. Please, let's put it back, okay? Or do we want to see sex as something that we learn, that we can change, that we understand will change with new partners, with new situations over our lifetimes, and by the way, that there are lots of ways to do it, all of which are healthy, normal, and just fine. Doing the tango is not better than doing a foxtrot. In this respect, I think it's wonderful to see that neuroscientists themselves, such as Michael Gazaniga, and social critics, such as the British biologist, Nicholas Rose, raise the same kinds of questions. Do we want to see ourselves as brains that do things my brain made me do it, as Bruce said? It wasn't me doing it. Or are we persons with brains? Is the brain the origin of action and responsibility? Or as Gazaniga says, does responsibility emerge from the interaction of our brains with particular environments and cultures? As we welcome the contributions of neuroscience in the future, let us also be aware of the risks and dangers of pseudo-neuroscience. Biology is an important piece of the human story, but it is only one chapter. Thank you very much.