I have previously written about how I think that cognitive neuroscience as a scientific discipline (and I know that this is not a universally held view) has largely moved on from publishing studies demonstrating the neural correlates of “x”, where x might be behaviours as diverse as maternal love, urinating, or thinking about god. There are still a few of these sorts of studies published each year, and because the public are, it seems, fascinated by stories about blobs on brains, the media portrayal of cognitive neuroscience tends to focus on such findings.
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| Some blobs on a brain |
This is all very entertaining if you like your science presented to you in a breakfast TV sofa sort of way. However, the downside is that people who are not regular readers of the fMRI research literature think that the media portrayal of cognitive neuroscience is an accurate representation of the field. In fact, I would argue, this is far from the case. In my experience of working in cognitive neuroscience for the last decade or more, most researchers I have encountered are not interested in so-called “blobology”. Instead, they work very hard each day carefully designing theoretically motivated experiments using cognitive neuroscience techniques to produce empirical data that can be used to differentiate between cognitive theories about how functions like memory, language, vision, attention, and so on, might operate.
