The Neuroscience Con

Attach a brain part to any ordinary bit of advice and it starts to feel like science. That's the con—the most-listened-to neuroscience on the planet is largely cosmetic. Here's how the trick works, and how to run it in reverse so you never fall for it again.

Show Notes

The most-listened-to neuroscience on the planet is a magic trick. Attach a brain part to any bit of ordinary advice and it starts to feel like science. Here’s how the trick works—and how to run it in reverse, so you never fall for it again.

Further reading

• The Neuroscience Con — the article behind this lecture
• Neurotransmitters and behaviour — the purest form of the trick
• Addictive work — where neurotransmitter talk actually earns its keep
• Not brain regions, brain networks — why single-region reasoning (the RAS, the cortex) misleads
• Brain structures and behaviour — a third of your brain is always on
• The value of brain waves — the same pop-neuro fluff in miniature
• The origin of insight — insight comes when you’re not immersed
• Problems with p-values — the replication crisis, in his own words
• Stress is good (lecture) — flow as optimum stress
• How to be lucky — manifestation as manufactured luck
• The trouble with Positive Intelligence — the con with a spine, infiltrating consulting
• Obscuring Banalities — why we dress simple ideas up as clever ones
• The amygdala is not the fear centre (lecture)
• The scientific ritual (lecture)
• Sages and wisdom (lecture)
• Education is entertainment (Malcolm Gladwell shit)

References

• Dr Tara Swart — the Instagram source slides: a neuroscientist’s guide to manifestation (the prefrontal-cortex, neuroplasticity and flow slides) and resistance to change (the RAS slide), both @drtaraswart
• Dr Tara Swart, guest on The Diary of a CEO
• M. Csikszentmihalyi (1975), Beyond Boredom and Anxiety — the “sense of control” quote on flow
• A. Dietrich (2003), transient hypofrontality hypothesis of flow
• Habituation — the filtering the RAS slide gestures at
• The replication crisis
• “The Rise of Decorative Neuroscience” — Skeptic (independent corroboration of the “cosmetic filler” thesis)
• Sherman, Lokhande, Müller & Cohen (2021), “Self-Affirmation Interventions,” in Handbook of Wise Interventions — affirmations are “powerful yet conditional”: they work when well-timed and specific
• Wood, Perunovic & Lee (2009), “Positive Self-Statements: Power for Some, Peril for Others,” Psychological Science — affirmations can backfire for people with low self-esteem

What is btrmt. lectures?

A brain scientist talking about (better) patterns of thought, of feeling, and of action. One pattern, one podcast—you see if it works for you. The btrmt. lectures, with Dr Dorian Minors. (btrmt.—said "betterment.")

Welcome to the Betterment Lectures. My name
is Dr Dorian Minors, and if there's one thing I've learnt as a
brain scientist, it's that there's no instruction manual for this
device in our head. But there are patterns—patterns of thought,
of feeling, of action. That's what brains do: create the patterns
that gracefully handle the predictable shapes of everyday life.

So let me teach you about them. One pattern, one podcast, and you
see if it works for you.

I've spent a couple of episodes now circling a question about how
we know things. One of them, on what I called the scientific
ritual, was
about how we intuitively retreat to the scientific, the empirical,
the evidence to solve our problems—and the trouble that the
scientific method is a belief system like any other, and so suffers
the same kinds of consequences. Another, more recently, was about
who we trust to tell us what's
right: how we
like to believe we pursue evidence and literature and science,
but what we're actually doing is deferring our understanding to
expertise, to sages, to gurus. And I talked a bit about why that
form of knowledge dominates on TikTok and Instagram.

Today I want to talk about the retail version of that—the less
highfalutin way brain science gets used to sell you stuff all the
time.

I want to talk about it because it bothers me. I'm an actual brain
scientist. I spent a long time researching how the brain works,
and how that influences decision-making, when I was at Cambridge;
and now I teach at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, where I'm
teaching people to use it in high-tempo, high-pressure
environments. So when somebody comes up to me and asks whether
I've read this new book about my amygdala—about how to get out
of your amygdala and into your frontal
lobes—it
makes me wince a little.

So: a grain of salt. This is a biased perspective. But I don't
think it's unfairly biased, because there's an entire genre of
this. If you do the Google keyword searches, this sort of
neuroscience-washing peaks in the 2000s. And when I first wrote
the article behind this lecture, I picked on somebody who must
have been using paid promotions on Instagram to violate me with
their neuroscience-washing—and who, when I got Claude to help me
turn that article into this podcast, turned out to be the guest on
one of the biggest episodes of a pretty famous podcast, the Diary
of a CEO.

So this isn't a fringe grift. This is the most listened-to
neuroscience on the planet. It's what people like to hear.

Knowing that, I want to be a little cautious. I don't want to
throw neuroscience out the window as a way of understanding the
world. But I do want to point out that almost always, this is a
confidence game. People using neuroscience are trying to con
you—and when they're conning you, it looks a certain way. I
want to teach you to spot it.

So let's get into it.

The theme I've been exploring recently is something about where we
like to believe we get our information from—the kind of
information that drives our decision-making. What we seem to like
to do, or at least the people I surround myself with, is be driven
by the evidence. We like the idea that we're paying attention to
the science, to the research, to the experts, and not being pulled
into some silly decision by our passionate emotions and fears and
worries. We're being objective, in some kind of way.

And when you actually explore that—the scientific method and the
way it's deployed, or the kind of people we listen to for
advice—you often find that we're just listening to our worries
and fears and dressing them up in a scientific costume. Brain
science is perfect for this. It's the real-sounding,
hard-science-sounding, credible-sounding thing you can dress
advice up in to make it seem evidence-driven, research-informed,
clever. It promotes advice from opinion to science.

I think this is part of societal training: the idea that anecdote
is weak, that our best guess is embarrassing, that our lived
experience isn't something we should draw on to solve problems—
we should look to data and science instead. We're in this
scientistic society. We like our knowledge regimented. So dressing
advice in neuroscience makes it feel a bit more legitimate.

And importantly, the underlying advice is often pretty good. I
talk a lot about Malcolm Gladwell
shit—the
idea that we use education as entertainment, delivering things
that make us feel like we've learned something while really just
repackaging something we already knew, hitting the same button
that real learning does. I'll link something in the show notes
that explains that idea in more detail. But I don't actually think
that most of the learning we do is fake education for
entertainment. I think a lot of it is explaining things people
need to hear, at the time they need to hear it, in a way that's
palatable—in a way that fits the scientistic society and lets
them say, my lived experience is real.

And that's a little bit what this podcast is trying to do, if I'm
honest. I draw on my background and my experience deliberately,
because I think people need that to have their experience
validated, and to feel their perspective on the world is
legitimate.

But, for example, we're going to rip on Tara Swart today. I'm
going to show you a couple of examples of how I think she really
is playing this confidence game—this violation of everything I
just said—in order to sell you stuff rather than validate your
perspective on the world. And yet some of it is legitimately good
advice. Her big thing seems to be manifestation. Now, I haven't
looked deeply into Tara Swart, so I might be mischaracterising
her, but there's a lot of stuff about how the brain is involved in
manifesting reality. Initially I reacted strongly to that—but if
you strip out the mystic language and the brain science, you find
it's basically manufactured
luck, something I
believe in myself and have in fact written about: the idea that if
you focus your attention on what you want, you'll notice more of
the opportunities that get you closer to it. A very real, very
sensible, very literature-informed idea.

The difference is that you don't need to lie about the brain to
get there. And I think the lie actually distracts you from what
the brain can teach you about behaviour—and there are things
it can teach you; it's just that most of the time, people aren't
talking about those. So I'm not here to say the advice is bad. I'm
here to talk about the way it's packaged, and the way that
packaging distracts us from really getting to grips with the
world.

So let me show you what the neuroscience con looks like.

I've given a lot of background, but I haven't really said what the
neuroscience con is. Let me give you the purest form—the
central spine of the trick—because once you see it, you'll see
it everywhere.

The best example is
neurotransmitters.
Neurotransmitters are these things that float around in the brain
and help influence or inform the way the brain signals—to help
you learn new things, or change the way you're perceiving stuff,
or whatever the case may be. They do a lot of stuff, is the point.
In fact they do so much, and they're so complicated, that it's
genuinely very difficult to work out exactly what they're doing at
any given moment. But people won't talk about how complicated they
are. What they'll do is build a sentence that goes something like:
doing X releases Y neurotransmitter, which gives you Z benefit.
So—going for a run releases dopamine, which makes you feel good.

The problem is that there's nothing useful the word "dopamine" is
doing in that sentence. Strip it out and you get: going for a run
makes you feel good. You get the identical informational value.
Adding the neurotransmitter is a purely cosmetic, decorative
thing—and what it does is legitimise the advice. Maybe you'd be
less inclined to believe that going for a run makes you feel good;
but when somebody says it makes you feel good because brain
thing, all of a sudden it's more legitimate.

That's essentially the con in a line: throwing a brain word into
an idea as a costume, to make it seem more legitimate.

So let me take it to Dr Swart. These are the Instagram posts she
must have put some paid promotion behind—and I do now wonder
whether that was because her Diary of a CEO episode came out around
then. Anyway, she was posting these really beautiful little
Instagram slides—a sort of neuroscientist's guide to
manifestation was the one I picked, and it seems to be the thing
she talks about on the podcasts she's on. I'll link the collection
in the show notes.

Here's a quote:

Get clear on what you want. Clarity activates the prefrontal
cortex, responsible for decision-making and planning. By
defining what you truly want and connecting it to a deeper
purpose, you engage your brain's motivation circuits, making
your goals more tangible.

Sounds great. Sounds like the brain is going to help you be
better. So the first question I want to ask is: is the
neuroscience even sensible? And in fairly typical fashion, it's
kind of sensible. The prefrontal cortex is involved in planning,
no question. But it's also roughly a third of your brain. It'd be
kind of weird if it weren't activated—you can't just have a
third of your brain switched off. And as for engaging your
motivation circuits: when are you not engaged in goal-directed
behaviour? People say they're not motivated, so they
procrastinate—but then you're motivated to not work. It'd be
weird if your motivation circuits weren't active, and it'd be
weird if they weren't involved in motivation.

So the brain science kind of makes sense. But it also doesn't mean
anything. Strip it out and what you get is: getting clear on what
you want helps you plan, and makes you motivated. And the problem
is you already knew that. Tara Swart couldn't just tell you
that—she had to add all the shit about the cortex and the
motivation circuits to make it seem more important than it is.

Here's another. This one's on self-worth:

Believe you're worthy of having it. Self-worth is tied to neural
pathways associated with confidence and self-belief. Positive
affirmations can help rewire those pathways through
neuroplasticity, reinforcing a sense of worthiness.

Is the neuroscience sensible? Well—she's said that self-worth is
tied to self-worth brain architecture. It would be kind of strange
if it weren't. And affirmations "rewire pathways"—sure, in the
sense that anything that changes you rewires the brain. That's
what the brain is. The entire point of the brain is to change
itself as you learn the structure of the world. It's like saying
water is wet.

So you strip out the brain science and you get: positive
affirmations reinforce a sense of self-worth. And you're done.
Though then, I suppose, you'd have to go and look at the
affirmation literature—which, as I understand it, needs quite
specific affirmations to
work,
so it's questionably even good
advice. But I'll link
a paper or two in the show notes. Don't take my word for it.

So we've had a couple of examples now, and they're good examples
of adding cosmetic brain-science words that don't really add
anything—because they're used in a way that could describe
almost anything. A third of your brain is involved in planning and
goal-directed behaviour and motivation; you'd certainly hope a
third of your brain was on while you're awake.

But there's another form of this. Less "obvious, anodyne stuff
that isn't technically wrong but doesn't add anything," and more
what I'd call jargon confetti. These are the ones that make even
me have to think. Here's a quote:

Trust the process and enjoy the views. When we let go of
excessive control, the brain can shift into a flow state,
engaging creativity and allowing intuitive ideas to emerge.
This helps reduce stress by lowering cortisol levels, making the
journey more enjoyable.

There's a lot going on here. Let me pick up flow. This isn't
technically brain-science stuff, it's more cognitive attention
science, and I'm not super familiar with the flow literature—
it's quite old now, and its broader discipline really struggled
its way through the replication
crisis. But I do know that the
core characteristic of flow is complete absorption in the task.
The challenge precisely meets your capacity, and so time slips
away from you. And, importantly, from the very beginning it's been
characterised by a sense of control, not a lack of it. To quote
one of the lead authors, from 1975:

a sense of control is definitely one of the most important
components of the flow experience, whether or not an "objective"
assessment justifies such feelings.

So on the face of it, I'm not sure how the brain would transition
into flow by letting go of control. I wonder if the "excessive"
is a nod towards Dietrich's transient hypofrontality
hypothesis—where flow comes from a down-regulation of prefrontal
regions associated with self-evaluation and performance
monitoring, which might otherwise be a barrier to the immersive
quality of flow. If we're evaluating ourselves too hard, it's like
an inner critic, and that might stop us dropping into flow. But if
that's what Dr Swart meant, I don't know why she didn't just say
so. She was whipping out prefrontal stuff earlier, saying it was
very good for goal-setting—and I wonder if the prefrontal cortex
just isn't good anymore, because the brain is complex, and
invoking something like a third of the brain might involve some
contradictions.

Whatever the case, this isn't particularly likely to help you
generate ideas. Across the board, the literature suggests that
intuitive insight
comes when you're not immersed in a task. So: letting go, yes; flow
state, no. You'd need to let go far more than a flow state allows
to get into the space of creativity. And more than that—flow
sounds stressful. It's where your capacity is completely absorbed
by the task at hand, which sounds a lot like optimum
stress: that delicate
peak of physiological arousal that takes all your cognitive and
physical resources and tunes them towards performance. And the
last sentence is just the straightforward version of the trick
again—"this reduces stress by lowering cortisol levels." Well,
yes: cortisol is the hormone associated with stress. Stress being
reduced by the stress-reducing parts of the brain shouldn't come
as a surprise.

By slide five or so, this is out of hand—you're getting the kind
of neuro-babble that leaves you less informed than when you
started. Jargon confetti. Strip it all back out and you get
something like: if you trust the process over your inner critic
you might find a state of flow, and if you let go a bit more you
might even get creative. The same advice. And it's fine—it's
good. You just didn't need to force all that random distracting
stuff in there.

I'll give you one more before I wrap up. Here's a quote:

The reticular activating system—the RAS—filters information
and favours what is familiar over what is new and uncertain. If
you've not primed your reticular activating system to seek out
new opportunities in line with your goals, it will seek out the
known.

Now, the reticular activating system is in the brainstem—which
isn't the smartest part of the brain. Very important, but not that
clever. This particular subsystem basically modulates your
excitability: if you're waking up, the RAS is playing a part; if
you're going from relaxed to focused, it's probably helping out.
That sort of thing. So I don't really know how she's getting from
there to this claim. New stuff does capture our attention, so
maybe you'd get a stronger burst of activity from those neurons.
Or she might be touching on habituation, where low-priority,
repetitive things—background noise—get filtered out of our
perception. But I don't know how you'd "prime" your brainstem to
intervene in that. I didn't know when I wrote the article, and I
still don't.

But strip it out and you get: if you focus on your goals, you
might spot opportunities you'd have missed. Which is, again, this
manifestation thing she's into—and it's a great idea. I agree
with it entirely. It just doesn't need the brainstem involved.

I'm not going to do any more slides, because they're all this kind
of thing. And it's not just her; she's just a very popular face of
it. I've critiqued a very popular self-help
method
that seems to be infiltrating business consulting at the moment—
I'll link it in the show notes. I've complained about this in
schools, in the media, in anything where people are trying to sell
you stuff. This trick comes up, and the longer it is, the less
useful and the more expensive it tends to be. I'll link as many
examples as I can find in the show notes.

But that, at its core, is the neuroscience con. So let's talk
about what we can do about it.

You don't actually need to be a brain scientist to sort this out.
In fact, you just watched me get all wrapped up in one, trying to
work out what was going on—because I'm a brain scientist. So
you might even be at an advantage over me.

What you need is to do three things. Take something populated with
brain science. Find the brain words—the regions, the chemicals,
the neuro-mechanism—and just delete them. Delete them and read
the sentence again. If it means the same thing, it's the
neuroscience con. And that's it. That's the entire skill. I'd love
for you to send me examples of this from Instagram and TikTok. Run
it on the next reel that comes across your feed, and I swear you'll
never unsee it.

And the problem—like the last two slides I went through—is
that it doesn't just fail to inform you. It doesn't just work past
your guard to sell you something you may or may not agree with,
wrapped up in fake authority. At its worst, it leaves you less
informed than you started. I think the flow literature is
genuinely interesting, and that mischaracterisation gives you a
confident wrong picture instead of a modest—or annoyingly
nuanced—right one. That's not helpful. You're not going to have
a better grip on how to live your life as a result.

And I said it at the beginning, and I want to reiterate it: often
the advice underneath is fine. It might be trivial or anodyne, but
sometimes we need to hear it, because it validates an experience
we're having—it reminds us that something we knew is still true.
Affirmations can work. Manifestation as manufactured luck—fine;
manufactured luck is a thing. You don't want to throw the baby out
with the bathwater. Just don't let people launder advice past your
barriers, because that's exactly what this kind of
neuroscience-washing is hiding. If you want to be evidence-based
and objective and data-oriented, this is about the worst possible
outcome for you.

So that's it. Find the brain words, take them out of the sentence.
If the point is exactly the same, then they're trying to sell you
something.

That's all I've got for you today.