Why Recent Neuroscience Research is a Waste of Money

[Daniel E.]

An excerpt from an interview with the author of Brain Lock, Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz:

Elisha: ...This vast output of neuroscience research over the last many years is largely a waste of money.

Jeff: Why? Because it doesn’t really have any real world human application. Neuroscience is increasingly looking like a passing fad – at least in its current version. Until it changes to a form in which conscious attention has physiologic effects or has a dynamic causal role in how the brain functions, all this research is basically not applicable to anything that’s particularly useful, and so the whole thing has been a gargantuan waste of money. What’s worse, in its current version it has massively increased the use of drugs in our culture, and now is even leading to the use of electrodes being placed inside people’s brains to treat mental health problems! This goes under the Orwellian name “deep brain stimulation” and it is, in my view, a very dangerous development. The terrible past abuses of psychosurgery seem to have largely gone down the memory hole of the current psychiatric establishment.

Elisha: When you talk about conscious attention, is one synonym of that mindful attention?

Jeff: No, it’s absolutely not a synonym, but mindful attention is one small, but massively important, sub-category of the general term conscious attention.

I would say that mindful attention is one of the highest functioning parts of what is included under the much larger category of conscious attention. You can have neutral attention and you can also have negative non-mindful attention. A classic example of this being pornography. Pornography has a huge capacity to holds people’s attention in place, but it is certainly not mindful. But it has the opportunity to wire the brain...in very negative ways. On the other hand, mindful attention and prayer or meditation, all traditional forms of rigorously practiced meditation would have an adaptive role in brain function. But anything that causes focused or stable attention, whether the subject matter is adaptive or maladaptive or whether it is conducive or not to well-being is going to wire the brain. Focused attention wires the brain, for good and for bad.

Mindful attention, prayer, meditation are the good examples, but there are very many bad examples.

Elisha: Another way of saying that would be as negative attention states of flow. In other words, you could have a sense of flow while looking at pornography or mindlessly shooting guns.

Jeff: Exactly, that’s why I’ve never been a big advocate of flow, unless you couple flow with a worthwhile goal. If you go out and market it the way it’s been marketed as a good in itself, you could do a lot of harm and a lot of harm has been done with that concept.

Why Recent Neuroscience Research is a Waste of Money