Those models and explanations are not nearly as helpful as one might think. A lot of "neuroscience" explanations of everyday behaviour are mostly nonsense that sounds plausible and appealing (https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn3817, https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/jocn_a_0075...). In this context plausible doesn't even mean plausible to a neuroscientist, it means more like consistent with the nonsense a layperson has heard before.
What would be really helpful is a model that can add to things we already know. Saying "studying for an exam engages the X part of the brain and uses the Y neurotransmitter" adds literally nothing to your understanding of studying (you can find out much more about studying by talking to people that are good at it and who have done a lot of studying themselves), it's just taking an everyday activity and identifying the small but still vastly complex portion of the brain that is activated more than others. Imagine being told that a particular bug in a 1-billion-lines-of-code codebase is due to some code within a 10-million-lines-of-code portion of it: that's great but how helpful is it really?
In general I'm very skeptical of much neuroscience. (If an article ever says 'emerging neuroscience shows...' you can be assured what follows is almost certainly BS.) Yet I found the senior researcher in this article quite refreshing about the limitations of their research.
Comments
Those models and explanations are not nearly as helpful as one might think. A lot of "neuroscience" explanations of everyday behaviour are mostly nonsense that sounds plausible and appealing (https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn3817, https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/jocn_a_0075...). In this context plausible doesn't even mean plausible to a neuroscientist, it means more like consistent with the nonsense a layperson has heard before.
What would be really helpful is a model that can add to things we already know. Saying "studying for an exam engages the X part of the brain and uses the Y neurotransmitter" adds literally nothing to your understanding of studying (you can find out much more about studying by talking to people that are good at it and who have done a lot of studying themselves), it's just taking an everyday activity and identifying the small but still vastly complex portion of the brain that is activated more than others. Imagine being told that a particular bug in a 1-billion-lines-of-code codebase is due to some code within a 10-million-lines-of-code portion of it: that's great but how helpful is it really?
In general I'm very skeptical of much neuroscience. (If an article ever says 'emerging neuroscience shows...' you can be assured what follows is almost certainly BS.) Yet I found the senior researcher in this article quite refreshing about the limitations of their research.