Spare the Tune When Shooting the Piano Player

The blogosphere is buzzing with lots of vitriol for Martin Lindstrom’s piece on the ‘neuroscience’ of loving your iPhone.  To be sure, there’s plenty to spew about, and many of my colleagues in neuroscience, neurotechnology and neuroethics have brought the issues to the fore: inapt misrepresentation of neuroscience, miscommunication of neuroscientific theory and findings, fallacious thinking both as regards the ways that neuroimaging can and should be used (e.g. the fallacy of false cause/post hoc ergo propter hoc – attributing the antecedents to the consequential), and the conceptualization of structure-function relations in the brain (what Bennett and Hacker have called the mereological fallacy of attributing the function of the whole solely to one of the constituent parts), and last, but certainly not least, plain misuse of terms and constructs (e.g. “synesthesia”).