The Seductive Allure of Neuro Self-Help

Neuroscience in self-help or productivity suggestions is a red flag

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I tend to stay away from self-help or "productivity" content.

I get the impulse for the stuff. We're all looking for the best way to do things. It's easy to look around and get the impression that others have things figured out. It's tempting to think there's some piece missing, some secret method, that if I discovered it, I would be less of a mess.

The trouble is, this temptation leads us to look for easy, definite answers. The self-help world obliges by finding some small slice of research and exaggerating its importance, treating it with more confidence than it deserves, and extending it far beyond the scope of what researchers tested.

Particularly egregious on this front is the use of neuroscience. Gurus will extrapolate a neuroscience finding far beyond what it can tell us to justify huge swathes of behavior. It's weird because neuroscience is particularly ill-suited to supporting self-help advice.

Neuro Self-Help

Let's look at a few examples of neuroscience gone wrong in the self-help world:

Left Brain, Right Brain

In the 1960s, Roger Sperry worked with epilepsy patients who had undergone surgery to sever the major connections between the two hemispheres of the brain. His work was groundbreaking, winning him the Nobel Prize. His research led to the modern understanding of differences between the hemispheres, like that for most people, the left hemisphere is more dominant in language processing and the right is more dominant in spatial and non-verbal reasoning (though Sperry himself showed the right hemisphere has a significant amount of language ability).

The popular understanding of this work, however, has completely lost any grounding in the scientific findings.

The pop understanding took the (legitimate) scientific finding: 

"There are asymmetries between the processing in the left and right hemispheres of the brain"

Which through media narratives oversimplifying and exaggerating becomes:

"The left brain is analytical and right brain is creative"

Which through misinterpretation becomes: 

"Analytic people are left-brain dominant and creative people are right-brain dominant"

Which becomes prescriptions for differences in educational approaches for left and right brained students and specific advice meant to improve creativity.

All this even though most cognitive functions, even those we see as "logical" or "creative", use both hemispheres of the brain, and individual people are not "left-brained" or "right-brained". There's evidence that communication between the hemispheres is what's important for those that are particularly good at certain cognitive skills, like mathematics.

Reward Centers and Addiction

The reward centers of the brain process signals related to motivation and reward. Anything that makes you feel "Ooh, I should do that again" involves these centers, from good tasting food to having a pleasant conversation. Addictive substances tend to directly manipulate the reward centers of the brain, leading it to go off the rails and make you feel "OOH, I SHOULD DO THAT AGAIN" (capital letters indicate the pathological kind of wanting to do it again).

The media is full of attention-grabbing claims that the brain reacts to various things like it reacts to cocaine or heroin: social media, sugar, porn, video games, phones, and even love. But involvement of the reward centers of the brain only makes something "like" an addictive drug in the superficial sense that both can motivate us to do things.

Just need a bump of true love.

Literal Brain Changes

Self-help gurus justify their advice with claims that their preferred practice "literally changes the brain". The issue is, every experience changes your brain. By reading this sentence, you've changed some synapses in your brain to hold information in working memory. Knowing a change has taken place isn't important or interesting—you want to know if the experience changed you for the better. And neuroscience isn't very good for telling you that—for that, you need to look at changes in behavior.

The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience

Why is there so much self-help content that features exaggerated neuroscience? Studies have shown that including some neuroscience in an explanation, even if it is irrelevant, increases perceptions of how good an explanation it is. 

Researchers refer to this as the "seductive allure of neuroscience": including references to the brain makes people think less critically about psychological claims. Neuroscience terms (indulge me here) short-circuit people's brains.

People invoke brain stuff when describing why something is good (or bad) for you because it makes the claim feel more sciencey and on firmer ground than it really is.

Behavior Trumps Neuroscience

Look at this explanation of exposure therapy (I've bolded for emphasis):

Gradual exposure therapy is a research backed approach shown to help reduce anxiety and treat anxiety disorders. It does this because it literally changes the brain, re-wiring the neural pathways and changing the release of chemicals in the brain.

That's as deep as the neuroscience explanation gets in this article. I chose this example because exposure therapy works! We have a ton of experimental evidence of it working.

Exposure therapy works, but this article sets off my alarm bells. It mentions the word "brain" 25 times, but none of the neuroscience terms carry any actual information. Of course exposure therapy changes the brain! Even if it didn't work, it would change the brain!

For exposure therapy, the neuroscience is maybe interesting but broadly irrelevant, because we have a better measure: specific behavioral changes. The question isn't "Does gradual exposure therapy change the brain?", it's "Does gradual exposure therapy change anxiety disorders?" 

We have a mountain of studies showing exposure therapy works to reduce many different specific anxieties. Saying "It changes the brain" doesn't help us understand how it does that, nor should it give us more confidence in the results.

If you can directly measure the behavior you're interested in, look at that before resorting to speculative neuroscience connections.

If you want to know if video games are as bad as heroin, you can just look at people who play video games. What proportion of video game players become so obsessed that it infringes on their ability to live a normal life? What portion go through physical withdrawal symptoms when they're taken away? What proportion say they want to quit but cannot?

Given that most adults play video games, it's fair to say it probably isn't much like heroin. If most people did heroin, I suspect it would cause more significant issues than our collective video game habits currently do. Looking at the brain doesn't change this.

Knowing that the brain's response, at some coarse level, is similar between video games and heroin, doesn't change the story.

Reverse Inference

I suspect part of the reason people fall for the "seductive allure of neuroscience" is that they don't have a good understanding of just how crappy neuroscientific measures are. People think if we say anything about the brain’s involvement, we must have it figured out, even if they don't understand the explanation.

But, as I talked about previously while discussing Mind Uploading, our methods of looking at the brain suck. We don't have high fidelity measures of neural activity.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is the standard for human neuroscience experiments. It's an extremely coarse measure of neural activity.

Images like this with a part of the brain "highlighted" are from fMRI studies. The highlighted bit is a visualization of a heavily filtered measure of the oxygen going to that part of the brain. Each "voxel" in the image contains hundreds of thousands of neurons. It gives you a broad sense of where some processing is happening, not what that processing is.

At a coarse enough level, the brain's responses to any two behaviors are going to look similar. Playing tennis, doing your taxes, composing a sonnet, smelling a rose, or looking at stuff—all of these are going to involve the cortex. If we just looked at "is the cortex active" as our measure, these activities are going to look similar.

Of course, we can look at things in a bit more detail than just "the cortex", which is an enormous part of the brain. But the point still stands: we're only able to look at neural activity at a coarse level, and each large "chunk" we can look at is involved in many things. This is the problem of reverse inference.

Let's look at an example in the brain from a terrible article about mirror neurons (another often misused neuroscience finding):

When we are experiencing pain, the anterior cingulate cortex is active. We also see activation in the same region when we observe someone else receiving a painful experience.

While supposedly written earnestly, this is almost like a coded joke for neuroscientists. Some of my peers and I used to play a "game" every time we were reading a new fMRI paper: what brain area is involved in this task? The in-joke was that the anterior cingulate cortex was always the correct answer. The anterior cingulate cortex is active in practically every fMRI task ever invented.

Each brain area does a ton of stuff. The anterior cingulate cortex "activates" in an extremely broad range of tasks. Saying it lights up in two different circumstances doesn't tell you the same neural processing is happening.

Self-Help for Self-Help

Neuroscience gives us a pretty blurry picture of what's good for us. We generally have a much better understanding of the behaviors we're trying to explain than the neural mechanisms involved.

It's fine to take inspiration from neuroscience when trying to come up with a practice to help you. But to hold up neuroscience as proving “this is the best way” probably isn't true. The reason to do "Deep Work" or meditate for anxiety or give up video games shouldn't be based on a claim about the brain.

If you want to know my opinion on Cal Newport's Deep Work, let's just say reading it was the impetus for me to write this post.

A good rule of thumb for evaluating self-help advice is to ask “is there behavioral evidence?” In the absence of behavioral evidence of a positive change in the behavioral measure in question, you should be careful about claims that you should abstain from digital media because your brain responds to it like cocaine.

Of course, there are good, science-based suggestions on practices we should adopt to better ourselves and our lives. For example,

Erman Misirlisoy, PhD

keeps things close to the evidence. But unfortunately, the majority of self-help advice I’ve come across instead speculates wildly and strays far from the studies they cite (if they cite any at all).

Life is complex, and it isn't easy to tell when we're doing the "right" thing. Having someone tell us that, because of how the brain works, it's best to act a particular way, takes away the ambiguity. But our understanding of the brain is no less ambiguous than the rest of life. All of us humans, neuroscientists or otherwise, are grasping around in the dark trying to find our way.

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