The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience

Dr. Sarah McKay speaking at the Emotional Intelligence Online Summit in 2020 for People Builders and the Emotional Intelligence Academy.

06: 52 - The Coming of Age of Neuroscience

08:32​ - Our Brains are What Make Us Human

09:10 - A New Approach to Neuroscience

12:58 - The Problem with all the Excitement

18:09​ - Dispelling the Neuromyths

27: 00 - Talk About Neuroscience with Wisdom and Care

29:57​ - The Downside of the Seductive Allure of Neuroscience

32:26 - The Misuse and Risks of Neuromyths

37:56 - Learn Neuroscience from a Neuroscientist

41:45 - Bottom-Up, Outside-In, and Top-Down

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Now that you understand the basic principles of neuroscience, perhaps it's time for you to start your own journey of development in the field of Applied Neuroscience. If you are ready to go deeper into this fascinating topic and use it to empower yourself and others, join Dr. Sarah in her self-study online course she offers through People Builders Institute.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

The Coming of Age of Neuroscience

Neuroscience is an incredibly broad, deep and rich subject. Despite doing this for 25 years, I believe that it’s just coming of age. For the last 5 to 10 years, I have seen a thirst and growing interest in the subject.

The discipline of neuroscience is so enormous, that it spans on everything from our genes. Those genes build molecules, which build cells, which build neurons, brain cells, which also build glia which provide protection and half of the support cells within the brain for the neurons. So, we’ve got neurons and we’ve got glia and these wire-up and connect to form networks and systems which can produce behaviours, sensation, perception and cognition. They give us the ability to think, feel and behave. Indeed, there are so many layers in which we can explore this topic of neuroscience and the brain.

Our Brains are What Make Us Human

The brain controls every aspect of our body. It controls our heart rate and our sexual ability. It integrates various parts of the world, our body, our mind and our memories to create emotions – we learn and we remember. It’s integrated with our immune system to control our response to disease and in some way, determines how well we’ll respond to a medical treatment or not. Ultimately, the brain shapes our thoughts, our hopes, our dreams and our imagination. It is what makes us human.

I’m very happy spending my time wallowing around this world of neuroscience. However, there are a few problems I’ve encountered and that is what I want to talk to you about today. As we discuss this, I don’t want to come on this talk as a neuroscientist and just throw out a few neuroscience sounding words which can get you excited but not equip you to do anything worth. What I want to do is introduce to you an approach that is from a different perspective- one that you may not have considered before.

A New Approach to Neuroscience

I want to start off with a quote from neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky: “little can be understood about humans if we proclaim that a certain brain region or a certain gene or a certain hormone or a neurotransmitter explains everything.”

And herein lies one of the problems we have when trying to translate neuroscience: If we try to understand why we humans do what we do (and really, that's generally why most people are interested in neuroscience) we have to factor in a whole lot of factors.

Like for instance, we have to look at the neurobiological events that have taken place a second before a certain behavior. We also need to look at the hormonal events taking place maybe from a few days before. Another thing that we need to factor in are the neuroplastic changes which have taken place weeks before. Then, the epigenetic events that may have taken place in our childhood. We also need to take a look at our fetal environment. Then the genes that we have gained from each parent and centuries and millennia of culture, ecology and evolution. Indeed, there is a whole lot of factors that we must take into account in order to understand any human behavior.

So, we're stuck because we were busy sort of proclaiming statements such as:

“This part of brain does this and that.”

“This part of the brain is the fear center.”

“That part of the brain lights up when we are expressing empathy for someone else.”

“There is a gene for depression.”

These very simplistic statements hardly scratch the surface of this extraordinary field of neuroscience.

And herein lies the problem (I can kind of see this from a number of perspectives): the problem is what we're trying to do is translate neuroscience research, take it out of the lab, and make it relevant to our lives. We're trying to make it relevant to the clinic, to the classroom, and even to the corporate boardroom. We’re trying to translate it for teachers, for health professionals, for coaches, for leaderships, for social workers and HR professionals. We’re trying to go from brain scan to classroom lesson plan – and I’m not convinced that we’re quite there yet.

The Problem with all the Excitement

This idea of translation- even going from the lab bench to the bedside, which is a pretty tried and tested translation pathway - is really difficult and takes a really long time. The complexity that we have is we've got the brain and we've got this state of affairs and we're trying desperately to translate it into something meaningful- and sometimes I think we've been a bit premature. As I said, neuroscience is still coming of age and there's a legitimate desire from policymakers, from politicians, and from people who are really interested to use scientific evidence to inform policy.

What we need are clear, evidenced based policies when trying to help people (I don't think anyone can argue with that) especially within the space of mental health, education and coaching. But the problem is there has been such an enormous enthusiasm for neuroscience that people got a little bit ahead of what neuroscience can do. It's almost as if we are asking so much - we’re going from brain scan to classroom plan and there’s a big gap.

And the gaps are where I’ve spent a lot of time in for the last five or so years and I saw that this was a very important space that needed to be filled. Over the many years and in many disciplines, this problem of trying to translate a particular discipline, particularly within science, into something that's real and usable. We’ve got complex science and we’ve got an urgent desire so it’s only understandable that we want to do that. But what happens when we have a gap? What do we do when we see a gap? Most of us would fill it with Polyfilla or Blu Tack, or something that can do the job. It looks like it'll do the job, especially if you would paint over it somehow masking the gap.

But I think it would be nicer if we start with a solid foundation. In doing so, we can carefully engineer that gap instead of just filling up with gumph. Because what I've seen over the years, particularly within the neuroscience space (and that is why I have been so compelled to do what I do), is that we have these gaps and they have become filled with waffle, with fads, with bandwagons, with mediocre gray-haired American gentlemen of the brain who see business opportunities and ways to make some money by packaging up science prematurely into self-help. They are, what I like to call, doing a little bit of ‘neuro-splaining’. And there's some real issues here; we've got plenty of businesses out there that have been packaging up brain training.

There was this so-called ‘online brain training’ and for many years they were claiming that you could sit down when you get home from work after a tough day, pop on the computer, do a little bit of their brain training game and not get Alzheimer’s disease. That idea was quickly dismissed. Once we found that it was entirely lacking in evidence, the claims were completely overblown and many companies were fined and were stopped from marketing their products.

There was also this concept of ‘brain gyms’ which have been rolled out unwittingly to thousands of schools around the world. It claimed that if children spent more time crossing their arms and legs, they would be able to learn with such greater ease, which again has been utterly and entirely debunked. Millions of dollars have been wasted and time on educating children has been wasted with these dubious claims which have been packaged up. There are also some claims that say if you can change your thinking through tapping into neuroplasticity, you can perhaps improve your income.

Now look, before you think I’m on some kind of snobby, academic soapbox alone here, these problems have been very well examined and addressed within the academic literature. This kind of world of gap-filling out there has been propped up by a couple of really big problems within the field of neuroscience. One of them is the idea of Neuromyths and the other idea is the Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations. Both ideas have specific definitions within the research field and are a field of research in their own right. In fact, there are several academic literatures on both ideas which I find really fascinating. You will go through some of them as you read along.

Dispelling the Neuromyths

Neuromyths are misconceptions about the brain that are not yet supported by any data or have been actively contradicted by the data. So, they are these ideas about the brain which are either not yet proven or have been disproven, yet permeate the public imagination. The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations (which gets rather entertainingly turned into an acronym SANE) also has its own specific definitions and for about a decade, has a growing interest and research around it.

“The Classic of the Space” was one of the very first papers on the Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations. It was published way back 2008 by a group from Yale University led by Deena Weisberg.

The group set out to try and explore why people are more likely to believe a psychological explanation about human behavior if neuroscience is added in there. So, they created a number of circular arguments or a number of long-winded explanations – some made sense, some did not – that included neuroscience for them to test out what people might have taken away from that.

Examples of those circular arguments are the following:

“humans like dogs because we have a strong preference for domesticated canines”

“Humans like dogs because of our parahippocampal gyrus.”

“The brain lights up when we interact with canines signaling to us that we feel pleasure.”

“We like dogs because of a region in our brain indicates that we like dogs.”

When one is to apply a little bit of critical thought on some of the statements, we can see that some of it do not make sense. And there were a number of different arguments and different statements that were made along these lines and essentially what the research has concluded, was that when the neuroscience explanation was added in, people found it satisfying, they found it believable and actionable and were more likely to believe it must be true even if the statement was senseless.

A second paper was published reasonably soon after that. The paper explored a similar idea to the “Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanation.” The paper was called: “ Seeing is Believing: The Effect of Brain Images on Judgments of Scientific Reason.” It used a similar approach to the “The Classic of the Space” study but used images of the brain like a large image of a brain behind, an FMRI or an MRI image of the brain. And again, people were far more likely to believe that what was said was true – they were far more likely to be compelled to act, or agree with the particular statement - if there was an image of the brain near.

Now over time, there was an inevitable pushback and this is often the case. I mean, the Seductive Allure of the Neuroscience Explanation sounds like a pretty exciting research field that's somehow being tinkered with and passed down.

There were some papers that came out about it.

“The Selective Allure of the Neuroscience Explanation.”

“The Seductive Allure of the Seductive Allure of Neuroscience.”

“The Seductive Allure is a Reductive Allure.”

And so, it goes on.

But essentially the findings somehow landed on the same place.

And rather interestingly and perhaps, disturbingly, depending on your approach, one study even went so far as to look to see the effect of neuroscience explanation to serious social issues like death penalty and abortion. In the study, it was found out that if neuroscience explanations were provided as justifications, people will believe the neuroscience and will give it a far more favourable rating if it supported their personal attitudes toward the social issue and will more likely denigrate the science if they find the social issue inappropriate.

So, we can see even when we start to dig down into quite serious social issues, the presence or absence of a neuroscience explanation can be incredibly compelling. We're starting to see it seep into the justice system - whether or not people should be sentenced at a particular age based on what we understand about brain development – and it has some really serious implications beyond just, some neuroscientists like me going: “we shouldn't just believe everything that you hear about the brain.” In short, what this means is people like neuroscience explanations even if they don't need them.

Now I believe, despite the downsides of showing an interest in neuroscience, there are also some upsides to this. If you are a person that helps other people understand a little bit more about who they are, why they feel and act the way they do or perhaps you’re a person who wants to get a better understanding of people and of the world, then this idea of the seductive allure and the ability to talk about neuroscience in a really clear, informed way can be a super power. However, like any super power, for you to be able to fully maximise it and seduce people in with this allure, you need to use it wisely.

We can use neuroscience in three really powerful and useful ways:

1. We can talk about basic neuroscience concepts.

2. We can talk about neuroplasticity; how it is involved with things like synaps - proving the removal of unwanted connections in the brain at different stages of development. Doing this can somehow give us some insights about childhood brain development that could maybe translate it into the classroom.

3. We can talk and understand about how neuroscience is done and how scientists figure things out.

And I have to say that 2020 in particular has been a fantastic lesson for people outside of neuroscience or outside of science in general, as to how the scientific method is done. We've seen science livestreamed in terms of the exploration of this pandemic. People have never seen science livestreamed. They've never seen the shades of gray. They've never seen how data can inform or misinform and how policy decisions have to be made based on uncertainties of bet and how messages can be switched almost based on new data coming in. It's been a fantastic lesson in to how science has been done this year. So, we can talk about neuroscience concepts, about how neuroscience is done, and how we can apply these ideas from neuroscience. But as I've said, this is quite tricky.

Talk About Neuroscience with Wisdom and Care

Now, about this idea of talking about neuroscience, there are some spaces in the subject which this has been tested out and has been shown to be useful. Because, as to what I have said, if we’re going to use neuroscience, we are to use it with wisdom, thought and care. One space where this has been tested and done particularly well, is within mental health, particularly in the space of psychoeducation.

Psychoeducation is an extra tool that we can use for helping people dealing with mental illness and/or mental health issues. It somehow blends a psychotherapeutic approach with a cognitive behavioral approach. It’s like giving people the tools to better understand and cope to whatever they are dealing with.

Like for instance when a person is dealing with serious anxiety, a psychoeducation approach would be to give that person the tools that not only challenges their thoughts that results in feelings and behaviors, but also teaches them how the brain responds to threats, challenges and opportunities and how that may be integrated into a stress response, and when a fear response may be appropriate or not. This has been pretty well tested and if this educational approach to talking about the brain is used alongside a type of a particular therapy, we can see that it aids in the process of recovery. Psychoeducation is one of the few places in which we have any good and clear evidence that talking about neuroscience works. So, if you are a real stickler for doing this in an evidence-based way, this is one of the few places where talking about neuroscience has been tested and has had an outcome.

So, we see people gain a more extensive understanding of their habits and even their responses to certain events. For children and young people, it can help stimulate curiosity and interest in themselves. Psychoeducation often helps people depersonalize some of their responses; it helps them go, “okay this is happening in my brain, body and nervous system.” And it gives them the ability to place a biological framework around that and take a step back and have a bit of look. So, it has its uses.

However, we aren’t seeing much work and testing being done in the classroom and there is not any work and testing done at all in the coaching space.

The Downside of the Seductive Allure of Neuroscience.

So, what are some of the downsides if we're going to start plugging these ideas about the brain?

For me, one of the major risks that we see in the space and has been explored in terms of the Seductive Allure of the Neuroscience Explanation, is the lack of neuroscience education. Of course, this was not within the reach of most people. I’m in my mid-forties and neuroscience wasn’t even offered as a type of degree until I was in my twenties. Although children nowadays, particularly here in Australia, are being taught this (which I think is really encouraging), they are not the ones making policy decisions. A 10-year-old won’t be able to influence much for a good 10, 15, 20 years, if that might be too late.

So, we don't need to just teach this stuff at schools. It needs to be the basis of a lot of work that people do within broader education, within broader coaching and training, and in the work they do. There are even these basic ideas of teaching critical thinking skills and understanding the scientific method; you pick up any basic psychology textbook these days and it will be in there. So that’s one problem: we’ve got a real gap in people’s knowledge and education.

Because of this gap, we have this infuriating reliance on these fads, these brain gyms, these rogue ideas that perhaps make intuitive sense, but have no basis or have been disproven. There's also a bit of a criticism in the space that neuroscience hasn't actually really lead to any new methods yet even within mental health. One of my best friends from my early childhood years in New Zealand, a psychiatrist, said:

I don't need a brain imaging to tell me if a treatment works, I'd just ask the patient how they think and feel; we don't need to be always peering inside the brain.

So, this misuse of these neuroscience explanations has propped up and we somehow ended up in this vicious cycle which is why we still have these neuromyths.

The Misuse and Risks of Neuromyths

Neuromyths are ideas about the brain and mind function that have been disproven or have not yet been proven true. There’s a core group of seven to eight classic neuromyths.

The most popular among this group of neuromyths (over 50% of people in the population believe this idea), is the idea of Learning Styles. This idea suggests that we all have different learning styles and only if we taught someone in the appropriate visual, auditory or kinesthetic way, they would learn better. And as I have said, this idea has been disproven.

Another popular neuromyth is the idea that physical movement, coordinates the left side and right side of the brain. Another one is the idea that we have left brain and right brain learners or ways of thinking – you either are a creative right brain person or an analytical left brain person. Again, we have zero evidence. In fact, there are many studies disproving that.

Then there is this the Mozart effect. This is the idea that listening to classical music will help you concentrate or playing classical music to an unborn child will make the child smarter. Again, this has been disproven.

Another neuromyth that is often seen in parent commentaries is this idea that sugar causes hyperactivity and lack of attention and children. Again, believe it or not, we have no evidence for that.

Then, the most popular of all (I get asked about this often) is the idea that we only use 10% of our brain.

So, they are the seven classic neuromyths tried and tested within the academic literature and a good 50% give or take, of people believe at least one of these to be true.

The story about the brain which annoys me more than any is the idea that we have a reptilian or a lizard brain lurking deep within us which kind of guides all of our behaviors and overrides our critical “mammalian” ability to think and make decisions. (I've got a blog post talking about why I think we need to rethink the reptilian brain. No neuroscience textbook that has been written within the last couple of decades mentions the reptilian brain unless it has to say it as a load of neurobunk.)

There is another one, it is this subtle idea that neurogenesis which is the birth of new brain cells, helps us learn. That's not how the brain learns – believe it or not (perhaps this doesn’t get me riled up as the old lizard brain myth does.)

But there's another myth. It's not necessarily a myth but it’s a way that we talk about the brain, which isn’t necessarily true – that each part of the brain has a particular function and lights up when it is performing that function. And again, we have moved far away from this idea of functional localization, particularly for most of our more complex behaviors, thoughts and feelings within the brain.

Now, if we get back to the nitty gritty academic literature, how these factors and myths have emerged and proliferated - these ideas have been identified and number one is this idea around education, the lack of critical thinking. The inability to be able to take a look at these basic science questions and then make that accessible or relevant into that space. There is also a lack of professionals and professional organizations who are working within that “polyfill gap.” Instead, we’ve got the mediocre American gentlemen of the brain packaging things up and flogging it to everyone. And again, this is propagating all of these ideas by and large, and essentially, we underestimate how complex the spaces are, we underestimate how complex human behavior is and we just want these simple answers. So, I'm not going to bang on any more about all of these ideas, what you may believe, which may not be true. I'm just going to make one very strong recommendation and then I'm going to give you a simple toll that I want you to take away from this. My one strong recommendation is: if you are interested in learning about the brain, if you are interested in learning about neuroscience, try learning about it from a neuroscientist.

Learn Neuroscience from a Neuroscientist

There are a lot of “neuroscientists”, “neurogurus” out there. If you are a teacher wanting to learn more about education, you probably would learn about it from people working within teaching with an education within educating educators. If you're a doctor wanting to specialize in cardiology or dermatology, you're going to go to the experts within that space who work, learn, research and teach within that space. If you're a coach and you're wanting to gain qualifications, I imagine and I hope that you would go and learn from people who are qualified working and teaching within the space. Please don't go, try and gain your neuroscience education from someone who talks about quantum theory and relates that to sign-ups plasticity and somehow links it up to the universal consciousness and wraps it up and a pseudo-scientific, fluffy, spiritual bio, and then delivers it with the confidence of these blokes over in the US.

If you are looking for people who have authority in the space of neuroscience to follow and teach you, I have some recommendations for you. I know these people personally and am familiar with their expertise and experience.

John Arden. If you work within the space of mental health education, coaching therapy, psychology, I recommend you meet him. He's written a couple of really interesting books, one in particular called, “Brain to Brain”. He's not a neuroscientist, but he is a psychologist-therapist and works in a very legitimate, thoughtful, and caring way within this space; so, you can follow him.

My old mate, Andrew Huberman who is was absolutely smashing social media and neuroscience education. He's a professor at Stanford. We first met when we were doing our PhDs many years ago. He does an exceptional job, especially via Instagram, on educating people about neuroscience.

Sarah Jane Blakemore is a researcher. She just moved from London to the University of Cambridge. Her father, Colin Blakemore, was my PhD thesis examiner. Sarah works within the space of Child and Adolescent Neuroscience. She’s somehow the founder of the space of Adolescent Neuroscience. Again, she’s an exceptional person to follow; thoughtful, particularly within the space of education.

Lisa Feldman Barrett. Lisa has an exceptional book that came out a couple of years ago called, “How Emotions Are Made” and another book coming out in another few weeks called “The Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.” And I was delighted to see that one of those chapters is devoted to debunking ideas around the reptilian brain.

So, all of these people do a lot of work within neuroscience education outside of the research that they do. They're exceptional communicators, they're thoughtful, and I believe that you can trust them- they’re neuroscientists. So, if you want to learn about neuroscience, go and learn about it from a neuroscientist.

If you're slightly out of that lightened neuroscience space, Caroline Webb is a, a woman from the UK who does a really wonderful job within the coaching space, kind of combining behavioral economics and organizational psychology and neuroscience. She's written a book called, “How to Have A Good Day” which I think is excellent, thoughtful and wise.

Bottom-Up, Outside-In, and Top-Down

Now, what I want to do is I want to give you something that doesn't make you feel deflated for someone who's been trying to talk about neuroscience or think about neuroscience, or learn about neuroscience for a while. So, you're completely scared of wanting to do any of this ever again. I'm going to introduce you to this really simple model called “Bottom Up, Outside in, Top-Down” and what it does is give you a kind of a framework where you can think about the complexities of the brain because there's this quote I gave you at the beginning of this talk and this idea I've taken from Robert Sapolsky which we need to be considering events, neurobiological events, endocrine events, neuro-plasticity events. The brain is kind of this prediction machine that is pulling in data from a load of different sources, and then predicting and making best guesses about what to do next and this framework will give you a bit of an insight into that.

Here’s a diagram looking at all of the genes that have been identified involved in something like Alzheimer's disease (that’s not even taking into account lifestyle factors) these are just genes involved in Alzheimer's disease. So, as you can see, none of us have got any hope - we can't even like scratch the surface a that literature.

Here's a reasonably new update on various stress response pathways and response to something as simple as a physical threat: bleeding out extreme heat, extreme cold; we're not lizards with fight or flight responses. There are a lot of arrows there; we're interested in wiring diagrams around the brain and motivation pathways, and happiness and pleasure. And we know that there's this dopamine, neurotransmitter involved.

The image below is a wiring diagram of a single dopamine neuron in the brain.

So again, there's a lot going on. We're dealing with really super complex systems here- we can't make simple statements.

What I would like to do is introduce you to this idea of considering anything within neuroscience, anything about the brain as complex. Here's a framework on what you can start trying to consider - the various inputs.

The brain is a prediction machine; it's pulling in data from a lot of different places and it’s computing what it's going to do next.

There's information coming into the brain that is determined by our bottom-Up biology – our genes, our hormones - and they could vary depending on your age, your sex, the time of the day, the time of the month, the time of your life, your gender, your immune system (we probably could have been thinking a little bit more about immune systems in 2020.) And we've got signals coming in from our gut (and people are getting really excited about these gut brain interactions and the microbiome within the gut.) Again, more data, more signals are being received from the brain; the food we're eating, how we're moving our bodies around through the world, even how we use our muscles- our muscle strength and muscle integrity - is related to cognitive fitness, how we are sleeping our body. So, the brain is saving all of these signals from the bottom-up super complex.

It's also moving through the world and receiving all kinds of signals and information and data from the outside and the people that we're surrounded with - our immediate families, our extended social support networks, who can we see and who can't we see right now, who's far away and who have we been interacting with.

It also collects and has data on what are our relationships and even our early lives; what were these social signals we were receiving from early childhood; the external, stressful events we’ve experienced (like a car horn tooting that might give you a fright versus this kind of existential threat that we have at the moment from this pandemic.) It collects and also has records of the education we’ve received and our movements and interactions with the natural world. So, we've got a lot of Outside-In data coming in through our nervous system, through our eyes, through our retina which is just an extension of the brain into our ears and the sounds we hear, the food that we take into our bodies, what we touch, what we feel and what we sense. It's a lot of data from the outside world coming in.

And then our brain itself (this is a bit of a harder kind of slippery bowl to hold on to) is also receiving data and input from itself from a Top-Down fashion. Our thoughts and our feelings are cycling between different networks; our mindsets, our beliefs. We can always put a thought or a feeling or a belief like right here in the middle and go, “what influenced that thought from the Bottom-Up, from the Outside-In, from the Top-Down?” “Why did the brain predict this emotional response in this situation based on the signals from our body? What we were feeling inside our body and that the situation we are in and our top-down perhaps experiences or memories of that.

So just to give you some examples of how I use this model and how you might use it in a way that might give you a brain and a neuroscience framework to think about really complex ideas.

So, let's put something in the middle like depression.

What makes depression? What causes depression?

Now, depression comes in many shades of blue. Why might someone fall somewhere in the middle of one of those shades of blue? What were the signals from the Bottom-Up body that you're genetically predisposed to? Is it a particular hormonal issue? Is it from the withdrawal of the good hormones from pregnancy in those early weeks of motherhood? Is it because of some immune reaction going on in your body? Is it because of your lifestyle -not eating the right food, not having enough sleep and exercise?

So, these signals could be contributing to depression.

And for the Outside-In: has some external, stressful event triggered something? Have you lost someone/something important to you – like a job or a friend? Have you been separated from someone you love? Are you going through a Divorce?

Then we have this Top-Down, disordered thinking. Perhaps we need a cognitive behavioral approach to readjust a response to an emotion.

So, we can put something like depression in the middle of this model. Think about it in a neuroscience context and then break down all of these various interacting factors.

We can do the same with something like insomnia. Perhaps you need a Bottom-up, Outside-in, then Top-Down approach. You may need to work on your daily exercise, you may need to check on the light-dark cycle from the outside and perhaps reassess some of your attitudes to waking up at night. We could also look at ways to buffer an external stressful event by ensuring that we have enough sleep by connecting socially and by thinking about a previous time or a memory we've had in where we were able to manage stress.

So, as I've said, neuroscience is an incredibly complex space. There are some people who are doing some really good work and we need to of approach this wisely- not getting seduced by complex ideas trying to oversimplify them and perhaps learning from people who are filling the gaps with what we call “seductive neuromyths”.

My work within the space is my life's work and I'd like to challenge and encourage you not to be swept away on a wave of neuroscience excitement, but to approach it in a thoughtful manner because we really should be doing the science and the scientists justice.