3:19am June 2, 2014

“
The point is that the fact that something is physical doesn’t stop it being also psychological. Because psychology happens in the brain. Suppose you see a massive bear roaring and charging towards you, and as a result, you feel scared. The fear has a physical basis, and plenty of physical correlates like raised blood pressure, adrenaline release, etc.

But if someone asks “Why are you scared?”, you would answer “Because there’s a bear about to eat us”, and you’d be right. Someone who came along and said, no, your anxiety is purely physical - I can measure all these physiological differences between you and a normal person - would be an idiot (and eaten).
”

—

-Neuroskeptic

http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.com/2010/10/brain-scans-prove-that-brain-does-stuff.html

Remember that infographic circulating around Tumblr that shows brain scans of people with ADHD and various mental illnesses, captioned “this is physical, not just all in your head?” Yeah, this is why it’s BS.

(I do think ADHD and mental illnesses are out of a person’s control and people with these conditions should be accepted. I just don’t believe in using neurotrash to support that idea. Part of that is I’m compulsively scrupulous about truth and logic. But, if you’re more pragmatic than me, not using neurogarbage will prevent your argument from being shot down by bigoted people who happen to know something about neuroscience).

(via neurodiversitysci)

It doesn’t help that I have met one of the guys really into doing neuroimaging to support ADHD, drug addiction, and other things as having an effect on the brain. And not only is his science bullshit, he’s a quack besides. He told an autistic friend of mine, based only on a brain scan, that he was a long-time drug abuser. The guy had never touched anything as strong even as caffeine. The doctor never noticed he was autistic. In my case he did find some stuff (because it turned out that one of the very few legit uses of the brain scan he did was to pick up the kind of epilepsy I have) but he blamed it all on a brain injury that never actually happened. He also missed any drugs I’d ever abused, go figure. He has a really bad reputation among parents as far as being a diagnostician, but he’s made quite a name for himself selling books, and selling his brain scans to people who want to prove that this-and-that is neurological in origin or has neurological effects.

Again, I’m not saying ADHD or anything else isn’t real, I just know a quack when I see one.

Notes: