{"id":6353,"date":"2013-11-26T21:21:14","date_gmt":"2013-11-27T05:21:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/?p=6353"},"modified":"2013-11-26T21:21:14","modified_gmt":"2013-11-27T05:21:14","slug":"more-commentary-on-why-neurobiology-is-a-very-soft-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/2013\/11\/more-commentary-on-why-neurobiology-is-a-very-soft-science\/","title":{"rendered":"More commentary on why neurobiology is a very soft science&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote>\n<p>More commentary on why neurobiology is a very soft science (high dimentionality matrix\/nonlinear responses).<\/p>\n<p>From The Black Swan (2007), less aggressive statement (it looks that mathematics leds me to get more aggressive in debunking):<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;For an example that justifies skepticism about unconditional reliance on neurobiology, and vindicates the ideas of the empirical school of medicine to which Sextus belonged, let\u2019s consider the intelligence of birds. I kept reading in various texts that the cortex is where animals do their \u201cthinking,\u201d and that the creatures with the largest cortex have the highest intelligence\u2014we humans have the largest cortex, followed by bank executives, dolphins, and our cousins the apes.<\/p>\n<p>Well, it turns out that some birds, such as parrots, have a high level of intelligence, equivalent to that of dolphins, but that the intelligence of birds correlates with the size of another part of the brain, called the hyperstriatum.<\/p>\n<p>So neurobiology with its attribute of \u201chard science\u201d can sometimes (though not always) fool you<\/p>\n<p>into a Platonified, reductive statement. I am amazed that the \u201cempirics,\u201d skeptical about links between anatomy and function, had such insight\u2014 no wonder their school played a very small part in intellectual history. As a skeptical empiricist I prefer the experiments of empirical psychology to the theories-based MRI scans of neurobiologists, even if the former appear less \u201cscientific\u201d to the public.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>via <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/permalink.php?story_fbid=10151865739058375&amp;id=13012333374\">More commentary on why neurobiology is a very&#8230; &#8211; Nassim Nicholas Taleb<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>More commentary on why neurobiology is a very soft science (high dimentionality matrix\/nonlinear responses). From The Black Swan (2007), less aggressive statement (it looks that mathematics leds me to get more aggressive in debunking): &#8220;For an example that justifies skepticism about unconditional reliance on neurobiology, and vindicates the ideas of the empirical school of medicine [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[145],"tags":[770],"class_list":["post-6353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-facebook","tag-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6353"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6353\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6355,"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6353\/revisions\/6355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}