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Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience By Satel Sally. & Lilienfeld Scott O.. Basic Books. 2013.US$26.99 (hb). 154 pp. ISBN: 9780465018772
With this impressive book, Satel & Lilienfeld (practising clinicians in psychiatry and psychology respectively) have achieved a timely and balanced work on the limits of contemporary neuroscience. Brainwashed is an exposé of ‘mindless neuroscience: the over-simplification, interpretive license, and premature application of brain science in the legal, commercial, clinical and philosophical domains’, and a damning critique of our now dominant assumption that a biological/neural explanation is the best way to understand human behaviour.
The authors acknowledge neuroscience as a hugely important and influential field but...