The clearest evidence that neuromarketing is not such a game changer is that all the key techniques used to package and sell the book itself predate any insights that the brain sciences may have brought. If even David Lewis has to rely on the same old methods tried and tested by people who wouldn’t know a synapse from a neuron, then neuromarketing may indeed be new and improved, but not quite as much as we are led to believe.
ReadOver-generalising is a basic human need. Little wonder then that we are quick to apply “always”, even to ourselves – whom we imagine to be more consistent and coherent than most of us actually are.
ReadThe chef Richard McGeown has faced bigger culinary challenges in his distinguished career than frying a meat patty in a little sunflower oil and butter. But this time the eyes and cameras of hundreds of journalists in the room were fixed on the 5oz (140g) pink disc sizzling in his pan, one that had been five years and €250,000 in the making. This was the world’s first proper portion of cultured meat, a beef burger created by Mark Post, professor of physiology, and his team at Maastricht University in the Netherlands…
ReadTrue self-knowledge demands neither complete trust of our introspective judgments nor deference to the calculations of the spreadsheet, but a combination of the insights of both.
ReadWe seem to have bought into a computational, ledger-based model of health which breaks everything down into its constituent parts and counts what goes in and out. Look at the reports I’ve highlighted and the key concepts are “BMI”, “calories” and “units of alcohol”, all things that can be measured and then used to create rulers with which to measure us. Our bodies, however, are more complicated than that. They are systems in which all the different elements work together. As soon as you try to isolate one, you lose the bigger picture and can easily be led astray.
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