Shortly after posting the piece below, I found more links and discovered that actual neuroscientists checked Martin Lindstrom’s actual data and have pretty much universally panned it.
Scientific discourse, which used to be confined largely to peer-reviewed print journals and annual conferences, now takes place at a remarkable pace online, and it’s fantastic to see social media used in this way. The hope is that as these technologies develop further and scientists take on a more active role in communicating with the public (something that platforms like Twitter and Google+ seem to be facilitating amazingly well), it’ll become increasingly difficult for people like Lindstrom to make crazy pseudoscientific claims without being immediately and visibly called out on it–even in those rare cases when the NYT makes the mistake of leaving one the biggest microphones on earth open and unmonitored.
On the one hand, it was fun to imagine that level of cognitive connection to something our tools. On the other hand, exhilarating that falsehoods can be addressed so quickly. Although not, it seems, fast enough to correct the misconceptions gained by reading the article.
