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1. 00:02 Recently, I posted a video about ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity
2. 00:08 disorder, in which I suggested based on literature that we are overdiagnosing
3. 00:15 ADHD, that it is not a clear clinical entity, that there are no biological biomarkers,
4. 00:23 and that the treatments we have are fuzzy at best.
5. 00:29 Immediately I was inundated with reactions by laymen.
6. 00:35 Of course, everyone in his dog is an expert nowadays because they have access to artificial intelligence and most of
7. 00:42 the reactions and comments I received were AI slop people using words and
8. 00:48 phrases they couldn’t define if their lives depended on it. But the problem is goes deeper. The gist of the arguments these people were making was that ADHD is a brain abnormality grounded in some genetic
9. 01:06 malfunction genes that express themselves when they shouldn’t or mutations maybe some
10. 01:13 biochemical pathways dopamineergic gun or eye etc etc and today I would like to
11. 01:20 delve deeper into the ostensible neuroscience
12. 01:26 of ADHD and more generally the role of neuroscience in modern psychology. Now
13. 01:34 those of you who have been unfortunate enough to follow me know that I consider psychology modern psychology uh
14. 01:42 pseudocience. I’ve dedicated many many videos to this topic and I’ve explained
15. 01:48 time and again why psychology in principle can never ever become a
16. 01:55 science. And it doesn’t matter how much statistics psychologists use, if they
17. 02:01 dress in white lab codes, if they claim to be an integral part of medicine.
18. 02:09 All these pretensions to science do not convert psychology into a
19. 02:16 science. Now there’s a problem with neuroscience when it is coupled with psychology. When
20. 02:22 you put together neuroscience as the fundamental foundation of psychological
21. 02:28 disorders, what you get is again a pure a pseudocience even on some in some
22. 02:34 cases a scam. My name is Sam Baknin. and the author of malignance self-love, narcissism
23. 02:41 revisited and a professor of psychology. Let’s start with a basic observation.
24. 02:49 Science, real science, cannot ever legitimize pseudocience. science, real science, exact,
25. 03:01 measurable, observable science can never ever convert a pseudo science into a
26. 03:10 science. Let me give you an example. If you put together astronomy, which is a
27. 03:16 science, with astrology, which is a pseudocience, it doesn’t render astrology more
28. 03:23 scientific. It doesn’t make astrology a science. Similarly, when you put
29. 03:29 together neuroscience which in some parts is a science and psychology which
30. 03:37 in no part is a science. It doesn’t render psychology a science.
31. 03:43 Psychology is reliably descriptive, observational
32. 03:49 and rigorous sometimes, but science it is not. Literature is observational. Literature is descriptive. And
33. 04:00 literature is often rigorous. Yet, it doesn’t make it a science.
34. 04:06 Let’s go let’s go back to neuroscience. Neuroscience is a study of the brain and to some extent the central nervous system.
35. 04:17 Here’s the first issue with neuroscience. Nonreplicability. nonreproduc reproducibility. The replication crisis.
36. 04:28 What is a replication crisis? It’s the fact that the vast majority of studies
37. 04:34 in neuroscience cannot be repeated, cannot be reproduced, cannot be
38. 04:40 replicated. End of story. They are one-offs. The And the reason is that neuroscience
39. 04:47 deals with human beings and and human beings are mutable. They keep changing all the time. Even the same human beings
40. 04:54 keep changing from one minute to the next. That’s not a very solid foundation.
41. 05:01 Neuroscience suffer from a replication crisis the same way psychology does. And in a minute I’ll make a distinction between valid solid neuroscience
42. 05:13 and the fake neuroscience or the the fluid neuroscience that accompanies psychology. The the kind of neuroscience
43. 05:24 that attempts to explain or account for psychological disorders. It’s a neuroscience which is neuroscience not
44. 05:33 neuroscience. But go back to neuroscience by itself.
45. 05:39 Fact number one, it cannot be reproduced. Majority of the studies cannot be reproduced. This is known as a
46. 05:45 replication crisis. Problem number two, the statistical power of neuroscience
47. 05:51 studies is shockingly low. Even even when neuroscience uses
48. 06:02 objective instruments such as magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI, functional
49. 06:08 magnetic resonance imaging and others. Even then the statistical power this the
50. 06:15 significance the and other statistical measures of the research is very low.
51. 06:23 So fMRI research um is anywhere between 0.08 and 0.31.
52. 06:32 Studies of event related potentials is 0.72 and 0 between 072 and 098 for large
53. 06:41 effect sizes. The only place where neuroscience is clearly valid.
54. 06:47 But it is 035 to 073 for medium effects already beginning to be a bit iffy and
55. 06:54 010 to 018 for small effects where neuroscience has nothing meaningful to say. There’s a study published in nature
56. 07:02 by psychologist Katherine Button and her colleagues and they conducted um a kind of metaanalysis of 49 major studies in neuroscience. The median statistical
57. 07:13 power of these mega studies in neuroscience was 21%.
58. 07:22 For you to understand, it’s the same median statistical power that we discover in economic studies, studies in economics where the statistical median power is 18%. John is a meta scientist. he and his
59. 07:38 colleagues computed an estimate of average power for for economic in economics and they came up with 18%
60. 07:45 based on 6,700 studies. So neuroscience
61. 07:53 studies cannot be replicated in almost 80% of the cases cannot be replicated.
62. 08:00 Their statistical power in the vast majority of cases is very low equal to
63. 08:06 the statistical power of studies in economics which are notorious for being meaningless
64. 08:12 and they are widespread failures time and again when we attempt to improve
65. 08:19 this situation when we attempt to replicate studies in neuroscience or and every single study that comes out adds
66. 08:28 to the problem. Now don’t get me wrong. I did make clear that there was a part
67. 08:34 of neuroscience, there was a territory of neuroscience which is solid, which is validated and which tells us and teaches
68. 08:41 us a lot about the functioning of the human brain. That is the neuroscience that deals with processes, traits and functions. the neuroscience of memory,
69. 08:52 of cognition, of language processing, of emotions, the building blocks, the neuroscience of the building blocks of what we call uh consciousness.
70. 09:03 But neuroscience is an abysmal failure when it comes to complex constructs,
71. 09:10 complex psychological constructs and not psychological constructs are more complex than psychological disorders. where neuroscience has zero,
72. 09:22 zero, nothing to tell us, should not be relied on. Period. Statistical power of
73. 09:29 studies linking alleged neuroscience with psychological disorders is so low
74. 09:36 that it’s be it’s below randomness. That’s how bad it is. And none of these studies can be replicated.
75. 09:43 The problem maybe is not so much with neuroscience. Maybe the problem is with psychology. In clinical psychology, we have diagnosis. But these diagnosis are not clinical
76. 09:55 entities. Let me explain what is a clinical entity. When you have malaria, when you
77. 10:01 have tuberculosis, when you have cancer, in Russia, in China, in Israel, in in
78. 10:10 Ghana, in South America, and in Antarctica, when you have these
79. 10:16 diseases, they’re all identical. They are 95%
80. 10:22 identical. The fact that a disease, a medical
81. 10:28 condition is identical across time, across space, across cultures, across
82. 10:34 societies, render it aminable to treatment. We know
83. 10:40 that a medicine chemotherapy for cancer would work the same way in all these countries, in all these places, in all
84. 10:47 these periods. And this is what a clinical entity is. It is something that is not dependent on
85. 10:56 context, not dependent on period in history, not dependent on values,
86. 11:03 beliefs, religion, cultures, societies and so on. Not dependent and cannot be
87. 11:10 altered by changing these parameters. If we transition someone from Morocco to
88. 11:17 France, the the clinical entity would remain the same.
89. 11:24 So in psychology, this is not the situation. We actually do not have clinical entities. Take for example something I am an expert on, narcissistic personality disorder.
90. 11:37 In the international classification of diseases which is a diagnostic manual used by 80% of humanity there is not
91. 11:44 narcissistic personality disorder at all. Theodo Milan who was one of the giants
92. 11:51 in in the field of psychology has written and suggested that narcissistic personality disorder is an American
93. 11:58 phenomenon culturebound. In other words, that it is that emanates from it is
94. 12:04 derived from a highly specific idiosyncratic culture and society. It’s
95. 12:10 not a real thing. It’s not a clinical entity. Narcissistic personality disorder is not like malaria or
96. 12:17 tuberculosis or cancer or a stroke. It’s not
97. 12:23 because when you study different people from different societies and different cultures, when you talk to clinicians
98. 12:30 who are using a different diagnostic manual, there’s no narcissistic personality disorder. Suddenly,
99. 12:36 even if we were to assemble in the same room 10 clinicians who accept
100. 12:43 the idea that narcissistic personality disorder is a real disease, a real
101. 12:49 problem, mental health issue. In other words, if we were able to put together
102. 12:55 clinicians in the same room who accept that narcissistic personality disorder may be a clinical entity, they would
103. 13:02 vehemently disagree as to the clinical features, the characteristics and the dynamics of
104. 13:10 narcissistic personality disorder. Even within the fifth edition text revision
105. 13:16 of the diagnostic and statistical manual, there is a huge discrepancy
106. 13:23 between the nine diagnostic criteria of narcissistic personality disorder and
107. 13:29 the alternative model of narcissistic personality disorder both in the same book. So clearly narcissistic personality disorder may be a construct, maybe an
108. 13:41 idea, maybe a framework, maybe a narrative, a clinical entity, it is not.
109. 13:49 And when the clinical entities in psychology are so illdefined, illdemarcated,
110. 13:56 when they are not um universally applicable, when they don’t have an
111. 14:02 invariable objective nature that is non-contextual, doesn’t depend on
112. 14:08 context. When this is a situation with psychology, what is the meaning when we say the neuroscience of ADHD or the neuroscience of NPD?
113. 14:21 We can’t agree in the profession within the profession. There is no agreement if narcissistic personality disorder even exists.
114. 14:32 So what does it mean when we say this is a brain of a narcissist? When even the clinicians and the scholars and the theoreticians and the psychiatrists and the psychologists and the authors of the
115. 14:43 diagnostic manual disagree ferociously and fundamentally about the very existence of narcissism, pathological narcissism. Come on, it’s not serious. Another problem with uh with
116. 14:59 neuroscience is the following. I’ve been reading every neuroscience
117. 15:06 article ever published on cluster B personality disorders. I’ve been hunting these articles down, these studies. I
118. 15:13 have a folder with well over 1,337 studies conducted on cluster B
119. 15:20 personality disorders. Majority of these studies pertain to psychopathy and borderline, but there’s a small number which deal with narcissistic personality disorders starting in about 2006. And when I look at these at these
120. 15:36 studies, so-called studies, these articles, it’s humiliatingly shameful.
121. 15:44 Start with the sampling. The samples used in these studies are highly
122. 15:50 nonrepresentative. First of all, most of the samples are self- selecting volunteers or students.
123. 15:59 The samples are tiny. I mean, shockingly tiny. There are many studies with three people. Seven people. One of the biggest studies we know of
124. 16:10 has 30 people. Three zero. I’m kidding you not. These are tiny simple samples
125. 16:16 that cannot ever be statistically validated. They’re meaningless. They are
126. 16:22 almost random. It’s it’s meaningless to study three people. It’s not a study.
127. 16:28 It’s a case study. It’s an anecdote. And the majority of the of the studies
128. 16:34 in my folder are like that. I’m hardressed to find anything with more than 20 participants.
129. 16:41 And there is a high variability in these studies because brains are highly
130. 16:47 unique. Brains have a hardware a wet wear element which is more or less uniform.
131. 16:55 But what is happening in this hardware is highly unique influenced by personal
132. 17:01 autobiography, memories, core identity, psychological processes and dynamics and so on so
133. 17:07 forth. No two brains are alike. End of story. Yes, you can map the anatomy of the brain, but do not confuse the anatomy of the brain with the contents of the
134. 17:18 brain. Not two human beings have the same brain. None, not one. Anyone who
135. 17:24 claims otherwise knows very little about the brain. And this is why we have psychology as we realize that people are
136. 17:32 different to each other and the thing and that things could go wrong. So when neuroscience
137. 17:38 claims that brains are uniform and homogeneous, that is completely counterfactual. The variability is so
138. 17:45 enormous that anything you say has extremely limited validity to the point of vanishing. If you look at my folder or any random
139. 17:58 selection of neuroscience studies of the last shall we say 20 years, the
140. 18:04 overwhelming vast majority of these studies are nonrandomized.
141. 18:10 These are not clinical trials. The golden standard in science is what we
142. 18:16 call randomized clinical trials. It involves a complicated procedure for
143. 18:23 making sure that what you think you’re learning from the study is actually true. that the conclusions and outcomes of the study can not be disputed or
144. 18:36 cannot be challenged because they have been insulated from confounding factors,
145. 18:43 outside influences, the biases of the experiment, the biases of the participants and so on so forth. This is
146. 18:51 a randomized clinical trial and it’s a golden standard because these trials yield the truth in a majority of cases unless they are seriously badly
147. 19:02 methodologically designed. I am hardpressed to find 10 10 randomized trials in my folder of
148. 19:15 1,37 37 studies in neuroscience.
149. 19:21 I could find only 10 such studies. The majority of these studies, so-called
150. 19:28 studies are non-randomized. Sample selection is biased. The samples
151. 19:34 are tiny. The variability is enormous. The control groups are shoddy or
152. 19:41 shockingly in 60% non-existent. And these studies, neuroscience studies
153. 19:48 are not longitudinal. In other words, they don’t follow an individual through the lifespan. They
154. 19:57 don’t for example study the individual as a newborn and then compare this the brain of that individual as a newborn to
155. 20:04 the brain of that individual as an adult. They don’t even follow people for five
156. 20:10 years or 10 years to see what’s happening to the brain whether the impacts isolated
157. 20:16 uh persist for example in medication given medication do the effects of the medication persist over 5 years 10 years
158. 20:24 nada majority of these studies and when I say majority is like 90% of these studies
159. 20:32 are pinpoint studies pointed studies they are not longitudinal They don’t revisit the same test subjects, the same participants over a prolonged
160. 20:44 period of time to isolate time dependent and context dependent uh impacts and
161. 20:51 effects and developments and processes and dynamics. Now, point point studies, studies that
162. 21:00 do not follow the participants, do not follow the test subjects over a long period of time. They’re like snapshots.
163. 21:07 Whereas longitudinal studies are like video. Where do you have more
164. 21:13 information? Where is information more reliable? In a snapshot or in a video? Where are you more liable to be manipulated? In a snapshot? With a snapshot or with a video? With a
165. 21:24 snapshot, of course. These studies suffer from other major flaws. For example,
166. 21:36 uh again the majority of these studies ignore confounding factors
167. 21:42 and in the case of psychological disorders, coorbidities. For example, I’ve isolated 26 studies
168. 21:50 that purported claimed to find a brain correlate to
169. 21:56 narcissistic personality disorder. Now, ignore for a minute the fact that no one agrees on what is narcissistic
170. 22:02 personality disorder. And there is a huge disagreement whether there is such a thing as narcissistic personality
171. 22:08 disorder. Ignore this for a minute. Let’s assume the construct is valid which it is not by the way but let’s
172. 22:14 assume for discussion sake and then you come and say as a neuroscientist yeah I
173. 22:20 isolated uh people with narcissistic personality disorder and I studied their
174. 22:27 brains using fMRI and other techniques and I discovered XYZ I discover you know
175. 22:33 problems with white matter with amydala with with hippocmpus and so on so forth
176. 22:39 Let’s assume it’s a very problematic statement
177. 22:45 because most of these people are comorbid. They have other mental
178. 22:52 health issues. For example, we know that depression, depressive illnesses and anxiety disorders are very very very common
179. 23:03 among people with narcissistic personality disorder as well as substance use disorder. Alcoholism for
180. 23:10 example or coke addiction. They’re very common. We also know that about 40 to
181. 23:17 60% depending on the study of people with narcissistic personality disorder have co-orbidities. In other words, they
182. 23:23 are also diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, you name it. And
183. 23:31 so these 26 studies, the average number of participants was 17, by the way.
184. 23:38 Shocking, tiny sample couldn’t be validated for for the life of me.
185. 23:44 statistically insignificant by definition. Although anything above eight theoretically theoretically can
186. 23:50 yield statistical significance, 17 is not serious. Okay. These studies link a
187. 23:58 dubious, debatable, arguable diagnosis of psychological disorder,
188. 24:05 narcissistic personality disorder with changes in the brain.
189. 24:11 And at the same time, these studies ignore the fact that most of these
190. 24:17 narcissists are also borderline also psychopaths, also have mood disorders,
191. 24:24 also have anxiety disorders, also abuse substances, and the list goes on. Many of them are paranoid, and the list goes on and on and on. Coorobidities are rife in cluster B personality disord.
192. 24:38 There are even a few of these studies who have erroneously conflated dark
193. 24:44 personalities with narcissists. Dark personalities, dark triad personalities and dark tetr personalities are not narcissists. They involve subclinical narcissism. But these people cannot be diagnosed with
194. 25:00 narcissistic personality disorder. And yet in several of these studies, seven if you want to know the number, they confused people with narcissistic personality disorder and people with dark personalities. A rookie mistake.
195. 25:19 All these studies, all these studies in neuroscience and the neuroscience of psychological
196. 25:25 disorders have serious philosophical problems. Start with the problem of
197. 25:31 causation versus correlation. Even if we were to agree, which I do not
198. 25:37 agree, that there is a high level of correlation, which there isn’t. I read to you the numbers. There is no high
199. 25:43 correlation between brain abnormalities and any psychological disorder. End of
200. 25:49 story. That’s a fact. But even if there were such a correlation, it doesn’t prove causation. These two should not be confused. And there’s also the issue of reverse causation. If you are a narcissist,
201. 26:05 did your brain change because you are a narcissist or are you a narcissist because you were born with a defective
202. 26:12 abnormal brain? We have no way of knowing precisely because we don’t have longitudinal studies. The samples are
203. 26:19 tiny and they are tainted with coorbidities. So the error of causation in
204. 26:26 neuroscience is very murky. And neuroscientists who go on television and
205. 26:32 the internet and YouTube channels and say the an abnormal brain causes narcissistic personality disorder are charlatans with and without academic degrees. Of course an academic degree is
206. 26:45 no guarantee of integrity. And today the drive to be a celebrity to garner your
207. 26:51 15 minutes of fame is irresistible.
208. 26:58 Go. Let’s now transition back to psychology. Psychology as I said can never be a
209. 27:05 science. And when you couple something that can never be a science with something that maybe one day will be a
210. 27:11 science like neuroscience, it doesn’t lend credence and credibility to either of them. When you put neuroscience and psychology together, both of them suffer.
211. 27:23 Neuroscience becomes associated with the pseudocience and the pseudocience does not acquire respect respectability and
212. 27:31 reliability by being associated with a nesscent science science in in its very
213. 27:37 beginnings. Psychology cannot be a science for various reasons but I will focus on four out of many. Again, if the
214. 27:45 topic interests you, you can um search my channel, the playlist, and you will
215. 27:51 find many videos I’ve made about the philosophical foundations of psychology and why it can never be a science. But
216. 27:57 let’s focus on four of them. Number one, ethical, the ethical problem. To substantiate any theory and any psychological construct, experiments
217. 28:09 have to be conducted on patients or clients or participants or subjects to
218. 28:15 achieve the necessary results or reliable results. The subjects must be
219. 28:21 ignorant of the fact that they are being experimented upon. This is known as double blind experiments.
220. 28:28 The subjects must remain in the dark regarding what the experiments want experimenters want to achieve. Some
221. 28:35 experiments may involve unpleasant or even traumatizing experiences. Some experiments have to be conducted on newborns and infants and toddlers and babies. All of this is ethically
222. 28:47 unacceptable. So all of this is excluded basically in definitely in the modern
223. 28:53 practice of psychology. Number two is the psychological uncertainty principle. The current
224. 29:00 position of a human subject can be fully known but both treatment
225. 29:07 life exper I mean treatment life experiences the experiment itself
226. 29:14 the influence the subject. So if we were to te if I were to test you right now, I could create a map of
227. 29:21 who you are, your brain, your emotions, your cognitions, relying on
228. 29:27 self-reporting by the way, but what can I do? But I can create some kind of map. And this map would capture you at this
229. 29:33 very second that I’m measuring you and testing you and observing you. But then
230. 29:39 life goes on. A thought crosses your mind. You are having a cognition. An emotion erupts.
231. 29:46 You see something out the window. Life goes on. You accumulate experiences, even micro experiences. You know that you’re subject to an experiment. And this changes your
232. 29:58 attitude, your motivation, your emotions, your feelings, your cognitions, you name it. And
233. 30:05 this means that you are never the same person from one minute to the next.
234. 30:12 So if I were to if I were to reduce you to a highly detailed description right
235. 30:19 now, this description would no longer be valid a minute from now.
236. 30:25 Yes, there will be many things in common, but there will be many other things not in common.
237. 30:32 Differences. We change. We mutate all the time. We are mutable as human beings. And so
238. 30:39 there’s no way to capture the same human being time and again in order to
239. 30:45 replicate the experiment or to continue it with this under the same identical constraints. The very process of
240. 30:52 measurement and observation influence the subject change the subject. Life
241. 30:58 itself influences the subject changes the subjects. Thoughts, emotions
242. 31:05 influence the subject. Change the subject and so from one second to the next next it’s not the same subject.
243. 31:13 Problem number four in psychology uniqueness. Psychological experiments
244. 31:19 are bound to be unique because of the aforementioned problem. They cannot be repeated, reproduced, replicated elsewhere. And at other times, even when
245. 31:30 they involved the same the very same subjects, even if you were to isolate people,
246. 31:38 isolate them in a padded cell and experiment on them repeatedly, you would still get results that cannot be replicated because these people change.
247. 31:49 And they change not only because of external stimuli. They change also because of internal processes and dynamics over which the experimental has no control.
248. 32:00 Subjects are never really the same due to the above mentioned psychological uncertainty principle. Repeating the experiments with other subjects adversely affects the scientific value
249. 32:12 and validity of the results of course. And finally, there is a problem known as
250. 32:18 the undergeneration of testable hypothesis. Psychology does not generate a sufficient number of hypothesis,
251. 32:25 predictions which can be subjected to scientific testing and falsification.
252. 32:31 And this has to do with a fabulous storytelling nature of psychology. In a way, psychology has an affinity with some private languages. It is a form of art and as such, it is self-sufficient.
253. 32:44 It is not referential. It is self-referential. If structural
254. 32:51 when it is structured, when it relies on constructs and so on, internal constraints and requirements are met.
255. 32:59 It’s a statement that is deemed true even if it does not satisfy external scientific requirements. So psych
256. 33:07 psychological theories are internally consistent even when they are inconsistent with reality.
257. 33:16 So here we have the picture a flawed pseudocience psychology teaming up with
258. 33:23 a nesscent largely ignorant wannabe would be science neuroscience
259. 33:30 and both of them in a shared fantasy of mutual admiration augment each other.
260. 33:36 The neuroscientists provide an alleged neurobiological template for psychological disorders that no one can agree if if they even exist. And these alleged brain abnormalities and templates are so poor in sub are so so
261. 33:54 poorly substantiated, methodologically flawed, laughable, reasonable studies
262. 34:00 that can never be repeated or replicated with tiny samples and so on so forth. No controls, no double blinds,
263. 34:07 non-randomized trials and so on so forth. It’s not serious, it’s and when I
264. 34:14 say not serious, I’m being uncharacteristically charitable.
265. 34:20 The word scam comes to mind because many people make a lot of money from neuroscience and from psychology.
266. 34:27 One last thing, many concepts in neuroscience contradict
267. 34:33 each other. They’re mutually exclusive. For example, if you were to accept
268. 34:39 neuroplasticity, if you were to accept that the brain is reactive, rewires itself, changes itself all the time,
269. 34:47 then neuroscience is impossible. Think about it for a minute. You’re studying the brain. If the brain does not remain fixed, a fixed entity that
270. 34:58 can be isolated, studied under the real or proverbial microscope, then if the subject you are
271. 35:06 studying, this this blob of material of
272. 35:12 matter that you’re studying keeps changing all the time, keeps rewiring itself, then you can’t have a science. Neuroplasticity undermines neuroscience
273. 35:23 and that’s only one example and numerous other ideas in neuroscience which completely destroy the very possibility of a neuroscience. I think
274. 35:34 personally this is the outcome of of profound ignorance when it comes to the
275. 35:40 brain. We haven’t scratched the surface even we are discovering whole giant systems subsystems in the brain
276. 35:47 every year literally which we we did not know ex existed. So we don’t know
277. 35:53 anything this hubris and arrogance and and grandiosity of neuroscientists put them aside they don’t know anything yet. I do believe however that neuroscience
278. 36:04 can make an amazingly important contribution and ground elements in psychology in the brain. So
279. 36:12 I mentioned memory, cognition, these things can be traced back to activities
280. 36:20 in the brain, to pathways in the brain, to multi-unit activation in the brain,
281. 36:27 to clusters and populations of neurons in the brain, to or um parts of the
282. 36:33 brain, so regions of the brain. So yes, I believe that the basic building blocks
283. 36:39 of psychology can be somehow tied to the brain. I believe this would be a major contribution of neuroscience. And I do believe that in a 100 years, 200 years,
284. 36:50 neuroscience would be a major science. Neuroscience has a future as a science.
285. 36:56 Psychology doesn’t. neuroscience would do well to limit itself to what wouldn’t WDT
286. 37:07 the pioneer of psychological laboratory work the pioneer of psychological testing and experimentation has suggested he said wound said in the late
287. 37:19 19th century he said we should study only the building blocks only memory only cognition that’s what we should study W divorced himself from the emerging
288. 37:32 fields of psychoanalysis and so on so forth because he thought these were quackery. He thought these were scams.
289. 37:40 He thought this could never ever be a science. And I’m afraid he was right. And
290. 37:47 neuroscientists would do well to take this advice to heart because they are beginning to compromise themselves with
291. 37:54 a lot of nonsense and boulder dash. And they are beginning to look as
292. 38:00 non-serious as astrologers when they discuss astronomy.
293. 38:11 Psychology is full of fads and fashions. This is something that neuroscientists
294. 38:19 should bear in mind. Remember refrigerator mothers who allegedly
295. 38:27 raised autistic children? Autism was traced back to cold withholding detached
296. 38:34 mothers. Remember schizophrenia which was attributed to bad parenting
297. 38:40 and child rearing. Remember depression which was thought of as a form of aggression and remember of course
298. 38:47 homosexuality which until 1973 was considered a mental illness and appeared
299. 38:53 in the diagnostic and statistical manual. Passing fads, passing fashions
300. 39:00 psychology changes with the times changes with the prevailing cultures and society societal mores and conventions
301. 39:08 and norms and scripts and narratives. That’s not a good sign. That is not how
302. 39:14 science works. And for those of you who have raised the issue of ADHD,
303. 39:21 there is disagreement between the definition and class classification and
304. 39:28 division of ADHD. In the 11th edition of the International Classification of
305. 39:34 Diseases and the way ADHD is described in the DSM,
306. 39:40 the ICD makes it very clear that there is no way to diagnose ADHD reliably,
307. 39:47 which is coming to think of it a pretty shocking statement. The ICD says there’s
308. 39:53 no scale that can be used, no test that can be used to diagnose ADHD.
309. 39:59 I’m asking you how serious is all this? How serious can all this be? And why
310. 40:06 would serious neuroscientists who are engaged in the construction bottom up of
311. 40:13 a new science? Why would they ally themselves with a pseudocience like psychology thereby tarnishing the prospects of their own discipline? I
312. 40:24 have no idea. Perhaps we need a psychologist here. It sounds very self-destructive.