The Business of Neurobabble and the Neurobabble of Business
Neurobabble and the neuroscientific framing of our professional and personal experience continues to proliferate. It’s as if we think we have to go to neuroscientists, bowl and spoon in hand, perhaps even on our bloody knees, and ask (in the manner of Oliver Twist), “Please sir—is it okay for me to learn and evolve?”
We used to refer to learning as—learning, of all things. No longer. In order to legitimize ourselves, we use phrases like, “Self-directed neuroplasticity,” and perhaps offer tactical, technological, or even psychedelic solutions to go with it. Apparently all of this sounds much more advanced (and often easier and seemingly more exciting) than mere “learning”.
Moreover, neurobabble terms come already primed for various forms of fragmentation, self-deception, and spiritual materialism. That priming is good news for the patterns of insanity at work in our world, and bad news for us and all the beings we share the world with, as our home.
Why offer leadership training when you can offer neuroleadership training (into which we can mix psychedelics as well)? Why offer to teach people how to become truly wise leaders when you can teach them “the neuroscience of leadership” instead? Why teach compassion when empathy, “emotional regulation,” and “executive presence” will suffice?
Let’s keep in mind that, if I put a brain scan image in this essay, you might find it more believable. Does that seem like a good thing?
And how good does all of this neurobabble sound when we reflect on the fact that we do not understand how brain relates to mind. We have a lot of data on various correlations, and even some data on experimental interventions on the brain. But we have no clear explanation of the relationship between mind and brain. Should that kind of science serve as the foundation for transformational insight and healing—even if we have more holistic and well-tested options available?
We certainly more holistic approaches that have proven themselves. For most of human history we have understood that learning and vitalizing development happen by means of skillful and holistic ideas, metaphors, stories, songs, ceremonies, rituals, dances, and other arts of awareness nested in vitalizing ecologies. Meaningful learning relies on concrete practices for the synchronization and synchronicity of heart, mind, body, world, and Cosmos—all with the aim of wisdom, love, and beauty, and the mutual liberation and ongoing vitality of Nature and culture seen as a whole.
Our context has shifted. What the dominant culture refers to as science now functions as the gold standard for the epistemology of the culture. In other words: We use “science” as the official standard of knowledge.
And now we face a weird situation: We can only work with experience itself, not with our brain anatomy, and yet we keep elaborating neurobabble (and technobabble too), and we keep using it to justify whatever elements of the self-help catastrophe and the larger culture we want to promote (or critique). It sounds better to say a coaching, consulting, or training program integrates “self-directed neuroplasticity” than it does to say the program involves learning, training, study, practice, and asking lots of daunting questions that resist easy answers.
“Self-directed neuroplasticity” may sound sexier than “learning,” and also better than meditation or mindfulness. But, however much we may want to discuss the vagus nerve, the plasticity of neural architecture, or the function of the amygdala, we’re left with the same venerable practices of meditation, mindfulness, imagination, and so on—but made more tame, less empowering, less dangerous to ignorance and oppression.
Extracting those venerable practices from their holistic ecologies, reducing them to controllable parts, and then framing the matter in technoscientific terms (including neurobabble) allows us to sell them, and get apparently good results, all while evading what the larger, holistic ecologies invite us to experience. We thereby limit ourselves, each other, and the world we share, and we thereby also perpetuate the problems we face, even as we move those problems around and dress them up in various new garments.
Here’s the kind of talk we can find on many platforms and websites—only slightly caricatured, for your reading pleasure:
“We train visionary leaders using growth mindsets, self-directed neuroplasticity, vagus nerve mastery, activated flow states, and peak performance. This evidence-based training (featured on platforms you know and trust . . . even though we did write some of the content) will turn you and your team into dangerous disruptors and unbreakable champions. Let us show you how the world’s top leaders use neuroscience to help themselves (and their clients and/or teams) achieve guaranteed results faster than ever before. Most frameworks are based on opinions, not facts. Successful leaders, coaches, and consultants come to us to learn the science, so they can launch their career faster, blasting beyond their limits, and reaching their goals so much more easily than they ever thought possible. The results our clients experience for themselves, their team, and their clients are ground-breaking. Let’s book a free strategy session today!”
As we discover more and more about the radical interwovenness of all things—as we discover more about the ecological nature of mind, and the nature of relationality itself—we will understand better and better why we shouldn’t localize into brain regions the traits and states we value, or reduce our potential to relatively narrow discussions about “mindset” and states like flow, or seek big shifts we might not be ready to navigate and take care of.
But a major issue here has to do with what we think we should justify in the first place, and how we go about justifying it. We can agree to disagree about the usefulness of our technofantastic and neurofixated approaches to life, love, and learning, but the issue remains: Neurobabble and technobabble seduce people into avoiding foundational questions and believing something they might otherwise (or perhaps just should otherwise) reflect on more critically.
Ironically, we can (perhaps have to) turn to dominant culture science to find empirical support regarding the phenomenon that people sufficiently infected by the dominant culture can become seduced by the trappings of “science”. The fact that dominant culture science provides this empirical evidence has less to do with anything special about that science than it does with the spiritual aspirations of the soul.
The soul generally seeks to overcome self-deception, and perhaps somewhere inside of us all we can get in touch with the will or passion to find out things for ourselves rather than merely to believe—at least some things, the most important things. We can do a bang-up job repressing that passion of the soul, and neurobabble often doesn’t help.
Given our context, it might prove useful to put several links below for journal articles that describe some aspects of the problem with neurobabble. A 2015 paper by Fernandez-Duque and colleagues, with the telling title, “Superfluous neuroscience information makes explanations of psychological phenomena more appealing, ” yields the following summary information regarding the phenomenon of neurobabble: Neurobabble can come across as more compelling than social science or even physics jargon, experts and “analytical” thinkers are not immune to neurobabble seductions, and (as a culture) we seem to have become convinced that the brain offers the best explanation for our thought, speech, and action.
In a 2016 study, “The seductive allure is a reductive allure: People prefer scientific explanations that contain logically irrelevant reductive information,” Hopkins and colleagues note a more generalized trend of jargon seduction “across several scientific disciplines”. They discovered that it flares up most, “whenever the explanations include reductive information: reference to smaller components or more fundamental processes.” That aspect of reductiveness relates to why technobabble can have effects that mirror those of neurobabble, and why the whole phenomenon related to the ideologies of dominant culture science.
As we noted, two things can happen when we get seduced by neurobabble or technobabble in the realm of business, leadership, coaching, consulting, cultural change, and so many other things that have our attention on platforms like this one: We may accept a claim, a practice, a theory, an approach, or a justification that we should question, and—something at times far more dangerous—we may go along with a general current of thought that we should challenge foundationally.
If someone offers to teach us “self-directed neuroplasticity,” does that properly describe the right approach to fulfilling our potential? For the moment ignoring the oddness of applying neurobabble to something as basic as learning (and simultaneously as subtle and profound as intention and free will), does it make sense to reduce our learning and development to rearrangements of neural architecture? How does that even help if we already know change happens?
Ah, but we just noted that the dominant culture has infected many of us to become predisposed to reductive explanations, ideally based in the brain when it comes to anything psychological. “Self-directed neuroplasticity” rings both bells at the same time.
A holistic approach would of course have to address the more thorny topics of intention, conscious human purpose, freedom, relationality, lifestyle, livelihood, ethics, compassion, wisdom, the delusions of the doer, and more. Once we throw in the neurobabble, we can basically expect that foundational philosophical questions will fall away and shrivel up like seeds cast on hot pavement—not merely academic questions, but the flesh and blood questions of our existence.
That leads directly to the second, more dangerous issue, because without those questions, we don’t ask whether we are self-directing our neuroplasticity in a way that will actually help ourselves, each other, and the world we share at the same time. For instance, the wisdom traditions of the world tell us that the pursuit of extrinsic, self-enhancing rewards (i.e., the aims of materialism: wealth, power, pleasure, and fame) will never bring us true happiness and peace. Even dominant culture science agrees with this. But our self-directed neuroplasticity program might never raise the issue, and thus never question whether the activity to which we wish to apply the neurobabble toolkit actually accords with our own soul.
Neurobabble can easily cover over the sorts of things holistic philosophies try to bring our attention to. And we should make no mistake: Neuroscience and all neurobabblistic approaches themselves have philosophies guiding them—they just tend to be anemic philosophies that can do more harm than good.
That broad characterization by no means applies in every case, and our contemplation here doesn’t ask everyone who’s ever used neurobabble, or even drawn from neuroscience to frame or explain their work, to hang their head in shame. I’m not trying to cancel neuroscience, and I certainly mention relevant science throughout my own work, including work with clients and students.
And we have to acknowledge that people can experience a lot of relief from approaches that rely on neuroscience and neurobabble. Some people can experience a big shift just from hearing about their vagus nerve, or the way the hippocampus can shrink, or the way dopamine pathways can get highjacked. People often engage in neuroscience research and the application of that research because they want to help, and they want to feel confident that science has provided techniques that give them a way to offer that help.
That doesn’t mean we won’t benefit from bringing the ethical, epistemological, aesthetic, and, yes, metaphysical and ontological questions to the fore—and that we don’t run grave risks if we avoid doing that with a good measure of passion and intellectual conscience. Those old philosophical terms can sound jargony to modern ears, but they have to do with our ways of knowing and being, living and loving. They touch on questions of values and meaning we need to stay intimately in touch with when we select and apply any technique or art of awareness.
For instance, just recognizing that what we can know depends on our entire practice of life gives us a basic principle that all of life is practice and realization. We receive teachings, we reflect critically, and then we must practice. By means of practice, by means of the totality of how we live, we bring values, meaning, and potentials to fruition. What love can mean for us depends on our whole practice of life, and is not helpfully reduced (perhaps not even helpfully referred to), as “self-directed neuroplasticity” or any other string of neurobabble.
Neurobabble obscures better ways of knowing in many ways, but perhaps the most insidious has to do with the way it covers over ecology and spirituality at the same time. By locating our problems and our solutions inside our skull, it fails to facilitate intimacy with ecological and spiritual realities (as a unity).
We can certainly use science to help us understand why we think better in the wild, and how mind in general manifests ecologically (even if that ecology appears as a single human being or a group of human beings rather than human beings in a landscape). But liberating ourselves into larger ecologies of mind in order to arrive at true wisdom has never required neurobabble to bring to realization.
Socrates didn’t mope around Athens saying, “If only we could tame our vagus nerves, fellow Athenians, then we would be wise.” Buddha didn’t say to his students, “We can’t have enlightenment yet, friends. We will need neuroscience for that.” The Peacemaker didn’t, as far as I know, say, “We cannot have peace, friends, until people come from afar and eventually build brain scanners in these lands.”
We could look at it this way: Since all we have is experience itself, every culture provides metaphors to orient that experience, to situate the practices we need in order to arrive at the realizations the whole of life depends on. But if we compare the mythopoetics of neurobabble to the mythopoetics of the wisdom traditions, we can’t help but see how anemic and tame the neuro-based images seem, and thus how anemic and tame they may make us and the world we share.
Why would we want to think about our vagus nerve when we could enter the holistic ecologies we find in the wisdom traditions of the world—including the poetry of people like Rumi and Milarepa, the dialogues of Plato, the vignettes of Zhuangzi, the ceremonies and inalienable rites of tribes and traditions that still maintain a nonduality of Nature and culture?
Why would we want to think about neuroplasticity when, for instance, Buddhist philosophy already teaches the obvious fact that we change, that we can learn, that proper training of the heart, mind, body, world, and Cosmos makes all the difference? Why not turn to mythopoetics that actually expand the imagination far beyond anything possible in neurobabble terminology?
Some this might sound a bit too critical. But we seem to have come to a moment in world history at which Earth won’t absorb much more of our ignorance. We seem to have a need for an extra measure of reflection, care, and a stillness that allows wisdom, love, and beauty to guide our next step.
The question is not just what we “plan” to “do” with this wild, precious life in this wild, precious home we share, but how we live this life—by means of what practices, what realizations, what rhythms and visions? The practices of “science,” or the practices of wisdom, love, and beauty? The practices of the self-help catastrophe, or the practices of the wild? The rhythms and teachings of Nature, or the pace and demands of Captain Clock, Colonel Calendar, and Commander Capital? By fragmentation, or holism? By competition, wealth, fame, power, position, personal branding, productivity, materialism? Or by collaboration, generosity, inclusiveness, ethics, creativity, clarity of mind, true joy, genuine peace, sacredness, and wonder?
Do we think we will change by means of brain anatomy and the language of neuroscience, or do we think we will change by means of the arts of awareness, the proper synchronization of heart, mind, body, world, and cosmos, together with mythopoetic images, archetypal patternings of the human and more-than-human mind? Shall we choose science, or shall we choose (and thus cultivate) a proper philosophical rebirth of science?