The 7th Year in Ideas from the New York Times highlights "neurorealism". Matthew Hutson writes:

You’ve seen the headlines: This Is Your Brain on Politics. Or God. Or Super Bowl Ads. And they’re always accompanied by pictures of brains dotted with seemingly significant splotches of color. Now some scientists have seen enough. We’re like moths, they say, lured by the flickering lights of neuroimaging — and uncritically accepting of conclusions drawn from it.

A paper published online in September by the journal Cognition shows that assertions about psychology — even implausible ones like “watching television improved math skills” — seem much more believable to laypeople when accompanied by images from brain scans. And a paper accepted for publication by The Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience demonstrates that adding even an extraneous reference to the brain to a bad explanation of human behavior makes the explanation seem much more satisfying to nonexperts.

Eric Racine, a bioethicist at the Montreal Clinical Research Institute, coined the word neurorealism to describe this form of credulousness. In an article called “fMRI in the Public Eye,” he and two colleagues cited a Boston Globe article about how high-fat foods activate reward centers in the brain. The Globe headline: “Fat Really Does Bring Pleasure.” Couldn’t we have proved that with a slice of pie and a piece of paper with a check box on it? ”

As someone who has promulgated a bit of neuro'un'realism during the first few years of this blog, I agree with Racine's analysis. This is why you haven't seen me blog over the past several about articles in the popular press which stretch the implications of neuroscience research. As I've learned more about the technology, I've developed a more scrupulous eye and it is with this more neurorealistic perspective that I am writing my book on the societal implications of neurotechnologies. It's a fine balance between guesstimating how technologies might advance and understanding why they won't, a balancing act I am working hard at nailing down so you won't have to.

More posts on the topic here and here. More mind and brain ideas in this year's ideas can be found here.