I USE the term “neuro-enthusiasta” for those given to excessive excitement over what brain science teaches. I have been warning, often in these pages, of its mostly amusing excesses and its tendency to produce newspaper headlines exclaiming that the brain “lights up” when people think and feel various things. Still, I did not foresee “neuro-” becoming a universal prefix. We have neuro-economics, neuro-theology, neuro-aesthetics and now, if Iain McGilchrist is to be believed, neuro-history.
Plato, long before neuroscience, spoke of the struggle in the soul between Reason, Appetite and Temperament. This, neurologically speaking, has turned out to be the struggle…
