Comments on: NPR goes cuckoo for neuropuffs

By: More on Martin Lindstrom « dlPFC

More on Martin Lindstrom « dlPFC — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 00:12:48 +0000

[...] seen this before, but the Stanford Law School Center for Law and Biosciences Blog had previously written about an NPR segment featuring Martin Lindstrom making many of the same mistakes as he did in his [...]

By: danielgoldberg26

danielgoldberg26 — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 22:19:36 +0000

Hey Emily,

This is an excellent post, and I agree, save that there is probably reason to believe that it is not only journalists who perpetrate all sorts of neurofallacies . . . did you happen to catch Steven Pinker’s recent N.Y. Times Magazine article discussing some of the neuroscience on ethics?

(http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html)

Unpersuasive, to put it mildly.

By: hgreely

hgreely — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 20:58:15 +0000

This is truly appalling, ESPECIALLY the New York Times op/ed, in which this non-scientist (as far as I can, which isn’t far as the only biographical information is buried deep on his own website, Lindstrom “went to” the European Academy of Advertising, whose neuroscience program is not known to me) argues that warning labels should be dropped because of the patterns of brain activation they cause. Even worse than his op/ed is the Times’s decision to run it. Grumble. Why do even the elite news media (NPR, NY Times, etc.) fall for this stuff? Why don’t they run them through their science writers, who know better?

By the way, biographies of Lindstrom have been deleted at least seven times from Wikipedia, mostly for “blatant advertising.”

By: emilyrmurphy

emilyrmurphy — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 18:17:44 +0000

And the NYT once again loans out its Op-Ed page. Fortunately many of the comments point out the logical flaws in Lindstrom’s argument against warning labels.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/12/opinion/12lindstrom.html?ref=opinion