The ‘Love Spot’ and other myths

Two years ago Robert Newman was one of the volunteer subjects in a brain-imaging experiment. He was hooked up to an electroencephalograph, which tracks blood flow to different areas of the brain, and told to look at a photograph of a person he loved.

The idea is that active neurons demand more oxygen and oxygen is delivered by blood, therefore higher blood demand indicates greater brain activity. The neuroscientists conducting this particular experiment were convinced they had discovered the bit of the brain responsible for romantic love. The New York Times reported the story under the headline ‘Scientists discover the love spot’. Newman believes they discovered no such thing and this book – which originated as a comedy show that in turn evolved into a BBC Radio 4 series – explains why.

Neuroscience is headline-grabbing and the subject of many popular science books, but Newman argues that brain imaging is misleading and that experimental data is often cherry-picked or misinterpreted and at odds with evolutionary biology. Furthermore, it gives us ‘a dehumanising and pessimistic picture of ourselves’.

So, are we nearing the day when we can upload our consciousness into computers, freeing us from our, in the words of one neuroscientist, ‘biological wetware’? Are artificially intelligent robots on the brink of replacing us all in the workplace? Will neuroscientists soon be able to read our minds? No, says Newman, and he takes a surgical scalpel to these and other notions popularised by neuroscience.

What gives him, a comedian with an English degree, the right to pronounce on these matters? He is, he admits, a ‘trespasser’ but he is exceptionally wellinformed, and very funny too.

He doesn’t wear his learning lightly but this is an entertaining, iconoclastic scan of a fascinating field. It is also highly stimulating for the, seemingly muchmisunderstood, old grey matter.