Psychotherapy, Mindfulness and Buddhist Meditation by Tullio Giraldi

Author:Tullio Giraldi
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783030290030
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

It will is hardly surprising that respected researchers have criticised these approaches and findings. Their criticisms of the incorporation of meditation and mindfulness into neuroscience are summarised in two eloquently titled books: Genes, Cells, and Brains: The Promethean Promises of the New Biology and Neuromania: On the Limits of Brain Science. According to the sociologist Hillary Rose and the neurobiologist Steven Rose, brain scans and the decoding of the human genome can tell us who we really are. What they point out is that humans have roughly as many protein-encoding genes as a fruit fly, and that fMRI scanning is still such an inexact art that a team of satirical neuroscientists have demonstrated significant “brain activity” in a dead salmon. They express their concerns that the economic, political and social determinants of science are overlooked. The entrepreneurialisation of science is now a primary objective for many, and the policies governing science and technology actually impede rather than promote their progress (Rose & Rose, 2014).

An interesting book by Legrenzi and Umiltà examines the origins of psychology in the second half of the nineteenth century, when it starts to take precedence over philosophy as a means of studying the mind. The book argues that today, something similar is happening to psychology as it begins to be superseded by a range of new ‘neuro-’ prefixed disciplines. As fragments of knowledge that have been isolated from psychology and neuropsychology for decades are re-packaged as novelty new disciplines, many people are overlooking neuropsychology when it is, in fact, perfectly capable of covering most aspects of the mind’s relationship with the brain. The authors conclude that if neuroscientific results were interpreted more appropriately, it would be possible to avoid the false representation of the role of biology in the mind and mind-body sciences (Legrenzi, Umiltà, & Anderson, 2014).

These concerns are not just expressed in these books: they are shared by more and more of the communities of researchers involved in the field. Technology has made it quick and affordable for scientists to examine the genome on a very large scale. Today, many so-called ‘genome-wide association studies’ (GWAS) have been performed. These studies have, however, attracted much criticism because their results show that it is possible to identify patterns of large numbers of genetic variants even in people with severe mental diseases, which means that they can only account for a tiny part of the risk of contracting the mental diseases in question. The ‘In Focus News’ recently published in Nature questions how far it is possible for GWAS to find useful disease links until we understand how exactly the networks of genetic variants we have discovered actually work (Callaway, 2017).

Similar concerns have been raised about the widespread use of MRI. A recent review suggests that data from MRI research is highly sensitive to common artefacts and that its findings are often inconclusive. The review suggests experts should be cautious about accepting these findings, as they may be deeply flawed and could run the risk of misinforming practitioners and patients (Weinberger & Radulescu, 2016).

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