Matthew Taylor
speaker
407 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2011
last heard Nov 2011
Matthew Taylor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Over the top is the word.
Ray Tallis isn't alone in his scepticism.
Writing about a tendency among some brain scientists to jump to conclusions about behaviour based on a few brain scans, a recent high-profile paper in Nature magazine coined the phrase voodoo correlations.
The truth is that neuroscience is still in its infancy.
Some of the most revolutionary ideas, like the power of the automatic brain, are still controversial.
Take as an example the science of mirror neurons, an idea related to the automatic brain.
Here's Chris Frith, doyen of British neuroscience.
You can see why the world gets excited, or sometimes overexcited, about ideas like this.
Because if mirror neurons do exist in human brains, it proves that our brains automatically imitate others, and that could fundamentally challenge our view of human society.
In a sense, our brains are not separate one from the other.
They are almost like a network working together.
Exciting new ideas like this seem to keep emerging from neuroscience.
While many haven't yet been fully proven, already Professor Reed Montague, who studied Coke and Pepsi, thinks it's not just companies who can take advantage of them.
Social goals like reducing obesity can be pursued by developing techniques that engage not just our conscious but our automatic brain.
The idea that understanding our cognitive process gives us new tools to meet our own and society's goals, well, that's what lies behind one of the most influential ideas in modern policymaking, the idea of nudge.
Small changes to the environment we live in can nudge us towards making better choices.
Take eating more healthily, for example.
Campaigns based on persuading our conscious brains have, at best, a mixed record.
But Montague told me about a famous nudge team in the US who found a much cleverer way to get people to eat less.
by redesigning a cafeteria.
Showing 61–80 of 407 · page 4 of 21
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