This Is Probably An Interesting Blog (but in the offhand chance it isn't…)

Jonah Lehrer, author of Proust was a Neuroscientist, on the value of Neuroscience.

He’s more interesting than boring I think.

“Here’s where neuroscience comes to the rescue. I think time and experiments have redeemed some of Freud’s fundamental theories – the unconscious drives much of our behavior, dreams aren’t random narratives, but actually regurgitate scenes and snippets from daily life, etc. – while other Freudian theories have largely fallen flat (your Mom probably isn’t responsible for most of your neuroses). We can take something as vague as the id and began shackling it to particular brain regions, like the aforementioned amygdala. (The prefrontal cortex is some fusion of the ego and super-ego.) By recording from hippocampal cells in the rat, scientists can begin to decode the function of dreams, and see how they’re a crucial component of memory consolidation. And so on. The point is that, while all of Freud’s theories might sound convincing, only a few of them are actually correct. In this sense, neuroscience is what helps us separate the beautiful theory from the definite truth.”

via Frontal Cortex