[audio]

The Neuroscience Con

11 Jul 2026

Brain-words are cosmetic filler. Strip the neuroscience out and the advice means exactly what it did before—so learn to strip it out.

Below is a lightly edited transcript of the btrmt. lectures podcast. For the article that inspired it, see The Neuroscience Con.

Welcome to the Betterment Lectures. My name is Dr Dorian Minors, and if there’s one thing I’ve learnt as a brain scientist, it’s that there’s no instruction manual for this device in our head. But there are patterns—patterns of thought, of feeling, of action. That’s what brains do: create the patterns that gracefully handle the predictable shapes of everyday life.

So let me teach you about them. One pattern, one podcast, and you see if it works for you.

¶The retail version

I’ve spent a couple of episodes now circling a question about how we know things. One of them, on what I called the scientific ritual, was about how we intuitively retreat to the scientific, the empirical, the evidence to solve our problems—and the trouble that the scientific method is a belief system like any other, and so suffers the same kinds of consequences. Another, more recently, was about who we trust to tell us what’s right: how we like to believe we pursue evidence and literature and science, but what we’re actually doing is deferring our understanding to expertise, to sages, to gurus. And I talked a bit about why that form of knowledge dominates on TikTok and Instagram.

Today I want to talk about the retail version of that—the less highfalutin way brain science gets used to sell you stuff all the time.

I want to talk about it because it bothers me. I’m an actual brain scientist. I spent a long time researching how the brain works, and how that influences decision-making, when I was at Cambridge; and now I teach at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, where I’m teaching people to use it in high-tempo, high-pressure environments. So when somebody comes up to me and asks whether I’ve read this new book about my amygdala—about how to get out of your amygdala and into your frontal lobes—it makes me wince a little.

So: a grain of salt. This is a biased perspective. But I don’t think it’s unfairly biased, because there’s an entire genre of this. If you do the Google keyword searches, this sort of neuroscience-washing peaks in the 2000s. And when I first wrote the article behind this lecture, I picked on somebody who must have been using paid promotions on Instagram to violate me with their neuroscience-washing—and who, when I got Claude to help me turn that article into this podcast, turned out to be the guest on one of the biggest episodes of a pretty famous podcast, the Diary of a CEO.

So this isn’t a fringe grift. This is the most listened-to neuroscience on the planet. It’s what people like to hear.

Knowing that, I want to be a little cautious. I don’t want to throw neuroscience out the window as a way of understanding the world. But I do want to point out that almost always, this is a confidence game. People using neuroscience are trying to con you—and when they’re conning you, it looks a certain way. I want to teach you to spot it.

So let’s get into it.

¶Dressing advice in a lab coat

The theme I’ve been exploring recently is something about where we like to believe we get our information from—the kind of information that drives our decision-making. What we seem to like to do, or at least the people I surround myself with, is be driven by the evidence. We like the idea that we’re paying attention to the science, to the research, to the experts, and not being pulled into some silly decision by our passionate emotions and fears and worries. We’re being objective, in some kind of way.

And when you actually explore that—the scientific method and the way it’s deployed, or the kind of people we listen to for advice—you often find that we’re just listening to our worries and fears and dressing them up in a scientific costume. Brain science is perfect for this. It’s the real-sounding, hard-science-sounding, credible-sounding thing you can dress advice up in to make it seem evidence-driven, research-informed, clever. It promotes advice from opinion to science.

I think this is part of societal training: the idea that anecdote is weak, that our best guess is embarrassing, that our lived experience isn’t something we should draw on to solve problems— we should look to data and science instead. We’re in this scientistic society. We like our knowledge regimented. So dressing advice in neuroscience makes it feel a bit more legitimate.

¶The advice underneath is often fine

And importantly, the underlying advice is often pretty good. I talk a lot about Malcolm Gladwell shit—the idea that we use education as entertainment, delivering things that make us feel like we’ve learned something while really just repackaging something we already knew, hitting the same button that real learning does. I’ll link something in the show notes that explains that idea in more detail. But I don’t actually think that most of the learning we do is fake education for entertainment. I think a lot of it is explaining things people need to hear, at the time they need to hear it, in a way that’s palatable—in a way that fits the scientistic society and lets them say, my lived experience is real.

And that’s a little bit what this podcast is trying to do, if I’m honest. I draw on my background and my experience deliberately, because I think people need that to have their experience validated, and to feel their perspective on the world is legitimate.

But, for example, we’re going to rip on Tara Swart today. I’m going to show you a couple of examples of how I think she really is playing this confidence game—this violation of everything I just said—in order to sell you stuff rather than validate your perspective on the world. And yet some of it is legitimately good advice. Her big thing seems to be manifestation. Now, I haven’t looked deeply into Tara Swart, so I might be mischaracterising her, but there’s a lot of stuff about how the brain is involved in manifesting reality. Initially I reacted strongly to that—but if you strip out the mystic language and the brain science, you find it’s basically manufactured luck, something I believe in myself and have in fact written about: the idea that if you focus your attention on what you want, you’ll notice more of the opportunities that get you closer to it. A very real, very sensible, very literature-informed idea.

The difference is that you don’t need to lie about the brain to get there. And I think the lie actually distracts you from what the brain can teach you about behaviour—and there are things it can teach you; it’s just that most of the time, people aren’t talking about those. So I’m not here to say the advice is bad. I’m here to talk about the way it’s packaged, and the way that packaging distracts us from really getting to grips with the world.

So let me show you what the neuroscience con looks like.

¶The purest form: neurotransmitters

I’ve given a lot of background, but I haven’t really said what the neuroscience con is. Let me give you the purest form—the central spine of the trick—because once you see it, you’ll see it everywhere.

The best example is neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are these things that float around in the brain and help influence or inform the way the brain signals—to help you learn new things, or change the way you’re perceiving stuff, or whatever the case may be. They do a lot of stuff, is the point. In fact they do so much, and they’re so complicated, that it’s genuinely very difficult to work out exactly what they’re doing at any given moment. But people won’t talk about how complicated they are. What they’ll do is build a sentence that goes something like: doing X releases Y neurotransmitter, which gives you Z benefit. So—going for a run releases dopamine, which makes you feel good.

The problem is that there’s nothing useful the word “dopamine” is doing in that sentence. Strip it out and you get: going for a run makes you feel good. You get the identical informational value. Adding the neurotransmitter is a purely cosmetic, decorative thing—and what it does is legitimise the advice. Maybe you’d be less inclined to believe that going for a run makes you feel good; but when somebody says it makes you feel good because brain thing, all of a sudden it’s more legitimate.

That’s essentially the con in a line: throwing a brain word into an idea as a costume, to make it seem more legitimate.

¶Taking it to Tara Swart

So let me take it to Dr Swart. These are the Instagram posts she must have put some paid promotion behind—and I do now wonder whether that was because her Diary of a CEO episode came out around then. Anyway, she was posting these really beautiful little Instagram slides—a sort of neuroscientist’s guide to manifestation was the one I picked, and it seems to be the thing she talks about on the podcasts she’s on. I’ll link the collection in the show notes.

Here’s a quote:

Get clear on what you want. Clarity activates the prefrontal cortex, responsible for decision-making and planning. By defining what you truly want and connecting it to a deeper purpose, you engage your brain’s motivation circuits, making your goals more tangible.

Sounds great. Sounds like the brain is going to help you be better. So the first question I want to ask is: is the neuroscience even sensible? And in fairly typical fashion, it’s kind of sensible. The prefrontal cortex is involved in planning, no question. But it’s also roughly a third of your brain. It’d be kind of weird if it weren’t activated—you can’t just have a third of your brain switched off. And as for engaging your motivation circuits: when are you not engaged in goal-directed behaviour? People say they’re not motivated, so they procrastinate—but then you’re motivated to not work. It’d be weird if your motivation circuits weren’t active, and it’d be weird if they weren’t involved in motivation.

So the brain science kind of makes sense. But it also doesn’t mean anything. Strip it out and what you get is: getting clear on what you want helps you plan, and makes you motivated. And the problem is you already knew that. Tara Swart couldn’t just tell you that—she had to add all the shit about the cortex and the motivation circuits to make it seem more important than it is.

¶Neuroplasticity and self-worth

Here’s another. This one’s on self-worth:

Believe you’re worthy of having it. Self-worth is tied to neural pathways associated with confidence and self-belief. Positive affirmations can help rewire those pathways through neuroplasticity, reinforcing a sense of worthiness.

Is the neuroscience sensible? Well—she’s said that self-worth is tied to self-worth brain architecture. It would be kind of strange if it weren’t. And affirmations “rewire pathways”—sure, in the sense that anything that changes you rewires the brain. That’s what the brain is. The entire point of the brain is to change itself as you learn the structure of the world. It’s like saying water is wet.

So you strip out the brain science and you get: positive affirmations reinforce a sense of self-worth. And you’re done. Though then, I suppose, you’d have to go and look at the affirmation literature—which, as I understand it, needs quite specific affirmations to work, so it’s questionably even good advice. But I’ll link a paper or two in the show notes. Don’t take my word for it.

¶Jargon confetti: the flow slide

So we’ve had a couple of examples now, and they’re good examples of adding cosmetic brain-science words that don’t really add anything—because they’re used in a way that could describe almost anything. A third of your brain is involved in planning and goal-directed behaviour and motivation; you’d certainly hope a third of your brain was on while you’re awake.

But there’s another form of this. Less “obvious, anodyne stuff that isn’t technically wrong but doesn’t add anything,” and more what I’d call jargon confetti. These are the ones that make even me have to think. Here’s a quote:

Trust the process and enjoy the views. When we let go of excessive control, the brain can shift into a flow state, engaging creativity and allowing intuitive ideas to emerge. This helps reduce stress by lowering cortisol levels, making the journey more enjoyable.

There’s a lot going on here. Let me pick up flow. This isn’t technically brain-science stuff, it’s more cognitive attention science, and I’m not super familiar with the flow literature— it’s quite old now, and its broader discipline really struggled its way through the replication crisis. But I do know that the core characteristic of flow is complete absorption in the task. The challenge precisely meets your capacity, and so time slips away from you. And, importantly, from the very beginning it’s been characterised by a sense of control, not a lack of it. To quote one of the lead authors, from 1975:

a sense of control is definitely one of the most important components of the flow experience, whether or not an “objective” assessment justifies such feelings.

So on the face of it, I’m not sure how the brain would transition into flow by letting go of control. I wonder if the “excessive” is a nod towards Dietrich’s transient hypofrontality hypothesis—where flow comes from a down-regulation of prefrontal regions associated with self-evaluation and performance monitoring, which might otherwise be a barrier to the immersive quality of flow. If we’re evaluating ourselves too hard, it’s like an inner critic, and that might stop us dropping into flow. But if that’s what Dr Swart meant, I don’t know why she didn’t just say so. She was whipping out prefrontal stuff earlier, saying it was very good for goal-setting—and I wonder if the prefrontal cortex just isn’t good anymore, because the brain is complex, and invoking something like a third of the brain might involve some contradictions.

Whatever the case, this isn’t particularly likely to help you generate ideas. Across the board, the literature suggests that intuitive insight comes when you’re not immersed in a task. So: letting go, yes; flow state, no. You’d need to let go far more than a flow state allows to get into the space of creativity. And more than that—flow sounds stressful. It’s where your capacity is completely absorbed by the task at hand, which sounds a lot like optimum stress: that delicate peak of physiological arousal that takes all your cognitive and physical resources and tunes them towards performance. And the last sentence is just the straightforward version of the trick again—“this reduces stress by lowering cortisol levels.” Well, yes: cortisol is the hormone associated with stress. Stress being reduced by the stress-reducing parts of the brain shouldn’t come as a surprise.

By slide five or so, this is out of hand—you’re getting the kind of neuro-babble that leaves you less informed than when you started. Jargon confetti. Strip it all back out and you get something like: if you trust the process over your inner critic you might find a state of flow, and if you let go a bit more you might even get creative. The same advice. And it’s fine—it’s good. You just didn’t need to force all that random distracting stuff in there.

¶One more: the reticular activating system

I’ll give you one more before I wrap up. Here’s a quote:

The reticular activating system—the RAS—filters information and favours what is familiar over what is new and uncertain. If you’ve not primed your reticular activating system to seek out new opportunities in line with your goals, it will seek out the known.

Now, the reticular activating system is in the brainstem—which isn’t the smartest part of the brain. Very important, but not that clever. This particular subsystem basically modulates your excitability: if you’re waking up, the RAS is playing a part; if you’re going from relaxed to focused, it’s probably helping out. That sort of thing. So I don’t really know how she’s getting from there to this claim. New stuff does capture our attention, so maybe you’d get a stronger burst of activity from those neurons. Or she might be touching on habituation, where low-priority, repetitive things—background noise—get filtered out of our perception. But I don’t know how you’d “prime” your brainstem to intervene in that. I didn’t know when I wrote the article, and I still don’t.

But strip it out and you get: if you focus on your goals, you might spot opportunities you’d have missed. Which is, again, this manifestation thing she’s into—and it’s a great idea. I agree with it entirely. It just doesn’t need the brainstem involved.

¶It’s not just her

I’m not going to do any more slides, because they’re all this kind of thing. And it’s not just her; she’s just a very popular face of it. I’ve critiqued a very popular self-help method that seems to be infiltrating business consulting at the moment— I’ll link it in the show notes. I’ve complained about this in schools, in the media, in anything where people are trying to sell you stuff. This trick comes up, and the longer it is, the less useful and the more expensive it tends to be. I’ll link as many examples as I can find in the show notes.

But that, at its core, is the neuroscience con. So let’s talk about what we can do about it.

¶How to spot it

You don’t actually need to be a brain scientist to sort this out. In fact, you just watched me get all wrapped up in one, trying to work out what was going on—because I’m a brain scientist. So you might even be at an advantage over me.

What you need is to do three things. Take something populated with brain science. Find the brain words—the regions, the chemicals, the neuro-mechanism—and just delete them. Delete them and read the sentence again. If it means the same thing, it’s the neuroscience con. And that’s it. That’s the entire skill. I’d love for you to send me examples of this from Instagram and TikTok. Run it on the next reel that comes across your feed, and I swear you’ll never unsee it.

¶What the con costs you

And the problem—like the last two slides I went through—is that it doesn’t just fail to inform you. It doesn’t just work past your guard to sell you something you may or may not agree with, wrapped up in fake authority. At its worst, it leaves you less informed than you started. I think the flow literature is genuinely interesting, and that mischaracterisation gives you a confident wrong picture instead of a modest—or annoyingly nuanced—right one. That’s not helpful. You’re not going to have a better grip on how to live your life as a result.

And I said it at the beginning, and I want to reiterate it: often the advice underneath is fine. It might be trivial or anodyne, but sometimes we need to hear it, because it validates an experience we’re having—it reminds us that something we knew is still true. Affirmations can work. Manifestation as manufactured luck—fine; manufactured luck is a thing. You don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just don’t let people launder advice past your barriers, because that’s exactly what this kind of neuroscience-washing is hiding. If you want to be evidence-based and objective and data-oriented, this is about the worst possible outcome for you.

So that’s it. Find the brain words, take them out of the sentence. If the point is exactly the same, then they’re trying to sell you something.

That’s all I’ve got for you today.

Anthologies: Betterment, Gratification, Thought Architecture, Karstica, Noetik, On Thinking and Reasoning, On Being Fruitful, On Culture

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