[larsonf]

No matter someone's stance on this, it seems a bit forward to discredit a relatively widely-held theory as something that is weakly argued by providing a few bullet points and then an outright assertion of another competing theory. This kind of thing has no place on Hacker News.

[biggfoot]

How is it a widely-held theory? It hasn't stood up to scrutiny, at least any well documented tests.

It is sorta misleading, in fact, because a lot of good authors and speakers assume it as a well known fact and add their leaps of imagination to it. It is OK at best as a pop culture thing, maybe a poetic spin off.

Why does it have no place on Hacker ... oh, you know what, scratch that. No point entering that debate. Thanks.

[larsonf]

I think you're right on this.

It's not so much about whether the stance is true or not and whether we should debate that. It's that articles that discredit something as trivially untrue by way of a trivially small statement. In the extreme it would be like discrediting [insert pseudoscience topic] by simply mentioning a copy of Nature. There's some degree here, sure. But tabloid-style takedowns, regardless of whether they are right, seem almost out of place.

I am wrong to say this has no place, though, which is in itself a pretty big claim with no substance behind it.

[InclinedPlane]

It's not a scientific theory, at best it's folk wisdom. This article is pointing out that there is no scientific basis for it.

The onus is not on anyone to disprove the theory, the onus is on the theory's proponents to prove it, they haven't done so, not to the slightest degree.

[Reallynow]

Yes. As a PhD neuroscientist, I use reference to the triune brain as a sort of shibboleth: If someone mentions it, I can tell they don't know any neuroscience.

[contingencies]

Post more neuroscience articles, please!

I read The Brain that Changes Itself recently and it markedly reinforced certain suspicions I had. Which other areas of are most active in neuroscience at the moment that might one day be related to human/computer interfaces?

[biggfoot]

Serious question: why hasn't the idea been aggressively discredited then? That would be a good thing, wouldn't it?

[Reallynow]

I guess it's not really on most people's radar.  There's little professional incentive in arguing against some old quasi-folk theory that is not believed by any of your peers.  

The incentive could exist for scientists who want to write books and be more public facing.  However, I think most neuroscientists want to write something that relates to their professional work and is more interesting to them.  Triune brain theory just isn't on radar.  

Moreover, popular neuroscience is really really hard to do well.  You need to find the overlap between the narrow controlled experiments of neuroscience and the messy realm of observable human behavior and experience. Things are that are known in the former are seldom known in the latter.  Careful scientists know this and often feel alarmed when asked to talk about things outside the lab. 

This leaves much of the writing, by default, to people who aren't concerned about being exact and who are happy to use technical terms as loose metaphors.  Many of these aren't neuroscientists, but people who want a little neuro terminology to make their work seem cooler. Accurate neuroscience is not all that important to success in punditry and publishing.  For example, psychiatrist Louann Brizendine's books on gender and the brain and economist Paul Zak's oxytocin book The Moral Molecule seem to me to write egregious neurobabble.  

(There are certainly modules in the brain -- contemporary work statistically identifies which areas are active at the same time.  There's a large cool literature on the default mode network, which is a pretty central concept in neuroscience: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_network ).  

(edited to fix a typo)

[Daniel_Newby]

The bullet points are objective and contain links to the scientific literature. The triune brain theory is rather more subjective.