http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-06/mf_neurohacks
This article presents a refreshingly skeptical view of recent brain imaging science, but I think it doesn’t go far enough to indict much of what’s called “science” in our culture today.
While all sciences were little more than vague insights and philosophical speculation at one point, it’s clear that mathematics, chemistry, and physics, have moved beyond con-games and become realities in their own right – dogmas shared by large groups of people who may well never realize that other people don’t see the world the way they do. (Did you know some people neither know about nor believe in integrals, quazars, valence bonds, or heaven?)
Never the less, I support the softer sciences, like social sciences and economics, brain sciences, psychology. They have the potential to traverse the same path as the hard sciences by eventually achieving some amazing, powerful, and mysterious description of the world. When they can suck in believers by the thousands with a brief, intense flash of epiphany, they will be productive outlets for some of the insanity and eccentricity that the process of evolution has bred into us.