Educating people about the brain is a good thing

Thomas Insel's latest post on his NIMH director's blog focuses on March being Brain Awareness Month. Although as Insel admits, we don't know much about the working of the brain, what we do know is important, fascinating and people should be more aware of it. I think it's important to emphasise the dynamic nature of the brain.

I just don't think Insel's so good on the limits of brain neuroscience, starting with his claim that mental disorders are brain disorders. Of course, there's a sense in which such a statement is merely tautologous. But, he goes further to state that "with the powerful tools of neuroscience, we can now use the brain to understand the mind" but then doesn't explain how exactly. He's even not correct, I don't think, about Freud's project for a scientific psychology. Freud may well have thought that psychoanalysis may have eventually been replaced by chemical treatment, but he believed his theory of the mind would endure (read John Heaton's book). I'm sure Insel does not agree with Freud that his theory of the mind was scientific.