Brainscams: Neuromythologies of the New Age

Glib, painless routes to insight and mastery are perennial best-sellers [1]. Mountebanks are sure to flourish wherever credible authorities decline to produce the impossible and the hopeful are willing to substitute cash for time and effort. In the United States alone, an estimated $30 billion is spent annually on employee training [2]. Increasing numbers of "New Age" entrepreneurs are entering this lucrative field, vigorously marketing unproven techniques for enhancing employee efficiency [3]. The best customers for this "new look" in performance enhancement have been large corporations, government agencies, and, especially, the armed services. Inundated with proposals to remake their personnel with techniques developed outside established human factors research, the U.S. Army recently turned to the National Research Council (NRC) to evaluate some of the most heavily promoted packages [4]. Several of these purport to apply new breakthroughs in brain research to improving intellectual, motor, and social skills; others offer blueprints for deploying psychic warriors in the national defense. In scrutinizing promoters' claims, the NRC committee was repeatedly confronted with scientific-sounding rhetoric that, for the most part, masked a glaring lack of scientific expertise. Not surprisingly, very few of the assertions of improved learning, task performance, social effectiveness, stress management, etc., were backed up by acceptable research.