Self-Loathing for Beginners

This piece of mine ran Aug 17th in print, and can be found online here. It is unusual for The Times to do humor, let alone about neuroscience, so attempting a project like this was an invitation to a kind of filigree-style self-loathing, wherein the insatiable concerns of psychobiologists for repertorial accuracy (you just can’t convey the complexity of neurocircuitry in ten words and still have room for the graphics) and the delicate feelings of celebrities’ lawyers (note the ample use of words like “seemingly”) twist their tendrils about your waking mind and spin spiderwebs through your dreams.

Is it clear in my article that the brain doesn’t really have clearly-definable “centers” for complex functions like speech? No. Is it clear that diffusion of Botox into the upper reaches of the cranium from a shot in the forehead has (as yet) no support from experimental evidence? Not really. Was I able to suggest that the nicotine receptors that Botox blocks have never specifically been shown to occasion the release of dopamine – a neurotransmitter associated with a very different set of receptors? Barely.

So this article makes me out to be something of an idiot, neurology-wise. And that for me is the fun of it. Because really we don’t need Botox to make us into fools; the simple task of trying to write clearly will do that nicely and far less inexpensively. Alas, it also causes the brow to wrinkle.

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 According to the New York Times,  a Swedish company, Kasthall, is displaying a “Negative Text Rug” which proclaims “I feel like everyone is walking all over me. I feel so low. Like someone is standing on me. I feel as if I am flat on the floor.” The words, written in white cursive script on a dark ground, were created with a “pneumatic yarn gun” (whatever that may be) and the rug is displayed in Kasthall’s New York showroom hanging on the wall, (making every word it utters a lie). The rug’s pimps are asking $6,091 for it, far more than it thinks it is worth, which is what makes it so valuable to the self-loather in us.