Back It Up
Poorly written and full of “some psychologists suggest…” link bait speak…
You Love Your iPhone. Literally. – NYTimes.com: “My best advice? Shut off your iPhone, order some good Champagne and find love and compassion the old-fashioned way.”
Yes, people can go overboard with gadgets. However, if you’re going to flaunt your “fMRI findings” at least show the data and not just describe your (not the) “shocking results.”
The bottom line of this fluff piece is “buy my next book!”.
Thanks for setting the bar so high, NY Times.
UPDATE: This post takes the whole article apart in painstaking detail.
It also sounds like we are in desperate need of some advances in how we study the brain. A “flurry of activation in the insular cortex,” you say? Are all activations in the insular cortex the same? Do they have different patterns, trends? Do they last for different amounts of time? Are they placed in the same place within the insular cortex?
Besides the ever-present “Look At Me, I’ve Got a Book Out! I’me Special!” this article tells me we have a long way to go to understanding the human brain. Clearly certain parts of the brain being active while using an iPhone (or any gadget for that matter) is not the same as “love.”
Also, can we talk about this sentence: “This past summer, I gathered a group of 20 babies between the ages of 14 and 20 months. I handed each one a BlackBerry. No sooner had the babies grasped the phones than they swiped their little fingers across the screens as if they were iPhones, seemingly expecting the screens to come to life.”
Don’t all babies touch and swipe stuff? Come on? You don’t tell us if these babies had ever been exposed to iPhones before, used the on a regular basis, etc. Are we really supposed to believe that by the iPhone’s mere existence in the world that babies have spontaneously begun thinking “Apple-ly”?
It’s fitting that the title of his book is “Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy,” since it seems that’s exactly what he’s doing to his readers.