There is a video by the psychiatrist Marian Rojas Estapé in which she uses the history of human evolution as an argument for current behavior. A recurring practice in self-help. Man in the 21st century does one thing: go hunting. The woman of prehistory went out to collect: little flowers, information about the wind, the rains. The woman of the 21st century goes out and takes all kinds of information, wherever she wants, ”she poses in the first seconds of the video. With this peculiar vision of gender roles, ancestral and present, and supported on the springboard of a supposed knowledge of human nature that the study of our evolution gives us, he launches an opinion on the differences between men and women as a result of his sense common.
The psychiatrist is one of Spain’s most successful writers and the best-known face of a type of self-help that uses brain science to advise how to live. The phenomenon triumphs in an environment of growing emotional discomfort in which more and more people seek scientific explanations and solutions to their ailments. “There is a confusion. People believe that neuroscience consists of applying common sense, and on television we often see neuroscientists who explain things without any kind of neuroscience, applying psychology or pure common sense,” says Ignacio Morgado, psychobiologist and author of several books on to make neuroscience accessible to the general public. “That a pleasant environment has a positive effect on the person is not neuroarchitecture, it is psychology or common sense,” he insists. “There is a growing interest in mental health and psychologists are now looking for what was looked for in other places before. Explaining problems to someone you trust and having that person give you advice and be with you can help to put your mind at ease. That used to be done by people in confessionals and now, sometimes, the psychologist replaces the role of the priest”, he affirms.
The advice of a trusted and authoritative person has always been in demand and also explains the success of self-help. However, as seen during the pandemic, scientists are very reluctant to offer dogmatic recipes, and science is more effective at detecting falsehoods than at revealing the truth. Daniel Sanabria, professor of psychology at the University of Granada, is one of many scientists Killjoy dedicated to questioning established truths that for many were already life recipes. In a review of studies published this week in the journal Nature Human Behaviourhe and his team concluded that the evidence accumulated to date does not allow us to affirm that regular physical exercise produces cognitive benefits, something widely accepted.
For him, much of the advice from self-help professionals “is psycho-obvious.” “A neuroscientist doesn’t need to tell me that doing things I enjoy, like playing an instrument or playing sports, improves my well-being,” he says. From his point of view, many of these authors, who give advice based on their experience or their beliefs, reinforce their authority by justifying themselves in science, speaking “of an activation of a region of the brain or a hormone.” In this sense, he agrees with Morgado, who warns: “People love that you simplify tremendously complex matters for them using a chemical substance. That you say that oxytocin is the love hormone, for example. That has some truth, because it is a prosocial hormone, but it would also have to be said that this hormone can lead us to be suspicious of strangers and trust our loved ones too much, to believe that they have the truth, even if it is not true”.
Sanabria believes that some speeches about the application of neuroscience to daily life can damage the prestige that science obtains with meticulous work to verify the real effects that sometimes exist, but have no application to our lives. He gives an example with music: “Imagine that you give an intelligence test to people who have practiced with an instrument and to people who have not. Those who play may have slightly better performance as a group, but if you randomly pick one person from the group of musicians, the probability that they are more intelligent than the other group is 57%. Therefore, although the scientific literature seems to show that playing a musical instrument improves cognition, it does not mean that we can advise on an individual level that playing an instrument will improve your intelligence, we are not at that point yet ”, he asserts. “I think we have to be cautious. Some discourses that offer recipes that work for everything, which is something very typical of pseudoscience, generate expectations that, if they are not met, produce frustration in people, who will think that psychologists say anything and will end up looking for answers in worse places” , summarizes.
Nazareth Castellanos is director of the Nirakara laboratory and the Extraordinary Chair of Mindfulness and Cognitive Sciences at the Complutense University of Madrid. Along with her research work, she has published successful books and gives conferences in which she goes beyond what could be stated with science in hand. “Science is wonderful, but it doesn’t give many answers,” she laments. “Besides doing my job, laying cables and making very precise measurements, then I turn to poetry, spirituality or mythology”, she says. “Not only what is scientifically proven exists,” she adds, recalling Goethe. Castellanos, a graduate in Theoretical Physics and a PhD in Medicine (Neuroscience), adds: “The world of science does not make an effort to disseminate so that everyone understands us and we cling to formalisms for fear of being criticized as frivolous”. The researcher believes that scientists have to dare to loosen some corsets because, if not, their space will be occupied by other charlatans without scientific training. She does it. In an interview on RTVE, Castellanos took it for granted that adults generate new neurons, something much discussed, and that exercise helps make it happen, although, to date, there are no studies in humans that have proven this.
Although many books that promote brain science can be classified as self-help, the differences between them are important. Belén Gopegui has just published the whisper, an essay on this subject: “Self-help as a genre designates too many things. Could it be understood that a book like Comportateby Sapolsky, the the creation of the self, by Anil Seth, are they self help? From my point of view, no, because they are books that seek to transmit knowledge. In what is usually understood by self-help, a promise of improvement is always included, and that is where something breaks, because it is a promise that, although it sometimes transmits knowledge, often does not take responsibility for arguing it, and almost never reveals even to what extent can they be misleading and incomplete”, he explains.
José Miguel Cuevas, professor of Social Psychology at the University of Málaga, also believes that it is necessary to distinguish between books and readers for whom that reading may feel good or bad, because, especially for people with pathologies, it is dangerous to give universal advice. . “If you give a depressive a book on positive thinking, you kill the depressive, because he feels worse. He does not understand why, despite the fact that he does what he is told, he does not feel good, he does not feel that life is wonderful, as the book tells him, ”he points out. “It’s another thing to recommend a specific book to a specific patient,” he adds. For other people, some self-help books can be “a nice placebo,” but, Cuevas warns, some have messages similar to those of the sects. “There are books that give you practical exercises so that you can unlearn what you have learned, to start from scratch and start creating your successful self, which even recommend that you stay away from people around you because they do not allow you to reach your maximum”, he relates. “When there is a message of total change of identity or values of the person, we enter the field of manipulation, because we do not seek improvement while respecting the person. You are treated as a human failure. They tell you that you are special, a diamond in the rough, to later cancel your interests and your experience, ”he sums up.
A final critique of self-help could also apply to some psychiatric approaches to mental illness or to the interpretation of brain studies. Although the person who suffers is an individual and can make changes in his life to have better habits and adapt better to his environment, he forgets that this environment has a great influence on his well-being and can be changed. A worldwide study on the increase in emotional distress, published this week, showed that people with fewer resources had worse mental health. Some self-help books promote the idea that only individual responsibility matters, something that produces frustration in those who try to get out of precariousness, a problem that has a mainly collective solution.
Despite its deficiencies, neuro-help responds to a human need for certainties and exciting discourses in the face of an existence full of confusion and fears that will always have a market. Scientists themselves, even the most serious ones, particularly at the end of their careers, want to go beyond the basics of their work. “When I was 25 years old, I loved explaining physics, chemistry, neurotransmitters, I learned everything and enjoyed learning and teaching, but when I’m older I want to project all of that further, into real life,” acknowledges Morgado, who put in The Faculty of Psychology of the Autonomous University of Barcelona is underway. “There is a need to transcend, to see what the use of what you have studied has been for, but there are people who climb a rope and when the rope runs out they continue climbing”, he ironized. Even a scientist like Humphrey Davy, one of the fathers of modern chemistry and an example of the power of science to transform the world, felt how little help sometimes comes when seeking comfort. In their consolations on the journey, a memoir written near his death, wrote: “The art of living happily is, I think, the art of being pleasantly deluded; and faith is in everything superior to reason, which, after all, is nothing more than a dead weight in old age. In a bad moment, anyone can accept that men only hunt and women do nothing but collect flowers and gather information.
You can follow THE COUNTRY Health and Well-being in Facebook, Twitter e Instagram.