Are bigger brains better?

Abstract

Cognitive psychology has witnessed a rise in the influence of brain based studies and this has caused debate among classicists and modernists in the field. The debate has allowed a reexamination of some key theoretical issues in the field including the tension between behaviourism and cognitivism, computationalism and symbolicism and the utility of verbal models of behaviour. Neuroscience has witnessed a rise in competing psychological accounts of brain data that raise a number of issues and questions requiring translation. Some of these questions touch on important ethical questions that require analysis and interrogation and challenge the positivist paradigm of scientific enquiry. In this talk I will examine a relatively inocuous finding that the brain changes shape with experience so called brain plasticity. Despite the advantages of a bigger brain, I will argue that the questions raised are not straightforward and require careful analysis particularly in a world of rapid media access and pressure to publish and to achieve ‘impact'.