Recommended reading: Alissa Quart’s opinion piece, “Neuroscience: Under Attack,” in today’s New York Times. It’s a well-written rant against a recent crew of neuroscience popularizers, including Malcolm Gladwell, Chris Mooney and Jonah Lehrer, who, she contends, are giving “vague, undisciplined thinking the look of seriousness and truth.”

Brain porn might provide short-term gratification, but it can be highly addictive. “As a journalist and cultural critic,” she writes, “I applaud the backlash against what is sometimes called brain porn, which raises important questions about this reductionist, sloppy thinking and our willingness to accept seemingly neuroscientific explanations for, well, nearly everything.”

Sounds like intellectual territorialism to me, or just old-fashioned snobbery—not unlike the way that many traditional journalists feel about bloggers. Most interesting is who she cites (and doesn’t cite) to buttress her case. We don’t hear from the Society for Neuroscience, or from voices representing the scientific establishment. Maybe one reason she doesn’t cite opinion leaders like the New York Times’ David Brooks is because he is part of her problem, a self-appointed popularizer of the social sciences, and has been widely criticized for his “reductionist” thinking. Nor does she quote the New York Times’ Paul Krugman – just a hunch, but could it be that he too is a popularizer – in this case, of economics? Or is it because Mr. Krugman was already on the record in support of Chris Mooney’s “The Republican Brain,” which he termed “a survey of the now-extensive research linking political views to personality types.” 

If not the scientific establishment, then who are the voices out front on this issue? Who are her go-to sources? Here’s the answer: the guys who, um, you know, sort of write stuff online, or as she put it: “A gaggle of energetic and amusing, mostly anonymous, neuroscience bloggers.” Yes, the dirty and much despised blogger class.

Hey, if you can’t beat them, join them.