Neuroscience in Psychology Textbooks 35brain, only smaller. How could such a squishy little blob of tissue allow
us to become neuroscientists? To make music of exquisite beauty? To
seek a cure for cancer? To fall in love? Or to read a book like this one?
(Coon & Mitterer, 2012, p. 51)The Cerebral Cortex—My, What a Wrinkled Brain You Have!
(Coon & Mitterer, 2012, p. 64)Textbooks used to be dry and dull. It was up to the lecturer to bring
some life to it: his or her enthusiasm and his or her occasional humorous
note could make the subject matter engaging or not. Now this task seems to
be outsourced, or should we say, the textbooks themselves mimic this
spicing up of dull course matter. But while of course a good lecturer also
has his or her tricks, one could argue that textbooks plainly go for pimping
the learning material and using the methodologies of the glossies and the
current media formats.
A central example of the latter is the use of personalized stories and
anecdotes: “When Vicky visited her neurologist, she was desperate,” opens
the Chapter “Neuroscience and Behavior” of Feldman: “Her frequent and
severe epileptic seizures weren’t just interfering with her day-to-day life—
they were putting her in danger” (Feldman, 2015, p. 50). Chapter 2 of
Hockenbury et al. (2015), also titled “Neuroscience and Behavior,” begins
with “The headaches began without warning. A pounding, intense pain just
over Asha’s left temple” (. 40). The “teasing” factor of the opening
sentence of the chapter “Brain and behavior” in Coon and Mitterer (2012)
is even more greater: “One morning Bryan Kolb lost his left hand. Up early
to feed his cat, he could not see his hand,” only a few lines further it is
explained that he suffered a stroke (p. 51). Of course, the use of these little
vignettes with which the reader is supposed to easily connect is a format
widely used in the media such as the daily TV news. The aim is to make
science or the news more accessible by connecting it to a story, a concrete,
anecdotal and personal story to which the reader or viewer is supposed to
emotionally connect so as to, arguably, assess easier the bigger picture.
This emotionalization and anecdotization could also be connected to
psychologization: news and scientific issues are approached from a