Your Wisdom Spot

Dileep Jeste, professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at the University of California in San Diego, and Thomas Meeks claim to have discovered the brain's repository for wisdom according to an article in the Mail on-line. Another MRI miracle scan, this time watching blood flow in the brain while dealing with a "moral" question.

Turns out the "wisdom" spot is all over the place in the brain. According to Meeks,

'Several brain regions appear to be involved in different components of wisdom. It seems to involve a balance between more primitive brain regions, like the limbic system, and the newest ones, such as the prefrontal cortex.'

Regadless of this mishmash of activity, the experiment is declared a successful attack on metaphysics:

"Professor Jeste admitted the possibility that wisdom and free will are based on the make-up of someone's brain rather than metaphysics is unsettling."
"But he said: 'Knowledge of the underlying mechanisms in the brain could potentially lead to developing interventions for enhancing wisdom.'"

These nuovo-phrenologists never admit for a second that the brain is plastic, always changing, with an internal mobility unlike any hardware computer. Moreover, its structure is massively parallel, unclocked, non-synchronous, and works even while changing itself around. So what chance is there that there is a fixed set of neurons that contain "wisdom"?

Enhancing wisdom by manipulating the wisdom spot? Is there any wonder that the pronouncements of scientists are taken with skepticism when so much of their output is sheer bull?