Neuroscientist

Noun. Synonymous with "black person."

London streets:

"Hey Paul, have you seen all those illegal migrants crossing the border? I voted for diversity, but I didn't think diversity meant getting 5 stab wounds on my way to get a crumpet!"

"Bob, you're just being racist again. These "illegal migrants" you speak of are neuroscientists, lawyers, doctors, and scholars! Have some respect!"

by JeffarryLounder June 26, 2023

neuroscientist

A person that studies brains.

This neuroscientist is my friend.

by Simple_dictionary June 5, 2021

Neuroscientific Sophism

The use of brain scans, neuroscientific language, and neuro-authority to dismiss experience, consciousness, and meaning. Neuroscientific Sophism reduces every human phenomenon to brain activity, then uses that reduction to dismiss the phenomenon itself: "love is just dopamine"; "consciousness is just neural firing"; "spiritual experience is just temporal lobe activity." It's sophistry in a lab coat: using science's authority to explain away, not explain.

"Your meditation experience is just your prefrontal cortex deactivating. Neuroscientific Sophism: using brain scans to dismiss experience. The reduction was meant to explain away, not illuminate. But the experience remains, whether or not you can see it on an fMRI."

by Abzugal Nammugal Enkigal March 7, 2026

Neuroscientific Postmodernism

The application of postmodern insights to neuroscience—the recognition that brain science is not a pure reflection of neural reality but a constructed, interpreted, power-laden enterprise. Neuroscientific Postmodernism critiques the tendency to treat brain scans as direct images of thought, arguing that they are always interpreted, always mediated, always shaped by theory and interest. It emphasizes the contingency of neuroscientific categories, the social construction of brain-based explanations, and the power effects of locating "truth" in the brain. Neuroscientific Postmodernism is the philosophy of critical neuroscience, of the recognition that even the brain is not beyond culture.

Example: "He'd thought fMRI images were pictures of thought—direct, objective, true. Neuroscientific Postmodernism showed him otherwise: those images were constructed, interpreted, shaped by assumptions. The brain was real, but so was the construction. He stopped treating neuroscience as revelation and started treating it as interpretation."

by Dumu The Void March 8, 2026

Neuroscientific Moralism

A form of moralism where findings from neuroscience—brain scans, neural correlates, neurotransmitter levels—are used as the basis for moral judgment and social exclusion. The neuroscientific moralist treats having the "wrong" brain structure, the "wrong" neural activity, or the "wrong" neurochemistry as evidence of moral deficiency. Criminal behavior is explained by "bad brains" rather than social conditions; political differences are dismissed as "brain abnormalities"; moral disagreement becomes a matter of neural pathology. Neuroscience, which should increase understanding of human variation, becomes a weapon for pathologizing difference and judging those who don't think or behave as the moralist deems proper. The complexity of human experience is reduced to brain scans, and moral judgment is dressed in the lab coat of science.

Example: "He didn't engage with her political arguments—he just cited a study claiming her brain showed 'reduced activity in moral reasoning areas.' Neuroscientific Moralism: using brain scans to avoid having to think."

by Abzugal Nammugal Enkigal March 14, 2026

Neuroscientific Puritanism

A purity culture within communities that elevate neuroscience as the ultimate arbiter of truth about human nature, where adherence to neuroscientific explanations becomes a test of virtue and belonging. Neuroscientific puritanism demands that true members explain all human phenomena—love, morality, consciousness, politics—in terms of brain activity, and treats any appeal to other levels of explanation (social, cultural, experiential) as impurity, heresy, insufficient rigor. Members compete to demonstrate their purity by reducing everything to neurons, dismissing alternative frameworks as unscientific, and condemning those who suggest that human experience might exceed brain scans. The result is a community that claims to value science while being dogmatically closed to the complexity of actual human beings.

Example: "The forum banned her for suggesting that maybe love couldn't be fully explained by neurotransmitter levels—Neuroscientific Puritanism, where any acknowledgment of phenomena beyond brain scans is contamination."

by Abzugal Nammugal Enkigal March 14, 2026

Neuroscientific Orthodoxy

The established, institutionalized set of beliefs and practices that define mainstream neuroscience—the often-unexamined assumptions about how to study the brain, what questions are worth asking, what methods are legitimate, and how findings should be interpreted. Neuroscientific orthodoxy includes commitments: that localization of function is the goal, that brain imaging is the gold standard, that animal models reveal human brain function, that neural correlates are the path to understanding, that reductionism is progress, that more data is always better, that neuroscience will eventually explain consciousness. Like all orthodoxies, it provides a research program and community identity, but it functions as gatekeeping—determining who gets funded, what gets published, which careers advance, and what questions are worth asking. Neuroscientific orthodoxy shapes not just what we know about brains but what we think it's possible to know, making certain approaches seem scientific and others "philosophical" or "unscientific."

Example: "Her research on consciousness was dismissed as 'not real neuroscience' because it didn't use imaging—neuroscientific orthodoxy, where method defines the field rather than questions. The orthodoxy's power is making its tools feel like the only tools."

by Dumu The Void March 17, 2026