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Editorial
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In ‘Keeping the media in mind’ (page 304), John Cornwell reviews Eric Kandel's In Search of Memory: the Emergence of a New Science of the Mind (2007), gauging evidence for the success achieved by experts in explaining their science to the public through the works of novelists, playwrights and film-makers. For John Cornwell, popular culture—reaching its zenith in Arnold Schwarzeneger's Terminator Two—now regards ‘passive reception of neuroscientific ideas as even more to be feared than drugs, booze and passive smoking’. He needs to cite very few examples to reveal how, through a multiplicity of reference points, journalism can lead the unwary neuroscientist by the nose into the extravagant world of hyperbole and false expectation. He worries that neuroscience is happy to breathe the oxygen
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