Diagnosing Our Purchasing Decisions

The report “Searching for the Why of Buy” (Feb. 27) is a bit more pie in the sky, a sign that they’re getting somewhere for the psychology researchers who feel they have a real “in” with their brain-imaging devices, enough of an in to worry Judy Illes of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. Not to worry. Since psychology became a “science,” the goal has been to find out what goes on with us without asking, sort of an elaborate wire-tapping system culminating in MRIs and such, but the modern “cognitive scientists” evidently haven’t stopped to think that the brain is still “outside.”

Reducing man’s “coolness” or “uncoolness” to patches of excitation in the brain is not different from Jonathan Swift’s reducing man to the size of Lilliputians. It is simply man caricaturing man as he tries to characterize him. It is the mind at work.

Forrest Strayer

Laguna Woods

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Misguided, ungrounded, brainy boys and girls playing with expensive toys, apparently oblivious to the arrogance and dehumanizing qualities of their endeavors.

John Leland

Altadena