Surely the concept itself is sound if you forget the misleading names and the idea of three independent modules? The more ancient parts of the brain certainly are located nearer the brainstem, and the most recent ones near the surface.<p>Also, even though the brain appears on a high level to function as a coordinated whole, there are certainly situations where, for instance, the ancient FFFF[1] responses compete with whatever the neocortex wants to do. Indeed, there's even a plausible-sounding hypothesis[2] that subjective experience itself arises from conflicts between the different modules.<p>[1] Fight, flee, feed, reproduce<p>[2] <a href="http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=791" rel="nofollow">http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=791</a>
"Brain science" is ripe for debunking. Why do people still accept this humbug?
<a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2012/09/your-brain-pseudoscience" rel="nofollow">http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2012/09/your-brain...</a>
Having spent some time in meditation practice, I have come to the conclusion that this is true (maybe not literally, but at least in effect).<p>We all spend most (all?) of our time being driven by impulses and habits without realizing that we're doing so and without any choice in that matter.<p>Moments of mindfulness are the exception, typically caused by some "unusual" event - like somebody you know dying.<p>It's quite a sad state of affairs (IMHO anyway). More like living the live of an extremely sophisticated robot, rather than a conscious, living being.<p>Everybody should spend a few minutes every day reflecting on exactly how decisions throughout the day were made.
No matter someone's stance on this, it seems a bit forward to discredit a relatively widely-held theory as something that is weakly argued by providing a few bullet points and then an outright assertion of another competing theory. This kind of thing has no place on Hacker News.