Last year at the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) meeting in San Diego, my colleagues and I presented the "Cingular Theory of Unification: The Cingulate Cortex does Everything" as a humorous satirical poster on the contemporary problem of neophrenology. You can read the extensive story here on my friend Shelley's old blog.
Rather happily for me and my colleagues, this work shall be published later this year in a German neuroscience satirical book "Braintertainment 2.0" and translated into "Die Cinguläre Theorie der Vereinigung: Der Gyrus Cinguli ist Für Alle Geistigen Leistungen Zuständig."
One slight untold detail about this work though was that right when my colleagues and I were presenting it at SfN, a paper in Nature came out about the cingulate cortex's role in "optimism." I could not believe my eyes. How much longer are the imaging folks going to get Science and Nature papers for simply mapping the brain? It's a totally fine scientific endeavor to do so, but such work is not the big science worthy of high-tier journals. So, I wrote a letter to Nature, which they never published. Its too bad. The text is below:
Dear Nature Magazine,
Your recent published findings of Sharot et. al, describing the functional brain regions involved in optimism have converged us into a rather drastic conclusion but that is nonetheless inevitable. Considering that the cingulate cortex is involved in loneliness, religious experiences, political leanings, stimulus-reward associations, motor planning, error detection, social evaluations, reward expectancy, sleep, and so on (references available upon request), we here propose the “Cingular Theory of Unification,” whereby we propose that the cingulate cortex does everything and is involved in all aspects of human behavior. We can thus move from determining what the cingulate cortex does to researching HOW the cingulate performs its infinite myriads of divine functions.
Tim Marzullo, Greg Gage, Hirak Parikh
University of Michigan
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