Sometimes scientific creations take on a life of their own in the popular imagination. But what is it that allows a creation to escape into the wider world? In "Stranger Than Fiction" (p. 16) Meir Rinde writes of a drug named scopolamine and of other methods meant to summon the truth from people's minds. While such tools offered a veneer of scientific plausibility, the concepts behind the tools were built on simplistic frameworks of how the brain works. But these methods were convincing enough to make sense, at least in Hollywood movies and some courtrooms. One common understanding of the brain relied on the metaphor of the mind as a locked filing cabinet, which naturally suggests the existence of a key that, when found, would open the lock. Then it would be a simple matter of riffling through the files until the right one could be found and the truth pronounced.
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