The charm of one-sentence biological explanations

A friend recently explained their excess of empathy by confidently talking about their mirror neurons, and my internal skepticism alarm went off in my mind. So I thought I'd write a little article about this topic to figure out why it irked me so much.

A single word is not a model

I keep seeing a particular kind of explanation that sounds precise, but has little depth to it. Pick a biological term that sounds fancy, then use it as a stand-in for a high-level human function. For fun, I decided to call these "charming explanations". The speaker starts with implementation details (cells, transmitters, circuits) and vaults directly to psychology or even sociology (empathy, motivation, depression), skipping every level of complexity in between.

A better habit is to respect the appropriate levels of explanation: what a system does and how it does it. And most importantly, having the humility to understand that we don't have a complete understanding of human complexity, much less in a single phrase.

So why do charming explanations spread so easily? I think part of it is that some topics come with built-in authority cues. Neuroscience does this very well. Put a claim next to a brain scan, and it starts to feel serious, as if the imagery is visual proof rather than processed data. Racine and colleagues described this as neuro-realism and neuro-essentialism: imaging can make a phenomenon feel objectively “real,” and it encourages the idea that the brain story is the deepest story about the person. Other work also shows that adding brain scans to claims can raise perceived quality of reasoning as well. That cultural backdrop helps a phrase like “mirror neurons” function as a catch-all explanation even when it covers only one slice of the complex reality.

There is also a more general persuasion trick here: technical decoration can substitute for actual explanatory work. In experiments, adding irrelevant neuroscience details makes weak explanations feel more satisfying, even when the extra words add exactly zero logic (they even mention the seductive allure of these explanations - coincidentally overlapping with charming explanations!). I think this points out the weakness we have to certain types of explanations and ways of thinking, although in charming explanations we usually omit as much detail as possible.

Examples of charming explanations that irk me

Mirror neurons as the empathy button
I remember first reading about mirror neurons when I was about 15, around the time I read the book The mind that changes itself by Norman Doidge and In Search of Memory by Eric Kandel, and the original macaque findings were really interesting. However, the narrative overreach begins when the basic principle, a selection of motor-related neurons fire during both action and observation, transforms to the core component that determines empathy.

Even if you grant a role for perception-action coupling, empathy is still far off in terms off complexity. A whole bunch of brain regions and chemicals are involved in empathy, let alone larger phenomena that don't map to a single biological process. Mirror neurons might be part of some lower-level ingredients, and even that can be debated.

Dopamine
Dopamine is the celebrity neurotransmitter, blamed for everything from phone habits to lack of discipline. In the actual literature, dopamine shows up as a messenger across multiple circuits, and a research-grounded account often emphasizes learning signals such as reward prediction errors rather than a simple pleasure dial.

Parkinson’s disease is a useful reality check here. At its core, Parkinson’s involves prominent loss of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra and dopamine depletion in the striatum, which is why movement becomes slow, stiff, and effortful. Dopamine replacement with levodopa can dramatically improve motor symptoms, which is about as far from dopamine equals pleasure as you can get.

What do we see in charming explanations?

I doubt that these people are just gullible. I believe these explanations are attractive because they are efficient, and human cognition loves efficiency. Social cognition researchers have long described people as cognitive misers, meaning we tend to conserve mental effort by reaching for shortcuts when we can.

Charming explanations also create an illusion of understanding. If you can name a thing, it can feel like you have explained it. The illusion of explanatory depth captures that dynamic: people often believe they understand complex systems until they are asked to describe explicit details.

Quackery profits from the charm

Mechanistic stories are a marketing asset because they provide prior plausibility. If the mechanism sounds plausible, the seller can imply the treatment works and quietly skip the complex science.

This is why pseudoscientific health ecosystems love mechanism-flavored nouns. Name a biological process (“dopamine burnout,” “adrenal fatigue,” “vagus dysregulation”), then sell a protocol that targets it. Outcomes become hard to falsify because the mechanism can absorb any result: improvement proves the mechanism, worsening becomes “detox,” and no change means you just need to keep it up for longer.

Mechanistic reasoning is often treated as strong evidence in practice (hell, I, in many senses of the word, work in providing these kinds of mis-usable mechanisms) yet it can mislead when systems are complex and interventions have off-target effects. Fundamental mechanisms clearly matter, and they belong in explanations. The problem starts when a label of part of the mechanism becomes a substitute for the full causal story, and when that label gets used to sell certainty, products, or moral judgment. Or when it gets thrown out casually and irks me a bit.