04/06/2025
🧠✨ Brain scans are powerful… but not in the way the internet thinks.
Contrary to popular belief, there is no brain scan that can diagnose mental disorders, personality traits, attachment, narcissism or trauma. Despite what you’ve seen in clickbait headlines or insta videos claiming to ‘see narcissism’ or ‘detect ADHD in the brain,’ no diagnostic brain imaging exists for any psychological or emotional ‘condition.’
Yes, neuroscientific studies have explored correlations between brain structure or activity and various behaviours or diagnoses, but these are exploratory, small-scale, and not replicable or diagnostic. As neuroscientists like Dr. Martha Farah and Dr. Sally Satel have long warned, we are a long way from being able to make any individual-level clinical predictions from brain scans.
🔍 What brain scans can do is detect physical abnormalities: tumours, bleeds, strokes, injuries, and disease. What they can’t do is read your mind, find out your attachment styles, measure your empathy, or tell if someone is a ‘psychopath’ or a ‘narcissist’.
Why does this matter? Because misinformation about brain imaging is being used to justify dangerous assumptions in law, education, and mental health, especially against women, children, and marginalised people. It’s a seductive mix of pseudoscience and control. People don’t question it, not even politicians. They assume because it sounds scientific and smart, it must be right.
Let’s stick to evidence. Let’s not pathologise people based on myths.
