The 12 Principles of Neuromythography

Neuromythography can be distilled into 12 Principles:​

1. The reification of psychosocial words into constructs–attention, anxiety, openness to experience, cognition, consciousness, and so on–is inherently too abstract and reductive, and their supposedly concretizing operationalizations are tautological.  The Hegelian age of reifying these mental phenomena category labels as if they were real objects (“reities”) must necessarily come to a close as a consequence of understanding the brain. This may be characterized as an even more radical version of eliminative materialism.
2. Evolution did not select brain areas for abstract human psychological words (neural reuse), nor should brain areas be denounced for refusing to reveal themselves as the wetware implementation of said words (neural degeneracy).  It is the reified psychological words that are degenerate, not the brain areas. 
3. The Modern Synthesis theory of evolution was fatally torpedoed with the advent of molecular genomics in the 1960s, yet inexplicably sails on as a degenerative ghost ship eternally firing upon the creationist ghost ship. See the Third Way of Evolution for a liberative starting point.
4. Sublime self-organizing mathematical generators offer simple, intrinsic, multiscale systems to “carve” the body and brain at its “natural joints”. One particularly beautiful generator is the “golden” Lindenmayer system (A->B, B->AB) that appears everywhere from cyanobacteria to plants (dermal->ground, ground->vascular) to the animal germ layers (ectoderm->endoderm, endoderm->mesoderm) to the brain itself (forebrain->hindbrain, hindbrain->midbrain/hindbrain). 
5. Nothing in biology makes sense except in light of the evolution of substitution systems. 
6. The prosomeric model of the brain, together with dorsoventral domains, forms a common primordial grid blueprint across the vertebrates, defined by combinatorial molecular expression and embryological ontogeny.  This is clearly the most empirically-grounded way to partition the “psyche” into components, though they have remained rather inscrutable to-date.  
7. The Human Connectome Project multimodal parcellation (Glasser 2016), that can be applied to anyone’s fMRI brain scan, overcomes the limitation that individual cortical surface morphology cannot be accurately aligned to a fixed coordinate map, but can be aligned to a common topological one. This particular parcellation has the advantage of being informed by primate studies and human homologies with primate brains–a combination of machine intelligence and expert cross-domain knowledge.
8. The instant electronic availability of the accumulated 2.5M neuroscience papers enables the interpolation of the interpretations of thousands of neuroscientists, to get to know these new entities.  Importantly, we can do so de novo, without being distorted by a trip through the hazy cloud of psychosocial and philosophical words, or necessarily being limited to difficult-to-interpret computational models.  We can create a new interpretive meso-layer between ensembles of computational elements as witnessed in neuroscience and the elements of mental life as witnessed in aesthetic motifs.
9. There is an unreasonable connection between music theory, number theory, Fourier theory, and the Hopf fibration-like patterns in real neuronal ensembles. 
10. Mythological stories are pragmatically the best memorization technique we have.  We can use the ancient tradition of personifications in a new way to tell allegorical stories about real things, to guard against the epistemic delusions that result from reifying psychosocial words. 
11. The reason that a mythologized social graph “works” is it engages the retrosplenial-posterior cingulate-precuneus and temporal pole complexes of the cerebral cortex. Multiple studies have fingered these regions as the cortical hemodynamic centers of the “female” and “male” brain, respectively, in humans. 
12. Throughout the ages, certain people have found the characterization of gods, archetypes, and mythology extremely interesting, for some reason.  Perhaps these collective attempts to map the psyche were in reality attempts to map the brain.  If so, then this crowdsourced resource then represents a set of puzzle pieces that might be fit to their neural correlates–an untapped heirloom resource that might be more successful than abstract psychological nouns.