I really wish that Epstein(real unfortunate name) cited some actual peer-reviewed research papers. Otherwise this "research" paper is just a vibes based analysis without a works cited.

[–] TankieTanuki@hexbear.net 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

wut ...It cites several. What are you talking about?

We're talking about my first source, right?

References

a series of long-term studies set in motion in the 1980s by anthropologists Beatrice Whiting and John Whiting of Harvard University

Studies by Beatriz Luna of the Laboratory of Neurocognitive Development at the University of Pittsburgh

An electroencephalogram (EEG) study by Irwin Feinberg and his colleagues at the University of California, Davis

a 1993 study by Jsus Pujol and his colleagues at the Autonomous University of Barcelona

Other studies, conducted by researchers such as Elizabeth Sowell of the University of California, Los Angeles

a 2004 study conducted by James Bjork and his colleagues at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, at Stanford University and at the Catholic University of America

I wish the article included links (a common complaint in science writing), but I doubt Scientific American would have allowed the article to be published if the referenced studies were all hallucinations.

Magazine articles like this are often reduxes of formal literature reviews. I'll see if I can find a more formal one.

Edit: Not by Robert Epstein, but related papers:

https://sci-hub.ru/https://www.nature.com/articles/nn1099_861

https://sci-hub.ru/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11343525/

https://sci-hub.ru/https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-00767-3