And he can trace its demise to 2008:
Such things are hard to measure, of course, but I think there’s circumstantial backup for my claim. In Brainwashed [a book excoriating the nonsense], for example, many of the key examples of mindless neuroscience come from 2008 (or before). Chapter 1, on the fallibility of brain imaging, starts with an article from ’08 by Jeffrey Goldberg, for which he traveled to Los Angeles to find out how his cortex might respond to pictures of Jimmy Carter and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It’s a useful study in the practice and promotion of witless pseudoneuroscience, but at the time, Goldberg’s case was not unique: That election season saw a rush of like-minded (and like-mindless) political neuro-coverage. Brain-based marketing firms placed their spurious analyses of presidential candidates and potential voters in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, and many other outlets; the neuropundits were running wild. But a lot has changed since then. Four years later, during the 2012 election, these sorts of stories were nowhere to be seen. At some point in Obama’s first White House term, interest in these political brain scans evaporated.
Chapter 2 of Brainwashed begins with another scene from 2008—the publication of the best-selling pop-neuroscience book, Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy. Satel and Lilienfeld describe its author, Martin Lindstrom, as a leading member of “an upstart generation of Mad Men known as neuromarketers.” But attempts to revolutionize the field of market research through the use of brain-imaging techniques haven’t gained much traction in the past 10 years. … As for neuro-best-sellers, those too have been on the wane since 2008.
Some of us aren’t sure if that fungus is really dead or just dormant. It doubtless took a huge hit from its use in politics:
For example, neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine suggests that if voters were attracted to Sarah Palin as a candidate in 2008, it may have been because the “mirror neurons” in their brains were going “‘ding, ding, ding—this person is just like me.’” And another group of scientists suggest that voters who rated Hillary Clinton unfavorably on questionnaires were, according to their brain images, actually “battling unacknowledged impulses to like Mrs. Clinton.”
Most of the audience was probably battling acknowledged impulses to send people like Dr. Brizendine packing, which seems to have been what happened—for now.