http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-06/mf_neurohacks
This article presents a refreshingly skeptical view of recent brain imaging science, but I think it doesn't go far enough to indict much of what's called "science" in our culture today.
While all sciences were little more than vague insights and philosophical speculation at one point, it's clear that mathematics, chemistry, and physics, have moved beyond con-games and become realities in their own right - dogmas shared by large groups of people who may well never realize that other people don't see the world the way they do. (Did you know some people neither know about nor believe in integrals, quazars, valence bonds, or heaven?)
Never the less, I support the softer sciences, like social sciences and economics, brain sciences, psychology. They have the potential to traverse the same path as the hard sciences by eventually achieving some amazing, powerful, and mysterious description of the world. When they can suck in believers by the thousands with a brief, intense flash of epiphany, they will be productive outlets for some of the insanity and eccentricity that the process of evolution has bred into us.
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I've defintely gotten into some of the softer sciences this last year and feel no more shaky about my knowledge than that of physics at the present moment. As you've mentioned, all of us science types are finding new twists in our work all the time.
I've gotten into the science of plant medicines, I guess you could call it.
For my there is never a concrete base to start on with another living thing but it's still worth studying other life to understand our own and how our physical bodies work.
The work itself further elucidates the expanses of the human mind, as well. I can perceive so many things I never did before simply by the shift in the intentions of my mind. I thought about some of these moments reading a blog of your back on myspace.
Life and matter are so much more than we can truly understand, any one of us, that I doubt all sciences, even my own. Or perhaps we're just living out Emerson's idea that any sufficiently advanced science will appear as magic to the average man. Maybe our universe is still just magic to us.
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