As in contemporary art, critics of a certain age, aching to keep up, can be the first to hop aboard. A.S. Byatt is among those Tallis admonishes for being dazzled by neuro-lit crit. Mirror neurons, she has suggested, help explain the appeal of John Donne's erotic poem "On His Mistress Going To Bed". Here she is in a radio interview on the same theme:

If Shakespeare had met a mirror neuron he would have loved it...Because of the word mirror, partly because you can take that out of a quite other vocabulary: "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?" And you can put it together with little blobs of brain matter which are in most people's idea formless, and you find form moving around in the brain and the eye and the mirror and — oh, he would have loved it!

A danger of neuroaesthetics will be the vaporous artspeak it can induce. This is not to say that mirror neurons or other discoveries cannot fire the artistic imagination or inspire a passing critical insight. But it is mirrors as a source of empathy that appeal to the social idealist or Utopian dreamer, which is why they make an appearance in the neuro-Arcadia evoked by the Cambridge neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen in his Zero Degrees of Empathy (Penguin, 2011). "Empathy circuits", he claims to have established (others disagree), exist in the brain. Terms like "evil" should therefore be abolished in favour of degrees of positive or negative empathy, and cultivating positive empathy could solve many of our problems, including the Arab-Israel dispute. Once again the human animal is destined to graze peaceably on the sunny uplands, this time through the development of the brain's intrinsic capacity for fellow feeling. 

Baron-Cohen must have been fortunate in his schooling. In the state sector empathy rather than facts, feeling as distinct from knowledge, have been at the core of educational theory for decades, with the results we have seen. When professors like him climb into the pulpit to preach a new science of feelings, a brave new godless world in which no one is responsible for  anything and all we need is to teach folk to be nicer to one another, it's time to take cover. My own empathy with humanity recedes each time I am promised a new edition of the New Man.

Baron-Cohen's Panglossian tone invites yet more scepticism: empathy is an under-utilised resource...Empathy is a universal solvent. Any problem immersed in empathy becomes soluble...I hope you have been persuaded that this resource is a better way to resolve problems than the alternative, such as guns, laws or religion."

We ought not to smile, yet it is easy to imagine a film starring his cousin Sacha as a crazed scientist with a fetching grin. Essentially his is a sentimental vision, reminiscent of H.G. Wells's childlike Eloi in The Time Machine, and for discriminating reviewers like Andrew Scull in the Times Literary Supplement the book is indeed "all a bit of scientific magic". Yet quite a few critics rather liked it — why argue against empathy? — which suggests that the market for neuroscientific self-improvement is there. It won't include Marilynne Robinson, who prefers to see us as something more than an "optimised ape", albeit a feelie one.