[mikert5671]

I would consider myself an amateur neuroscientist, in the sense that I frequently read blogs on the newest publications and findings, have a decent background in pharmacology literature.

Aside from FMRI scans, which give us a very broad picture of the brain, there is no way to really tell "whats going on". We have not developed that yet.

What neuroscientists currently know, aside from FMRI scans, is that certain behaviors are associated with certain genes. They can say, people who had gene X and went through life situation Y, were Z percent more likely to have a bad outcome. This is where the human behavior is deterministic idea (and "evidence") comes from. One specific expert on human behavior is Robert Sapolsky from stanford, who no doubt understands human behavior deeply. Almost all of his conclusions are driven from the method I exclaimed above. Everything is a statistical conclusion on how the average person behaves, which is a huge error in modern science