MacLean's Triune Brain Nonsense? Options

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Is MacLean's Triune Brain concept utter nonsense with no basis in neuroscience? I'm inclined to think it is, and have been told as much from many neuroscientists. Yet, the triune brain concept remains popular with laymen and the general public. Why is this? Here's an excerpt from a pro-MacLean site over his Triune Brain theory, to give you an idea of what his theory is all about.

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[Paul King]

Read what Maclean himself said about it here:
http://www.d.umn.edu/~rlloyd/EducatorsInstitute/Mac2.htm

It's a good link and makes for an interesting read but I still think Maclean's triune brain concept is childishly naive and explains nothing. Anyone sufficiently appreciative of the brain 's organization and complexity will tell you the same thing.

The value of the triune brain concept is as a point of view, not as an explanation of mechanism. It is a systemic way of thinking about the cause of behavior that is an improvement over Freud but still a long way from what is "really" going on.

The strength of the idea (the intuition, really), is that most instinctual behaviors (what he calls ancestral memories selected by evolution) are encoded in the circuits and pathways of the limbic system and below. Conversely, most cognitive functioning, acquired memories and skills are encoded in the cerebral cortex.

Current theories still support this basic separation, however the models have come a long way since MacLean's time. The neocortex, for example, is not at all separate and independent from the older parts of the brain. MacLean did not say that it was, but he did seem to talk about it that way. What MacLean really said was that the limbic system is a fairly self-contained, tightly interconnected system, and current theories would not contradict that.

Today's explanations of brain mechanism focus much more on statistical learning models and pattern classification. The current models around emotion tend to map the phenomena people associate with emotions onto reinforcement learning and behavior strategy selection paradigms. The trend these days seems to be not so much in understanding instinctual wiring, but in understanding learned behaviors. Learned behaviors are often the interaction of certain neural pathways and circuits (which could be called instinctual) with structured adaptive processes that lead to the formation of optimal behavior.

Emotions are being understood these days in terms of neurotransmitter systems and their relationship to behavior strategy optimization processes, for example, the study of "neuroeconomics" and neural mechanisms of decision making, risk assessment, and exploratory learning.