When I meet Robert Newman, he is wearing a homemade brain scanner on his head. He had it built as a prop for his most recent show about neuroscience. Newman is a writer and comedian who had a hugely successful career as part of a duo with David Baddiel in the 1990s and has since been doing his lecture-cum-standup style of high-brow comedy. His previous topics have included the history of oil, the war on terror and evolution.

Off stage, Newman is the only comedian to have been cited in the science journal Nature and he has written about neuroscience and robotics for Philosophy Now. He’s here to talk about his new book, Neuropolis, and its accompanying BBC Radio 4 programme, in which he guns for an unlikely bunch of targets – neuroscience writers – for having, he says, a reductionist view of the world.

There’s an angry tone to the book, almost like you want to pick a fight…
I see it as more of a puckish book. There’s this tendency in new science writing, especially writing about the brain, to be really pessimistic about people. They make these vast and belittling claims about us that have nothing to do with science. So, yeah, some of it does make me angry.

How so?
It’s almost as if they think the nastier you can be about people then the more rigorous and critical your thinking must be, whereas to have a good word to say about people is to be Pollyanna, to have a sort of secret religiosity.

You go after some pretty big names…
That’s the whole point: it’s “church scientific”. These people are very influential and you’re not allowed to criticise them. VS Ramachandran, listed by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, says that our smile evolved from an aborted snarl. He bases that on no evidence. Brian Cox says that there’s nothing special about the human brain that a sufficiently complex computer couldn’t do just as well. I know of no evidence from any experiment anywhere that a computer can come anywhere close to what a mammalian brain, especially a human one, can do, which is to experience emotion. Sorry but that’s not science – it’s magical scientism.

What’s the problem?
I think that science is really important and should be at the heart of society. The fact that we get this magical scientism instead breaks my heart. And it can be damaging. Take [neuroscientist and author] Dick Swaab. He says – again, based on no evidence – that Japanese and New Guinean people struggle to tell the difference between fear and surprise. That’s racist! Then you’ve got journalists on the back saying how great this book is. It’s outrageous!

I was surprised to see Francis Crick get a rollicking…
In The Astonishing Hypothesis, Crick says that “‘you’ – your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will – are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules”. The fact that he’s knowingly or unknowingly echoing a famous line from The Emotions, a classic of neuroscience written by Danish anatomist Carl Lange and American philosopher William James, which says: “We owe all the emotional side of our mental life, our joys and our sorrows, our happy and unhappy hours to the vasomotor system”, disproves the very point he is trying to make. We are not just deluded autonomers – we work through a community of minds, a sense of self that is deep rooted in a shared soil of common understanding and experiences.

Stephen Hawking says we’re just chemical scum on the face of a moderate-sized planet. It’s like there’s a competition among science writers – who can say the most horrible thing about us.

Professors saying increasingly mean things? That reminds me of a famous sketch [one of Newman and Baddiel’s most famous sketches was of two scholarly professors who’d descend into increasingly puerile insults, each ending with the catchphrase “that’s you, that is”]…
Ha. Yeah, I guess so. See that bit of flob on the floor? That bag of molecules and neurons? That’s you, that is.

You know those pinstripe waistcoat and trousers I’m wearing in that sketch? When I took them off, it said Arthur Lowe in them. They were what Captain Mainwaring wears as the bank manager in Dad’s Army, so they were in two famous comedy shows.

Someone from the Times has written on the back of your book that you’ve combined “proper scientific argument with dazzling shafts of wit”. Have you written Neuropolis just for laughs or is there a more serious point to it?
There are lots of reasons why having a dehumanising and narrow view of humanity is bad. It has a chilling effect on the democratic process. If we are all insignificant, snarling killer apes then who are we to decide on anything? The global mental illness epidemic – there are many weakly acting causes but to be told that everything you see is wrong, that you are a violent, homicidal maniac with this slender, late cortical add-on that keeps you from dismembering your fellow citizens, that’s not going to do you much good, is it?

Where did the name Neuropolis come from?
Probably from watching Zootropolis with my daughter. We watched it again the other day.

You studied English at Cambridge, and have had no formal scientific training, but you’ve clearly read a lot about science. What got you interested?
It was about six years ago. My wife went back to work and I was the primary carer of our daughter. I thought: “If I’m going to be spending all day at the swings then I want to use my brain.” So I started reading about philosophy of science. At first, I’d have read a page and not really got it. I’d think: “Why am I doing this? Am I just a poser?” But I thought I’d carry on – it’s quite comfy here and I’ve still got half a cup of coffee left. Then all of a sudden, like when you first skateboard, you think: “I’ve stayed up there for a full 30 seconds, I’ve understood all of that paragraph.” It went from there.

Let’s end with a question that sounds like a joke. Maybe you can come up with a punchline. What’s the difference between a comedian and a scientist?
[Puts on a faux thespian voice] Well, that does sound like a joke, very much the sort of joke I wouldn’t tell myself. I used to go to a standup night where the host would read out the first half of a joke and during the interval the audience would come up with punchlines. To the chagrin of the comedians, the biggest laughs of the night would come from the answers the punters came up with themselves. It was one of the many occasions where you just have to take your hat off to the creativity and wit of your fellow citizens. It’s the opposite of what you get in these neuroscience books that say we’re all stupid and untrustworthy.

Erm… I don’t have a punchline for you. You should do it as a competition for your readers – see what they come up with. I bet they will be great.

Robert Newman’s Neuropolis starts on Tuesday on BBC Radio 4. His book, Neuropolis, is published by Harper Collins (£20). To order a copy for £17 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99