Tag: fmri

The brain scans, they do nothing

Published on by Sanjay Srivastava

Breaking news: New brain scan reveals nothing at all.

This is an amazing discovery’, said leading neuroscientist Baroness Susan Greenfield, ‘the pictures tell us nothing about how the brain works, provide us with no insights into the nature of human consciousness, and all with such lovely colours.’ …

The development, which has been widely reported around the world, is also significant because it allows journalists to publish big fancy pictures of the brain that look really impressive while having little or no explanatory value.

I’ve previously mentioned the well documented bias to think that brain pictures automatically make research more sciencey, even if the pictures are irrelevant to the conclusions. Satire makes that point a lot better though.

Pretty pictures of brains are more convincing

Published on by Sanjay Srivastava5 Comments

This study seemed like it was begging to be done, so I figured somebody must have done it already. Thank you Google Scholar for helping me find it…

Seeing is believing: The effect of brain images on judgments of scientific reasoning [pdf]

David P. McCabe and Alan D. Castel

Brain images are believed to have a particularly persuasive influence on the public perception of research on cognition. Three experiments are reported showing that presenting brain images with articles summarizing cognitive neuroscience research resulted in higher ratings of scientific reasoning for arguments made in those articles, as compared to articles accompanied by bar graphs, a topographical map of brain activation, or no image. These data lend support to the notion that part of the fascination, and the credibility, of brain imaging research lies in the persuasive power of the actual brain images themselves. We argue that brain images are influential because they provide a physical basis for abstract cognitive processes, appealing to people’s affinity for reductionistic explanations of cognitive phenomena.

For a few years now I’ve been joking that I should end every talk with a slide of a random brain image, and conclude, “Aaaannnd… all of this happens in the brain!” This is solid evidence that doing so would help my credibility.

Now, the next big question is: who’s going to replicate this with psychologists and neuroscientists as the subjects?