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.
The Hardest Science 