fMRI; the truth (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, October 03, 2012, 15:28 (4436 days ago)

A wonderful essay exposing all the garbage produced by lay-folks who make money writing books about the suppposed truth of brain function as shown by fMRI's. -
"Paul Fletcher, professor of health neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, says that he gets "exasperated" by much popular coverage of neuroimaging research, which assumes that "activity in a brain region is the answer to some profound question about psychological processes. This is very hard to justify given how little we currently know about what different regions of the brain actually do." Too often, he tells me in an email correspondence, a popular writer will "opt for some sort of neuro-flapdoodle in which a highly simplistic and questionable point is accompanied by a suitably grand-sounding neural term and thus acquires a weightiness that it really doesn't deserve. In my view, this is no different to some mountebank selling quacksalve by talking about the physics of water molecules' memories, or a beautician talking about action liposomes."
 
Shades of grey
 
The human brain, it is said, is the most complex object in the known universe. That a part of it "lights up" on an fMRI scan does not mean the rest is inactive; nor is it obvious what any such lighting-up indicates; nor is it straightforward to infer general lessons about life from experiments conducted under highly artificial conditions. Nor do we have the faintest clue about the biggest mystery of all ... how does a lump of wet grey matter produce the conscious experience you are having right now, reading this paragraph? How come the brain gives rise to the mind? No one knows."-http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2012/09/your-brain-pseudoscience