This Is Your Brain On Science

摘要

Brain imaging studies seem so simple and elegant: Hook someone up to a functional MRI (fMRI) machine, which measures blood flow; see which parts of the brain light up; and identify regions associated with love, rejection, etc. But in a forthcoming paper, psychologist Hal Pashler of the University of California at San Diego and his colleagues challenge the validity of broad claims that come from these studies. The authors charge that shoddy statistics and noisy measurements are leading to gross overestimations of the correlation between brain activity and emotions.