| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
Understanding what’s going on inside the body, and especially the brain, needs healthy scepticism
Monday, December 3, 2012 1:30
% of readers think this story is Fact. Add your two cents.
The New Yorker on the ups and downs of brainy ideas:
About half a dozen PET studies of speech perception had been published, all in top journals, and David tried to synthesize them, essentially by comparing which parts of the brain were said to be active during the processing of speech in each of the studies. What he found, shockingly, was that there was virtually no agreement. Every new study had published with great fanfare, but collectively they were so inconsistent they seemed to add up to nothing. It was like six different witnesses describing a crime in six different ways.
This was terrible news for neuroscience—if six studies led to six different answers, why should anybody believe anything that neuroscientists had to say? Much hand-wringing followed. Was it because PET, which involves injecting a radioactive tracer into the brain, was unreliable? Were the studies themselves somehow sloppy? Nobody seemed to know…
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/what-neuroscience-really-teaches-us-and-what-it-doesnt.html#ixzz2DxGPFiXd
Q What Neuroscience Really Teaches Us, and What It Doesn’t : The New Yorker:
2012-12-03 01:21:56
Source: http://gmopundit.blogspot.com/2012/12/understanding-whats-going-on-inside.html
Source:
