Hubristic Neuroscience (or, Mindreaders!)

Oh, barf.

On Sunday (Nov. 11), the New York Times published an op-ed piece written by a team of neuroscientists, led by a researcher named Marco Iacoboni from UCLA, and including a couple of folks from a company called FKF Applied Research. In this wildly overstated piece, they described a study in which people viewed pictures of political candidates and watched video clips of speeches made by these candidates. While doing all of this, their brain activity was measured in an fMRI tube. In the article, the authors made a variety of amazing claims about how activity in certain brain regions corresponds in an apparently one-to-one manner with emotional states. I had no idea that brain-reading was such a precise science! An example of this kind of bunkum: "When viewing images of [Hillary Clinton], these voters exhibited significant activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, an emotional center of the brain that is aroused when a person feels compelled to act in two different ways but must choose one. It looked as if they were battling unacknowledged impulses to like Mrs. Clinton." Whoa. I think these folks are trying to doing some more-traditional mind-reading here, along with that of the neuroscientific variety.

Thankfully, many folks have called out the Times and the researchers, including Martha Farah at the University of Pennsylvania, the bloggers at Mind Hacks, and Daniel Engber at Slate, among others. This is not the first time that Iacoboni and his colleagues from FKF have pulled off these kinds of shenanigans, bypassing any kind of peer review to present wild claims to a credulous public about what neuroscientists can do: In early 2006, Iacoboni and friends scanned the brains of subjects who were watching Super Bowl commercials. The results of this study were disseminated widely ("instant science" - that is, not peer-reviewed, nor up to snuff for publication in a scientific journal) on Edge.com and to the press (see here, for example). What a waste.

I've done my part here. I just want to make sure that at least a few more people are aware of the crap being perpetrated by some in the scientific community.

P.S. I discovered that the Times yesterday published a letter to the editor expressing displeasure with the Times and the researchers, signed by a group of top neuroscientists. The heart of the matter: "As cognitive neuroscientists who use the same brain imaging technology, we know that it is not possible to definitively determine whether a person is anxious or feeling connected simply by looking at activity in a particular brain region. This is so because brain regions are typically engaged by many mental states, and thus a one-to-one mapping between a brain region and a mental state is not possible."

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