The journal Nature has published an editorial slapping the New York Times for its incredibly stupid decision to run advertising posing as (really shoddy) science on its op-ed page a few Sundays back (see here for more, and here for the original "op-ed" piece). In Nature's editorial is a rebuke for some aspects of cognitive and affective neuroscience research that deserves quoting:
[H]ow do you find out what people are feeling? ... Apparently just asking them was simply not good enough. So how did [the researchers] uncover the innermost thoughts of their 20 subjects? The[y] used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan the subjects' brains while they viewed images of political candidates ... A group of cognitive neuroscientists was swift to object to its conclusions — which veer close to a modern-day phrenology.
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