By Neuroskeptic, a neuroscientist who takes a skeptical look at his own field, and beyond. A different version of this post appeared on the Neuroskeptic blog.
Brain-scanning studies may be giving us a misleading picture of the brain, according to recently published findings from two teams of neuroscientists. Both studies made use of a much larger set of data than is usual in neuroimaging studies. A typical scanning experiment might include around 20 people, each of whom performs a given task maybe a few dozen times. So when French neuroscientists Benjamin Thyreau and colleagues analysed the data from 1,326 people, they were able to increase the statistical power of their experiment by an order of magnitude. An American team led by Javier Gonzalez-Castillo, on the other hand, only had 3 people, but each one was scanned while performing the same task 500 times over.
In both cases, the researchers found ...
