I tend to get a “we are science, and what we say is the definitive truth QED” sense from the NYT.

There are indeed some heavy hitters on the author list of the reply, and perhaps that’s the only way to make the point, given that you can’t give everyone a graduate education in a few paragraphs on the Op/Ed page. (Although as Ben Goldacre demonstrated in a recent entry here, you can try.) However, for good measure, they weighed in not just with their authority, but with a very concise explanation of the two most important problems.

I think what elicits such strong emotions here is that this really reinforces negative views of scientists. It’s frustrating but not surprising when science journalists sensationalize even the most inconsequential work. But when scientists behave this way themselves, it makes it much more difficult for those of us who want to present our work honestly. Worse yet when they do it with work that hasn’t even been published or reviewed, and that can’t possibly have really been honestly intended. Honest reporting of the results (”we carried out a study we knew was meaningless, and got uninterpretable results”) wouldn’t pack quite the same punch, but dishonest reporting isn’t the second best option.

While it hurts to have it made so public, the truth is that even highly credentialed, respectable fMRI researchers draw a lot of conclusions that aren’t justified by the data they’ve collected. And they do it in Neuroimage and the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, not just in the New York Times. And I don’t give them credit, as scientists, for their bad judgment. But at least there, reviewers have had a chance to weed out the worst of it, and the audience is, on the whole, a little less gullible.

My last attempt to comment on this story vanished into a bitbucket, so I’ve tried to keep this briefer.

http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~span/Press/bk091007press.html
This is a decent news item that includes a revealing quote from Dr. Freedman on fMRI use:

“Through his work with FKF, Mr. Freedman said he’s confirmed a consistent reality about human behavior: People tend to lie. “The ads that evoked the strongest emotions and are really firing up their brain, they tend to be relatively dismissive of,” he said. “Ads that are pleasant pabulum, they’ll say they are great, but their brain isn’t lighting up at all. That’s the problem with focus groups: People don’t really bare their soul. They are trying to protect their souls.”"

I would not be surprised if Dr. Freedman feels completely comfortable supplying his own reactions in place of what any subjects might tell him.

As mentioned above, FKF is a neuromarketing firm. Run by Dr. J. Freedman, Mr. T. Freedman (Dr’s brother, perhaps?) “who has published opinion articles in a variety of publications including The New York Times,” William Knapp (“a senior media strategist for three U.S. presidential campaigns”), and a few others.

Gosh. Convienent.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v450/n7169/full/450457a.html

The fact it got called into play for the US presidentials in the same sort of way is, to me, a nasty testament of the nature of the US presidentials – the hope being nobody looks too hard at the story beyond getting the impression people don’t trust John Edwards, or whoever. Wasting marketing budgets is one thing but using bullshit marketing techniques to sway the voting public is another.

Thanks for taking a break from the homeopaths to write about it, and I wish you would more often and more critically. British alt-med is a study in dangerous exploitation, but at least it’s exploiting a need that it can’t be blamed for; people’s alienation, for good or bad reasons, from proper medicine. Neuromarketing is part of an effort to create AND exploit needs; a dynamic that’s even more sickening in politics than commerce. And while for the moment it’s just bad science, the prospect of neuroimaging techniques actually working for marketing or political purposes needs a whole new negative adjective.

Is “Big Tobacco” in the brain-imaging business, at all? (I guess autopsies…)

They kind of did an experiment design using an acupuncture proponent, a couple of neuroscience types and somebody with a big MRI machine (manchester hospital?)

The idea was to show which areas were activated when inserting needles etc. unsurprisingly it showed an increase in certain areas when needle was inserted to shallow depth (just below the skin) but also seemed to show a deactivation in other areas when needle inserted to normal accupuncture depth.

Unfortunatly i didn’t catch all of it but it might make interesting viewing if anybody wants to find it on RTE’s website.

The images looked pretty though.

fMRI has been through its dodgy early stage (God is in the amygdala, etc) and some people are really starting to do interesting things with it. It’s sad that this sort of twaddle is what the public get to hear about.

it is incredible how large institutions, corporations and organisations buy the “oooh, look, fancy sciency thing” fallacy – i.e. some nerd in a white coat says look, the pre-frontal parietal amygdylificatory lobe is lighting up, so this person favours coke over pepsi/votes republican/has leadership qualities etc. seriously, according to this lecture the US army and police use fMRI as a rectuiting age. sheesh.

What’s also noteworthy here is that one or two of the authors of the original article are pretty serious scientists (certainly Iacoboni has done sterling work) but the driving force seems to be FKF Applied Research: (http://www.fkfappliedresearch.com/FKF.html) – self-styled “Leaders in Neuromarketing”.

Groups like this seem to be springing up a bit since the advent of functional neuroimaging – making promises that the technique can be used to look into the minds of prospective customers and offer big advantages in the market place. Anyone interested in this might want to take a look at an editorial in Nature Neuroscience (entitled “Brain Scam”) here:
http://www.neurosense.com/pdf/nn0704-683_editorial.pdf

or at an exhaustive look at this field hree:
http://www.neurosense.com/news_archive.html

I’m glad Ben drew attention to this – functional neuroimaging is trying to establish its credentials as a serious, though limited, neuroscientific approach and can do without some of this quackery.

Something that’s probably not obvious to the layman is just how big a deal the opposing letter to the editors is. The list of authors isn’t just a random group of neuroscientists; it’s some of the biggest and most influential names in the field. Many of those authors are editors of top journals in this field (at a glance, the editors of _Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience_ and _Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience_ are authors), other authors literally wrote the software that the rest of the field uses to analyze fMRI data.

As a casual read, that response is just a strongly-worded piece of an argument between scientists. To insiders, though, that response is an academic bitchslap stronger than any I’ve ever seen.