[cknizek]

> I believe the "specialized brain regions" idea has been over-debunked. It was the source of so much woo woo in the late 20th century (are you right-brained or left-brained!?) that we've come to think it's complete bunk.

I still see PopSci articles with a title along the lines of; "Scientists have discovered the part of the brain responsible for X". Even in studies or experiments in the literature, I still see color gradient scales used for fMRI. These are known to vastly over exaggerate the discrepancy between functional areas. And yet they allow for a more easily digestible view of what the study is after, which is probably why they're still used.

I think what the author is getting at is that, yes, some parts of the brain are more specialized than others. But there is no specific part of the brain that regulates a specific function and nothing else. Rather, it's an enormously complex system.

edit: Color gradient scales are fine for academic studies and research. However, they can be misleading to laypeople.

[disgruntledphd2]

And remember that those pictures are themselves the result of lots and lots of clustering and dimension reduction, so are about as useful as cluster analysis of unsupervised data (which is what they are), that is not particularly useful at all.

I mean, the actual problem is that fMRI is expensive, and gives good spatial understanding, but bad temporal understanding (i may be mixing this up, I haven't seriously looked at any brain research in about a decade).

The statistical problems in fMRI are sadly unappreciated, much like the statistical problems in human research more generally.