[judk]

fMRI psych studies were debunked by the dead fish paper years ago. (In short: investigators misreport the measurement apparatus's random noise as significant results.) Why does the neuro community still publish fMRI psych papers? Is it is a case homeopahy where the quacks are the ones doing the peer rebiews and the entire specialty is a most cause?

[kenferry]

What the salmon study did was make some points about statistics in a funny way, but the authors were not trying to discredit fMRI as a whole.

If you look at most studies that came out before it did, they were already using statistical approaches that were robust to this sort of problem.

These include Bonferroni correction, cluster correction for spatial distributions, and Monte Carlo simulations and permutation testing.

These techniques analyze what you would expect to happen if there were no signal but a lot of random noise. You can then look for signals that are still significantly stronger than predicted by the null hypothesis. This is what most fMRI studies do, and this is not done (intentionally) in the dead salmon study. If you use 'em, you find nothing in the salmon.

[amirmc]

fMRI is a tool. Just like every other tool it can be wielded skilfully or incompetently and in the case of fMRI you must do your stats properly (c.f. the Multiple Comparisons problem [1]). There's nothing out there that 'debunks' fMRI as a tool.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_comparisons_problem

Edit: Indeed fMRI allows us to do things we had no hope of doing before, e.g. communication with those who are otherwise in permanent vegetative states [2,3] (that guy was my co-supervisor).

[2] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/313/5792/1402.abstract

[3] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8497148.stm

[swederik]

If Adrian Owen was your co-supervisor, you should know better than to say that fMRI allows you to communicate with patients in a vegetative state. VS means, by definition, that the patient is unresponsive. Communication via fMRI or brain computer interface is still only possible with patients that are conscious (e.g. locked in, or in a minimally conscious state).

[amirmc]

"VS means, by definition, that the patient is unresponsive."

And IIRC they were VS until such studies demonstrated that actually not all of them were (which was my point).

[nealabq]

I assume this is the dead fish paper: http://prefrontal.org/blog/2009/09/the-story-behind-the-atla...

[edit] The above is a link to a blog post. Is this the paper: http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf

[fluidcruft]

The dead fish was attention whoring bullshit. I'm willing to bet you actually have no clue.