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Dead Salmon's "Brain Activity" Cautions fMRI Researchers
AthanasiusKircher sends in a Wired writeup on what should surely be a contender in the next Improbable Research competition: wiring a dead salmon into an fMRI machine and showing it pictures of humans designed to evoke various emotions. "When they got around to analyzing the voxel... data, the voxels representing the area where the salmon's tiny brain sat showed evidence of activity. In the fMRI scan, it looked like the dead salmon was actually thinking about the pictures it had been shown. ... The result is completely nuts — but that's actually exactly the point. [Neuroscientist Craig] Bennett... and his adviser, George Wolford, wrote up the work as a warning about the dangers of false positives in fMRI data. They wanted to call attention to ways the field could improve its statistical methods. ... Bennett notes: 'We could set our threshold [of significance] so high that we have no false positives, but we have no legitimate results.... We could also set it so low that we end up getting voxels in the fish's brain. It's the fine line that we walk.'" The research has been turned down by several publications, according to Wired, but a poster is available (PDF).
Scientists like to make themselves sound smart and sophisticated but when it comes right down to it, scientists are a bunch of arrogant pricks who know nothing and simply want the rest of us blue collar folks to fund their insane "dead salmon" experiments with our hard earned tax dollars.
Whether it is evolution or global warming, scientists have been wrong about everything since they first started talking about the natural world. It is well past time that we go back to a REAL understanding of the world through our minds and our hearts, not through cold and dead measurement of useless facts.
Fish are capable of all sorts of feelings for humans.
Just ask Kanye West...
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
I love how on slashdot, if you are not an acolyte in the "science is never wrong" religion, you are *ALWAYS* moderated down as a troll or as flamebait. Make all the intelligent, logical, and reasonable arguments you want, but if you hit too close to home, the censors of slashdot moderate you away. Too bad for you lot that ignoring the Truth will not make it go away.