8 years ago
5
Could Brain Research From The Past 15 Years Really Be Wrong?
A major discovery (and not the good kind) can mean that up to 40,000 research studies about how the brain functions published over the past 15 years could go out the window. There has been a bug (and not the insect kind) in the software used to create functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) images of the brain. fMRI is an imaging technology widely used to generate pictures of the brain and its activity. If you have ever seen a picture of the brain with different colors in different parts of the brain showing brain activity, that’s fMRI. So, many of the studies that have told us what happens in your brain when you...
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No, Forbes. I won't turn off my ad blocker.
Me neither. Sorry forbes, I don't want your shitty ad malware and tracking.
I added a non-paywalled link. Includes a link to the paper.
Wow, this is huge if it is the case.
These implementation problems have been recognized for years and years. This coverage hits harder because science itself is in the midst of a massive crisis around the reproducibility of results. Or should, by now, we be saying the ‘irreproducibility?’
I had the privilege of working on a 3T fMRI scanner at MCV in Richmond, Virginia. What a pain that thing was to calibrate, and the lead engineer was almost constantly at the site when they were running scans just to keep it running properly. This was 2001-2003. It's pretty cool stuff, I must say. There are a lot of really smart Ph.D.-level engineers working on these things, they will figure it out.