alt Hacker NewsNow seems like a good time to remind folks of the Stanford dead fish fMRI study: https://law.stanford.edu/2009/09/18/what-a-dead-salmon-remin...
fMRI has always had folks highlighting how shaky the science is. It's not the strongest of experimental techniques.
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Why are you calling Bennett et al "the Stanford... study" ? Not one person on that team went to Stanford.
Direct link to the poster presentation: http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
Discussed here. others?
Risk of false positives in fMRI of post-mortem Atlantic salmon (2010) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15598429 - Nov 2017 (41 comments)
Scanning dead salmon in fMRI machine (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=831454 - Sept 2009 (1 comment)
fMRI methods and statistics have advanced quite a lot since the dead fish days, that critique does not really hold up today.
I immediately thought of it too. Didn't realize it was that long ago.
This study was really highlighting a statistical issue which would occur with any imaging technique with noise (which is unavoidable). If you measure enough things, you'll inevitably find some false positives. The solution is to use procedures such as Bonferroni and FDR to correct for the multiple tests, now a standard part of such imaging experiments. It's a valid critique, but it's worth highlighting that it's not specific to fMRI or evidence of shaky science unless you skip those steps (other separate factors may indicate shakiness though).