YOUR BRAINmore conservative title by nervous journal editors) and was leaked on
the Internet ahead of publication, subsequently causing a storm in the
blogosphere and other scientific outlets.
Many of the accused researchers later published robust rebuttals,
but the damage had been done. The saga left a lingering sense that
the new technology was producing data of unprecedented complexity,
and the sophistication of the researchers’ analysis simply couldn’t keep
up. After all, these papers were mostly published by psychologists, not
statistics professors. In research presented at the 2009 Human Brain
Mapping conference, Craig Bennett at the University of California,
Santa Barbara provided a further graphic demonstration of the folly
of conducting brain imaging research without the necessary statistical
checks and balances in place. Bennett’s team scanned the brain of a
dead Atlantic salmon while it was presented with emotional photo-
graphs versus “at rest”. Using substandard statistical tests of the kind
used by a significant portion of published brain imaging studies, the
group found an area of the salmon’s brain that was more active during
the photo condition compared with at rest – an obviously spurious
result with a message for any researchers who are lax with their statis-
tical methods.
Ultimately, though, the Voodoo affair and dead salmon study will
surely have strengthened the field, flushing out bad practice and
generating healthy debate about just how to handle research hardware
that generates a blizzard of complex data every second. Most psycholo-
gists today recognize that while some crude localization of function is
possible, the brain is best understood as being made up of functional
networks or systems. Most tasks, however simple, activate a whole
swathe of interconnected brain regions that work together in concert.
When leading psychologist Steven Pinker was asked to summarize brain
function in five words, he said “brain cells fire in patterns”, and it is
uncovering the ways that different regions of our brains work together,
in patterns of fluctuating activity, that is the foremost goal of modern
cognitive neuropsychology.
The plastic brain
A key characteristic of the brain is its “plasticity” – the ability to change
its structure and function in response to task demands. Probably the
most famous demonstration of neuroplasticity was the London taxi
driver study published in 2000 by Eleanor Maguire and her colleagues