PINNING DOWN POTENTIAL 31A simple illustration is the interpretations of brain- volume diff erences
between males and females and explanation for the (formerly) huge
attainment gap in math achievement. On the basis of “biological” (hor-
monal) and “brain” studies, scientists have told educators to pay more
attention to biological diff erences between boys and girls. Over the past
thirty years, however, that attainment gap has virtually dis appeared
in schools. In the United States, fully 30 percent of math PhDs are now
awarded to women, obviously for reasons to be understood at levels other
than neural networks.
Much of the prob lem lies in the tendency to resort to simple meta phors
or mechanistic models of brain, as mentioned above. Th is is why, in their
book Brainwashed: Th e Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience, Sally
Satel and Scott Lilienfeld off er a stern warning about overly determinis-
tic interpretations of scientifi c fi ndings, especially when those fi ndings
gloss over limitations and complexities. And I may be skeptical about
Paul Howard- Jones’s apps (see above), but he is quite critical, too, about
the way that “myths about the brain— neuromyths— have persisted in
schools and colleges, oft en being used to justify in eff ec tive approaches to
teaching.”^36
A major prob lem is that, however impressive the technicolor pictures
of brain scans may be, they are particularly diffi cult to interpret. In
chapter 6, I discuss a number of prob lems, such as noise in the system,
the experience of having a scan while confi ned in a large cylindrical
enclosure, the diffi culty of presenting realistic cognitive tasks and evok-
ing meaningful responses, and so on.
Brain imaging is rather like trying to work out what goes on in a com-
plex factory by observing how brightly lit diff er ent rooms become when
raw materials go in or products come out. Except that, in the case of MRI
scans, the light is averaged across thousands of diff er ent “win dows” (or
microscopic blocks of brain tissue). Th is says little about what really goes
on behind them, on what bases, and with what results. As Matteo Caran-
dini reminds us in Th e Future of the Brain, cognition does not reside in
isolated cir cuits but in the computations that emerge between them.^37
Perhaps it is not surprising that, in an amusing aside, Craig Bennett
and colleagues discovered signs of apparent activity in an MRI scan of
the brain of a dead salmon! Th ey were duly awarded the 2012 IgNobel
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