Larry Arnhart rightly takes issue with a recent New York Times article purporting to analyze the brains of potential voters for their responses to McCain and Obama. This is absolute nonsense, and it's getting very old very fast. As Arnhart correctly notes,
Here are some of the difficulties that contribute to the brain imaging fallacy.
1. Functional neuroimaging is not a direct measure of neuronal activity because it measures only indirect surrogates--particularly, the flow of oxygenated blood.
2. The interpretation of these brain scans depends on elaborate theoretical assumptions about the relationships between blood flow and neural activity.
3. Many different kinds of brain activity can produce the same fMRI signal.
4. No two brains are alike in their structure or functioning, and therefore brain scans require an averaging procedure.
5. Interpreting these brain scans assumes that mental activity can be decomposed into distinct parts corresponding to distinct parts of the brain, although the interconnectedness of brain activity make this unlikely to be completely true.
6. Although the sensory and motor activities of the brain do seem to be clearly localized in identifiable parts of the brain, it is much more speculative to assign the higher cognitive activities to particular parts of the brain.
7. Although brain scans and neuroscience generally show clearly that the brain supports mental activity, this does not show how the brain does this.
8. Since the mind is an emergent property of the brain, the mind depends on, but is not simply reducible to the brain; and this gap is most evident in the contrast between our subjective experience of consciousness and the objective study of the brain in neuroscience. There will always be a gap between our scientific observation of brains at work and our introspective knowledge that comes from our first-hand experience.
(Emphasis mine.) I would add that in any area like this, and particularly a very young scientific technique, the interpretation of the results is terribly prone to biases on the part of the interpreters. Taking this stuff as if it were scientific proof of anything is ludicrous, and it just has to stop.
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