I had something else lined up for today, but it’s humbling and fun to be cited (“cited”) 12 years later for a 2010 comment on a methodological issue in cognitive neuroscience that’s apparently still polarizing researchers today. (Marc is a former labmate, of course; no one ever said #networking wasn’t a thing in science, or post-science.) Fun for obvious reasons, humbling because these humans are all deep thinkers at the top of their game working in a very complex field. The question presents as tedious because the relationship between brain activity and brain function has been acknowledged as lethally tricky at least since it was possible to measure hemodynamic signals in the brain, and it’s hard not to feel like we should be over it by now. But sometimes truth isn’t obliging.
I haven’t gone through all the discourse secondary to the tweet of origin, but anyone who’s interested in getting a better understanding of the relationship between the kind of colorful brain maps you see in popular science articles and what the brain might actually be doing could benefit from a skim through the replies.
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