Prefrontal.org - The Story Behind the Atlantic Salmon

Anyone foolish enough to read the science section of the newspaper is aware of the tendency of lazy writers to publish bunk stories about how pictures of parts of the brain lighting up in an MRI “prove” that it’s just possible but maybe, somehow, the brain might just be involved in thinking.

A radical idea, I know.

Recently, some scientists were playing around with their own MRI machine and they made a remarkable discovery: the brain of a dead salmon they threw in the scanner had a “statistically significant” response that shows us how dead salmon are able to process the emotions in people’s face:

I ran the fish data through my SPM processing pipelines and couldn’t believe what I saw. Sure, there were some false positives. Just about any volume with 65,000 voxels is going to have some false positives with uncorrected statistics. Rather, it was where the false positives occurred that really floored me. A cluster of three significant voxels were arranged together right along the midline of the salmon’s brain.

A quick joke article later, and boom, they’ve published an important cautionary tale about relying on weak statistics.