Today 01:28 AM
SABINE HOSSENFELDER
https://youtu.be/jHGx7HBB-J4
INTRO: Neuroscientists have long assumed that when a brain region becomes more active, more blood flows to it. That assumption is the entire basis of functional magnetic resonance imaging. A new paper now says it's wrong for about 40% of the signals, and it isn't the only recent study to find that a lot of what we thought we knew about the brain rests on bad measurements. Let's take a look.
VIDEO EXCERPT: The problem in neuroscience is extremely similar to what's happened in psychology, where scientists have been squeezing fake results out of underpowered studies with statistical techniques that were widely known to be wrong. This continued for decades, and now every time you turn around there is yet another supposedly foundational psychology study that could not be replicated. Basically the entire field of psychology has to start over again.
The reason these things happen is that scientists have very strong incentives to ignore these problems so long as they can get their papers published. And scientific publishers have strong incentives to publish papers because that's what they make money from. The tragedy is that this problem isn't remotely new. It's widely known, and yet nothing changes. Look, I don't want to say all of neuroscience is bullshit. Certainly not. The papers I just mentioned are in specific fields related in particular...
Neuroscience is in big trouble ... https://youtu.be/jHGx7HBB-J4
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/jHGx7HBB-J4
https://youtu.be/jHGx7HBB-J4
INTRO: Neuroscientists have long assumed that when a brain region becomes more active, more blood flows to it. That assumption is the entire basis of functional magnetic resonance imaging. A new paper now says it's wrong for about 40% of the signals, and it isn't the only recent study to find that a lot of what we thought we knew about the brain rests on bad measurements. Let's take a look.
VIDEO EXCERPT: The problem in neuroscience is extremely similar to what's happened in psychology, where scientists have been squeezing fake results out of underpowered studies with statistical techniques that were widely known to be wrong. This continued for decades, and now every time you turn around there is yet another supposedly foundational psychology study that could not be replicated. Basically the entire field of psychology has to start over again.
The reason these things happen is that scientists have very strong incentives to ignore these problems so long as they can get their papers published. And scientific publishers have strong incentives to publish papers because that's what they make money from. The tragedy is that this problem isn't remotely new. It's widely known, and yet nothing changes. Look, I don't want to say all of neuroscience is bullshit. Certainly not. The papers I just mentioned are in specific fields related in particular...
Neuroscience is in big trouble ... https://youtu.be/jHGx7HBB-J4