Wired magazine has a good piece on recent attempts to market neuroimaging services to individual consumers, Brain Scans as Mind Readers? Don’t Believe the Hype, by psychiatrist Daniel Carlat. Vaughan at Mind Hacks has a good discussion of the piece, Don’t believe the neurohype (thanks to Vaughan, also, for alerting me to the original piece). The Wired article, in addition to sharing Carlat’s adventures with the pay-per-scan industry, has a nice table of ‘neurologisms’ as well to help out the less-neurohip among us (myself included).
(I was a bit chastened by the line: ‘Add the prefix neuro to a discipline and you get a new field with instant cred. But the science can be less than compelling.’ uhhh… we at Neuroanthropology hope that our readers will judge us by our results; we plan to earn our ‘cred.’)
As Vaughan discusses, some people have a financial interest in over-interpreting brain scans and exaggerating what they can do:
Scientists and responsible clinicians will know about these shortcomings and make sure they don’t oversell their findings, but commercial companies are not selling you the data, they’re selling you a way of make you feel better about your insecurities, whether they be commercial concerns or health worries.
All I would add to this is ‘most‘ scientists know about these shortcoming and don’t paper over them when describing their research (and we’re happy to heap scorn on those who don’t have the proper humility).
