November 10, 2012

How a Dead Fish Changed Brain Scan Studies

Jordi Prats, Significance Magazine


AP Photo

This is a Halloween statistical tale. Believe me, it will scare you. It's about a lab where strange things happened, where a dead fish showed brain activity in a magnetic resonance image. This is a scary tale not because the protagonists discovered a fish that apparently was thinking dead, but because they discovered a significant proportion of brain scan scientists had been using sloppy statistics. That gives you the creeps.

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TAGGED: fish, functional MRI, brain scan

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