FMRI: Neo-Phrenology or “Window into the Movies in Our Mind”?
Channel: Nerd Nite East Bay
Date: 10/03/2015

Mark Lescroart at Nerd Nite East Bay #9, 24-June-2013

Search the popular press and you can find stories about lie detection and dream reading via brain scans, or about the “neural correlates” of addiction or romantic love. These stories have gotten so much attention that a cottage industry of de-bunkers has emerged to counter the more grandiose claims of the neuro-imagers. Nay-sayers point to bad statistics, unreliable effects and over-blown conclusions in the fMRI literature. So what should we believe? What do the appealing flickers of color over the brain pictures next to pop neuroscience articles mean, anyway? Why involve magnets at all, and what is “resonating”? I’ll run through how an fMRI scan is different from a picture or X-ray, and explain what functional magnetic resonance imaging can and cannot measure with as little hand-waving as possible. By the time I’m through, you’ll know whether you need to worry about the government eavesdropping on your thoughts, whether you can trust an fMRI scan to tell a lie from the truth in a court of law, and generally what to look out for when interpreting claims based on fMRI evidence.

Mark Lescroart is a postdoctoral researcher in the Gallant laboratory at UC Berkeley. He got his PhD in 2011, working with Irving Biederman at the University of Southern California. Mark also went to USC for undergrad, and graduated in 2002 with a B.S. in Psychobiology and a minor in Japanese. Mark studies the way our brains transform patterns of light on our retinas into useful information about the shape and structure of objects in the world. That can be spooky. He has also written popular science articles for Scientific American Mind, and received a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Fellowship in 2012.

Credits
Bosses: Rick Karnesky and Rebecca Cohen
Video Editor: Rick Karnesky
Videography: J.C. Cooper
Additional Thanks: Amber Crabbe and Kishore Hari