sally mckay and lorna mills

LOL salmon scan nabbed from prefrontal.org

What does it mean when an fMRI scanner reveals activity in the brain of a dead fish?

A: dead fish can still think about things
B: time to do some more better math
C: time for those of us who aren't neuroscientists to exercise some healthy skepticism when it comes to claims being made in the popular press for non-research-based fMRI applications (eg: lie detection)

Craig Bennett, the guy who put the dead salmon in the scanner, would say B, would definitely not say A, and probably would not say C. (update:Craig Bennett has clarified his stance in the comment section : he would say no to 'A', yes to 'B', and always to 'C'. - thanks Craig!)

* The goal of the Salmon poster was to encourage the minority of researchers who report uncorrected statistics to move forward and begin using basic multiple comparisons correction in their research. The Salmon doesn’t add anything to the technical discussion of how multiple comparisons correction is performed, it is simply a salient reminder of why proper correction is always necessary.
* None of the authors intended for the Salmon to go public in such a big way, especially before the commentary was reviewed and published. We were actually quite content to publish our editorial in a neuroimaging journal and be done with it. We feel that, fundamentally, this is an internal debate within the field of neuroimaging.

I respectfully take his points. But I was already leaning towards C before this salmon data and I'm still kind of going with it.

note: almost every story I've seen about this says that some people took the data to prove the existence of the ethereal soul. After a fair amount of searching, I still haven't found any such person.

another note: the best part of this story is that — in order to keep their variables consistent by running exactly the same kind of experiment as they always do — the researchers showed the dead salmon pictures of human people doing things and asked it what emotions it thought the people were feeling.

(thanks to Rob for the tip)

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