- Yet a series of recent papers suggests the story may be more complex. If we are seduced by neuroscience, it might not be the pretty pictures that people find so alluring.
In one set of studies, authored by Hook and Farah and published in the September issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, people judged research summaries that included fMRI images no more surprising, innovative, worthy of funding, or illustrative of good scientific reasoning than summaries accompanied by other images, such as photographs associated with the summarized research. (Hook and Farah's initial experiment did find that fMRI images increased people's ratings that the research summary was interesting, but this small effect wasn't replicated in their subsequent experiments.)
- If we are seduced by neuroscience, it might not be the pretty pictures that people find so alluring.
Neuroscience is very seductive to a lot of people, namely people who have a need to replace religion with something they view as more objective. There is a cult of worship that has simply substituted "brain" for "god", and yet somehow view themselves as more objective thinkers than their religious counterparts. It's somewhat understandable among the public, because obviously neuroscience is very complex and it's impossible for most people, even highly intelligent and educated people, to understand most of it. However, it's way scarier when neuroscientists start talking like cultists. (For example, here.)