15/12/21 19:23 Brain scans look stunning, but what do they actually mean?

| Psyche Ideas

Brain scans look stunning, but what do they actually

mean?

Evidence for different areas of brain activation in a language t ask, as

measured by fMRI. Image courtesy of Matthew Glasser and David Van
Essen, Washington University/NIH

by Danielle Carr

Danielle Carr is a writer and PhD candidate at Columbia University in New York who writes about the political
and cultural history of science and medicine.

Humans have created detailed scientific maps of the brain since Sir Christopher Wren
illustrated Cerebri anatome (1664), the first rigorous dissection-based anatomy of the
brain. But it is only recently that such images have begun to play a larger role in how
ordinary people make sense of everyday life. Dating roughly to the ‘Decade of the Brain’
announced by the then US president George H W Bush in 1990, high-resolution brain
images have been widely trafficked, from popular magazines to the courtroom.

https://psyche.co/ideas/brain-scans-look-stunning-but-what-do-they-actually-mean 1/6
15/12/21 19:23 Brain scans look stunning, but what do they actually mean? | Psyche Ideas

Glossy, high-res images of brain activity are created through a variety of techniques,
including positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI). As a research tool, the power of PET and fMRI scans rests on their ability
to show what is occurring inside the skull, tracking how neural regions activate in
response to experimental stimuli. Brain scans seemed to hold the promise of revealing
the ‘real’ neural basis of human subjectivity, and the method quickly began to travel
outside of laboratory research contexts.

The first appearance of brain scans in a courtroom occurred in 1992 when a defence
team used a PET scan to argue that the defendant’s murder of his wife was caused by a
large arachnoid cyst on his frontal lobe. The use of this image sparked controversy about
its admissibility in a trial where jury members are expected to make sense of the
evidence. At stake in this controversy was the fact that these sorts of images wield a
powerful rhetorical heft, a phenomenon bioethicists and critical scholars have tried to
describe with neologisms such as ‘neurorealism’ and ‘neuroessentialism’.

While both fMRI and PET scans work on a similar basic principle, fMRI has become the
dominant tool in contemporary cognitive neuroscience because it’s easier to use and
gives more precise results. PET scans use glucose as a proxy for brain activity, and
require researchers to inject a radioactive isotope into the arm of participants to see
where in the brain it is being metabolised. Meanwhile, fMRI is noninvasive and tracks
blood oxygenation changes as a proxy for brain activity, allowing researchers to put
subjects directly into the scanner.

Researchers should publish their ‘uncorrected’ data, and

be clear about what algorithms and statistical methods
they are using to analyse it
By the 2010s, the widespread use of fMRI was provoking critical pushback not only from
sociologists and philosophers, but within the neuroscientific community itself. In large
part, these criticisms have focused on the ‘pipeline’ of methods and statistical
frameworks that scientists use to analyse the data from fMRI experiments. Craig
Bennett’s ‘dead salmon’ study of 2010 was the most famous shot across the bow. In it, a
dead fish in a scanner was ‘asked’ to hypothesise what emotions people in pictures of
social situations might be feeling, and showed what looked like meaningful neural
activation in response to the task.

https://psyche.co/ideas/brain-scans-look-stunning-but-what-do-they-actually-mean 2/6
15/12/21 19:23 Brain scans look stunning, but what do they actually mean? | Psyche Ideas

These results were possible because of the statistical techniques researchers use to make
sense of fMRI data: fMRI images divide the brain into as many as 40,000 ‘voxels’ per
scan, and data analysis tends to treat each such cubic unit independently when looking
for activation. This means that at least 40,000 comparisons are being run on
independent units, grossly multiplying the possibility for false positives, unless they’re
filtered through a technique statisticians call ‘multiple comparisons correction’. The
tradeoff is that such corrections threaten to erase what might be meaningful
correlations. The resulting debate over whether false positives or false negatives are
more dangerous has developed into a growing consensus that fMRI studies must be
more transparent about their analytic methods: researchers should publish their
‘uncorrected’ data, and be clear about what algorithms and statistical methods they are
using to analyse it.

This kind of critical discussion of statistical methods has become a defining feature of
the fMRI research community, although much work remains to translate its implications
to the public in terms that a nonspecialist can understand. But for the most part, even
the work that does try to give them the tools for a critical approach tends to focus on the
well-trod terrain of the statistical analysis. Left out of this picture is a discussion of how
scientists construct the activities that a subject performs in the scanner. Beyond
grasping the stakes of these statistical debates, then, public engagement with
neuroscience would be less prone to overreaches of ‘neurorealism’ if equipped with a
better understanding of how scientists go about constructing tasks that can model
reality in the scanner.

An fMRI is not a picture of just any brain. It is the picture of the brain of a person who is
lying flat on their back in a tube-like chamber the size of a casket – often equipped with a
panic button in case an attack of claustrophobia sets in – performing a task designed by
the research team. The setting is about as far from the sorts of ordinary situations you’d
encounter in everyday life as you could imagine. Given these technological constraints,
scientists come up with tasks for scanning subjects that will model as closely as possible
whatever it is they are trying to measure. This might be the data or evidence behind
research that later reaches us through a short news story that scientists have found the
neurological basis of ‘creativity’ or ‘shame’.

Constructing a task is a delicate balance between three things: the thing you want to
measure; the measurable entities you will use as a proxy for that thing; and the task you
are going to use to measure that proxy entity. The thing you want to measure will be
https://psyche.co/ideas/brain-scans-look-stunning-but-what-do-they-actually-mean 3/6
15/12/21 19:23 Brain scans look stunning, but what do they actually mean? | Psyche Ideas

something like ‘empathy’, ‘impulsivity’ or the severity of a psychiatric diagnosis such as

obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). But because you can’t measure those things
directly, you have to construct proxies that you can measure. For something like
‘impulsivity’, you might choose to measure whether the subject’s decision-making
responds to normal incentives. You then construct a task that will let you measure it: ie,
you might pick a gambling task that offers higher and higher potential payoff, coupled to
an anklet that delivers increasingly painful shocks in the event that the subject loses the
bet.

Relating your object to your proxy to your task can require tradeoffs: a task might be an
excellent measure of the proxy, but the proxy might be more hypothetically related to
the thing you want to measure, or vice versa. Take the example of the multi-source
interference task (MSIT), often used to measure ‘cognitive control’, which is in turn often
used as a proxy for assessing the severity of diagnoses such as OCD. The MSIT presents
the subject with slide after slide of three numbers, then asks them to switch between two
different criteria for choosing the odd one out. Rapidly switching between these two
tasks requires the subject to flip between decision-making structures, relying on what
neuroscientists theorise is ‘top-down control’ of cognitive processes. So far, so good: the
task and the proxy seem well and plausibly linked. But if MSIT is being used to measure
severity of OCD or depression symptoms, it relies on a hypothetical link that maintains
that OCD or depression is defined by a lack of top-down cognitive control. Put
differently, the use of MSIT and most other fMRI tasks relies on this kind of toggling
between object, proxy and task. It’s missing the point to think about these kinds of
triangulations as ‘true’ or ‘untrue’ – rather, the reality of this kind of scientific
experimentation is simply that the so-called ‘hard science’ relies on a hypothesis-
dependent framing of the object you’re trying to measure.

What happens in the scanner is the construction of

measurable proxies for ‘naturalistic’ reality
Choosing a good task is not just a matter of constructing a hypothesis about how you are
going to get at the thing you want to measure. More practically, a good task is one that
shows a clear difference between the control conditions and the experimental
conditions. Even the most elegant stitching of object to proxy to task is useless if you
can’t tell the difference between control and trial, or if the difference varies so wildly
between subjects that you can’t extract what the trial responses have in common. For

https://psyche.co/ideas/brain-scans-look-stunning-but-what-do-they-actually-mean 4/6
15/12/21 19:23 Brain scans look stunning, but what do they actually mean? | Psyche Ideas

imaging studies, the ideal task is one that activates a discrete region consistently
between subjects, and, if a task can reliably activate the same region, it can make a task
more attractive even if its relevance to the object is less certain. This fact partially
accounts for the increasing popularity of MSIT, which reliably activates the cingulo-
frontal-parietal cognitive attention network. Put differently, MSIT is attractive because it
reliably ‘lights up’ a discrete system of structures in the brain that seem to be involved in
decision-making and attention; this means that the effects seen are far less likely to be
false positives à la the dead salmon. In turn, this increases the likelihood that this task
will be used as a proxy for more objects – not necessarily solely because it seamlessly
captures whatever object is being modelled.

Neuroscientists are far from naive about these considerations in constructing tasks, and
there is a long pipeline for tasks, from being invented around a lab meeting-room table
to being accepted as a standard measurement. For a task to reach this level of
standardised acceptance and use, it has to go through many stages. Because of incentive
structures in scientific publishing that do not reward straightforward replication, after a
new task is first published, other scientists will modify or expand the use of the task –
perhaps adding a component to the task or using it with a new population. After a task
reaches a mid-tier acceptance range, scientists who want to champion its use will talk
about how to standardise and apply the task. These types of discussions can result in
‘consensus papers’, or collective statements by scientists about how a task should be
used, attesting to its validity. Not all consensus papers are created equal; a consensus
paper appearing in Nature will have more weight than one in a smaller regional journal.
For instance, despite an influential community of researchers championing MSIT, no
consensus paper has yet emerged, partially because where it appears will change the
viability of the task’s broader acceptance.

Despite public enthusiasm for fMRI imaging, there is some scientific consensus around
its limits, and neuroscientists often urge caution in how their results are conveyed to lay
people. Yet still, as the bioethicist Eric Racine argues, excitement about the potential of
fMRI often neglects its dependence on task selection. The fact of the matter is that what
happens in the scanner is the construction of measurable proxies for ‘naturalistic’
reality. The tests are delicate, and the results must be interpreted with scepticism and
caution. As Racine writes: ‘Heightened awareness of these challenges should prevent
hasty neuropolicy decisions and prompt careful consideration of the limitations of fMRI
for real-world uses.’ What Racine means by ‘neuropolicy’ is the application of fMRI
outside of the laboratory, to do things such as assess a child’s academic potential in
https://psyche.co/ideas/brain-scans-look-stunning-but-what-do-they-actually-mean 5/6
15/12/21 19:23 Brain scans look stunning, but what do they actually mean? | Psyche Ideas

order to assign allegedly limited educational resources, or to adjudicate legal

responsibility for an action. But neurorealism, or the putative popular authority of
fMRIs, makes caution an uphill battle.

It’s true that fMRI is a valid scientific tool with manifold research uses illuminating what
happens in the brain. It’s also true that deciding what fMRI images mean is fraught with
multiple moments of contingency and interpretation. Deciding the meaning of these
images is not a matter of straightforwardly reading results – even less so when it comes
to what these images are made to mean in public discourse.

22 NOVEMBER 2021

https://psyche.co/ideas/brain-scans-look-stunning-but-what-do-they-actually-mean 6/6