Remember that terrific egg in a frying pan public service announcement warning us all about the dangers of drugs?
It was well done, stoners in the 1980s said things like, "I'm so fried" (they are much healthier now, they say they are baked rather than fried) but it was widely ridiculed.
Who knew that 25 years later similar imagery would have the psychology community filled with glee, just because it used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)?
Littlefield has tackled these issues before, like in 2007 when he debunked "dolphin-assisted therapy."
Sometimes, in hindsight, it is easy to see watershed years. 2011 was the year when I saw that neurogibberish was going ot of fashion.
Prior to that, the fix was in. Brain scans could do anything: want to prove liberals are easier to scare than conservatives? Brain scans. It didn't matter that there is no methodology for doing brain scans much less interpreting them, somewhere a gullible journalist was willing to reprint the claims.
Read more:
http://reason.com/archives/2013/08/06/the-gray-areas-of-gray-matter
