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Prefrontal.org
Personal blog · prefrontal.org/blog · on HN as prefrontalsciencescience
Prefrontal.org is a personal blog at prefrontal.org about science and science. Since 2011, 25 different Hacker News readers have linked it 27 times, most often “Neural correlates in a post-mortem Atlantic Salmon (2009) [pdf]”. The last post was in 2014, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (23) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link this 2009 Bennett et al. poster on a dead Atlantic salmon scanned with fMRI. It is cited as the standard example of multiple-comparison statistical errors in neuroimaging.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 23 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Neural correlates in a post-mortem Atlantic Salmon (2009) [pdf]18 people · 18 mentions · first linked 2012-11-13
- /files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.jpg3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-11-28
- /files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-07-04
What Hacker News says?
I was a grad student at UCSD when Ed Vul published Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience [1], which stoked a severe backlash from the fMRI syndicate resulting in a title change to Puzzlingly High Correlations in fMRI Studies of Emotion, Personality, and Social Cognition [2]. There is a lot of interesting commentary around this article (e.g., “Voodoo” Science in Neuroimaging: How a Controversy Transformed into a…
Comment linking /blog/2009/01/voodoo-correlations-in-social-neuroscience/
on “40 percent of fMRI signals do not correspond to actual brain activity”Submitted Neural correlates in a post-mortem Atlantic Salmon (2009) [pdf] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWhy are you calling Bennett et al "the Stanford... study" ? Not one person on that team went to Stanford. Direct link to the poster presentation: http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
Comment linking /files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
on “40 percent of fMRI signals do not correspond to actual brain activity”Thanks for the kind words. I am the first author of the "Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: An argument for multiple comparisons correction" paper. Happy to take any questions here. A link to the original poster: http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
Comment linking /files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
on “A low-cost and shielding-free ultra-low-field brain MRI scanner”The salmon thing was a statistical problem, not a technical one. fMRI data generate an incredible number of data points: imagine a movie, but in three dimensions, so you get a sequence of x/y/z-volumes. A typical scan has ~128 to 256 voxels in each spatial dimension, for ~1 million voxels per volume. This means that if your analysis contains voxel-by-voxel tests, you're going to be running a huge number of them. Eve…
Comment linking /files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
on “fMRI software bugs could upend years of research”Searching for "dead salmon fMRI" turned up the following: http://www.prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009....
Comment linking /files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
on “fMRI software bugs could upend years of research”Alright, since I did a quick skim over the article liked by @JonChesterfield and didn't find any discussion of how they calibrated their fMRI machine or if they did any Multiple Comparison Corrections, time to post the obvious: http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf fMRI is not a silver bullet, do your due diligence everyone. I'll wait for this to be replicated before I read anything into it.
Comment linking /files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
on “To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language (2020)”At first I thought this was related to the famous Dead Salmon study [0]. The article turned out to be completely different, and certainly much more amazing. [0] Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: An argument for multiple comparisons correction — http://www.prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009....
Comment linking /files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
on “The swimming of a dead fish (2018)”Here is a wonderful research paper that illustrates the misuse of statistics in neuroscience: http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.jpg
Comment linking /files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.jpg
on “50% of neuroscience papers suffer from a major statistical error.”I became a total cynic toward the entire field of fMRI studies the day I found out that they found a dead salmon [0] could tell what emotions humans were depicting in photos. [0] http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
Comment linking /files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
on “You’re an Adult. Your Brain, Not So Much”Dead Salmom fMRI Wired Article: https://www.wired.com/2009/09/fmrisalmon/ Research Poster: http://www.prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009....
Comment linking /files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
on “Reconstructing images a person sees via non-invasive brain scans”reminds me of the fmri of a dead salmon ( http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf )
Comment linking /files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
on “A student's grandmother is far more likely to die just before an exam”I think it was just asking you to register for Dropbox. If you close that popup the PDF is already open behind it. Here's a link from my server that should just work: http://prefrontal.org/files/papers/Bennett-Salmon-2010.pdf
Comment linking /files/papers/Bennett-Salmon-2010.pdf
on “Risk of false positives in fMRI of post-mortem Atlantic salmon (2010) [pdf]”The linked Dropbox page appears to be password-protected. Here's the original poster: http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
Comment linking /files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
on “Risk of false positives in fMRI of post-mortem Atlantic salmon (2010) [pdf]”Oh, but the paradigm-shifting revolution of a paper, sorry: "poster" surely is "Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon": http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
Comment linking /files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
on “Machine learning of neural representations of emotion identifies suicidal youth”Didn't we already try the theories of "differing brain size means <insert_gender,race,etc_here>" in the past? Any time I hear "fMRI" I feel a hidden tinge of Phrenology trying to pull itself back from the grave of pseudoscience. In this article I started to wonder here: As might be expected, more educated families produced children with greater brain surface area and a more voluminous hippocampus. But income had its…
Comment linking /files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
on “What Poverty Does to the Young Brain”I assume this is the dead fish paper: http://prefrontal.org/blog/2009/09/the-story-behind-the-atla... [edit] The above is a link to a blog post. Is this the paper: http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
Comment linking /files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
on “Brain scans link concern for justice with reason, not emotion”This has led to some interesting neurological findings: Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.jpg via http://www.metafilter.com/85322/The-Wisdom-of-Salmon An extreme example, illustrating a common mistake in the field. https://xkcd.com/882/ has the gist of it.
Comment linking /files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.jpg
on “Google Search Terms Can Predict the Stock Market”Oh it has FMRI results. I wonder what dead salmon think of high ceilings? ( http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf )
Comment linking /files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
on “Why Our Brains Love High Ceilings”A lot of people worry that exposing their baby to another language will somehow impair its ability to learn theirs. This isn't true, but people worry anyway. --- The result described in this press release isn't new. We already knew that neonates are able to distinguish languages they've been exposed to from languages that they haven't been. What this study adds is "we documented an existing known result, but with so…
Comment linking /files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
on “Learning a foreign language–before you're born”Link to salmon study: http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf Choice quotes: "[the salmon] was not alive at the time of scanning" "The salmon was asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing."
Comment linking /files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
on “Flaws uncovered in the software researchers use to analyze fM.R.I. data”Another classic of the genre is the ol' dead fish fMRI analysis: http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.jpg
Comment linking /files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.jpg
on “Beware explanations from AI in health care”Well, we'll have to see the paper to know more. For an example of one of the classic kinds of "debunking" that this kind of research tends to get, see "Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: An argument for multiple comparisons correction" ( http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf , PDF)
Comment linking /files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
on “'Vegetative' patient communicates”http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
Comment linking /files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
on “Human neuroscience mustn't forget its human dimension”It is a reference to this ( http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf ) fMRI study, where using standard fMRI analysis techniques researchers found significant results when using a dead salmon as a subject.
Comment linking /files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
on “Human neuroscience mustn't forget its human dimension”See also: Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: An argument for multiple comparisons correction http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
Comment linking /files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
on “Spontaneous Events Drive Brain Functional Connectivity?”
