Dorothy Bishop writes, in her blog (HT Uta Frith): I was set off today by a report that “fMRI scans prove music is more emotionally stimulating if you listen with your eyes closed”. What’s wrong with that? Well… It seems every week we have another claim that brain scans have shown something about our cognitive or […]
Tag: interpretation
Fun with numbers: Coffee, Sex, Stroke
A new study in the journal Stroke is triggering lots of exciting news stories about sex, coffee, defecation, and other activities. Here are two fairly typical headlines: Common Activities Such As Sex, Coffee Can Cause Stroke [SmartAboutHealth.net] Sex and coffee ‘trigger stroke’ [BBC News] You might enjoy looking at the study itself, and asking yourself […]
Church and fatness: A hearty guess
Scientists like to tell what they have observed. Some scientists, sometimes, also offer up an amusing, possibly wild guess about exactly what it means. Sometimes a reporter writes up the possibly wild guess as if it were attached to reality by some sturdy chain of reasoning. A March 24, 2011 CNN report tells about a […]