50% of neuroscience papers suffer from a major statistical error.

Re:50% of neuroscience papers suffer from a major statistica... by disgruntledphd2 on Monday November 28, 2011 @11:48AM (#3286560)

While I agree with the major substance of your point (though i never liked that Yodowsky link), you are incorrect in your citation of the paper.

The actual paper is: http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v14/n9/full/nn.2886.html

It appears to follow on from an extremely controversial paper in neuroscience: Voodoo neuroscience http://escholarship.org/uc/item/51d4r5tn;jsessionid=FB5843BB...

If you look at the cited by links in scholar, then you can get access to a raging debate across quite a number of journals (well worth popcorn if you're nerdy and not involved).

The crux of the matter for me is that the brain cannot be fruitfully modelled using statistics developed for independent samples. This is going to cause us massive problems unless we can develop better statistical tools (or at the very least use the ones we have more wisely).

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Re:50% of neuroscience papers suffer from a major statistica... by kevinalexbrown on Monday November 28, 2011 @12:19PM (#3286683)

No, that's not the crux of the matter. It has nothing to do with the brain per se. The voodoo paper was about people using fMRI improperly analyzing their data, but as the authors point out, there are existing tools that are fine and should have been used. Likewise for the recent Nature Neuro paper.

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