40 percent of fMRI signals do not correspond to actual brain activity

Re:40 percent of fMRI signals do not correspond to actual br... by D-Machine on Tuesday December 16, 2025 @12:08PM (#46291107)

Yes, well "almost all" is vague and needs to be qualified. Sample sizes have improved over the past decade for sure. I'm not sure if they have grown on median meaningfully, because there are still way too many low-N studies, but you do see studies now that are at least plausibly "large enough" more frequently. More open data has also helped here.

EDIT: And kudos to you and your advisor here.

EDIT2: I will also say that a lot of the research on fMRI methods is very solid and often quite reproducible. I.e. papers that pioneer new analytic methods and/or investigate pipelines and such. There is definitely a lot of fMRI research telling us a lot of interesting and likely reliable things about fMRI, but there is very little fMRI research that is telling anything reliably generalizable about people or cognition.

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Re:40 percent of fMRI signals do not correspond to actual br... by SubiculumCode on Tuesday December 16, 2025 @07:33PM (#46296738)

I remember when resting-state had its oh shit moment when Power et al (e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22019881/) showed that major findings in the literature, many of which JD Power himself helped build, was based off residual motion artifacts. Kudos to JD Power and others like him.

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Re:40 percent of fMRI signals do not correspond to actual br... by D-Machine on Tuesday December 16, 2025 @08:01PM (#46296932)

Yes, and a great example of how so much research in fMRI methodology is just really good science working as it should.

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