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Re:Neuroscience: Under Attack by Alex3917 on Friday November 23, 2012 @08:35PM (#4824269)
"It's not Neuroscience: Under Attack, it's Pop Neuroscience: Under Attack, and it's under attack by scientists."

Neuroscience itself is generally pretty shoddy, so I don't think the distinction between neuroscience and pop neuroscience is necessarily all that important. E.g. this article explaining that over 50% of neuroscience journal articles are completely invalid because they use statistics incorrectly:

http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v14/n9/full/nn.2886.html

And that's only one type of error out of dozens.

Re:Neuroscience: Under Attack by zerostar07 on Saturday November 24, 2012 @10:45AM (#4825517)
No. The core of neuroscience (as reported in Neuron or Nature neuroscience) is top notch science. What you see blown up in media reports are usually reports that jump to conclusions and generalizations too fast. Neuroscience is not shoddy, however due to its relation to psychology it's bound to be abused by pop press. The truth is, at this point we still know very very little about how the brain works, so everything that is 'backed by neuroscience' should be taken as early speculation.

The problem of bad statistics is more applicable to medicine than neuroscience: http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...

Re:Neuroscience: Under Attack by etrautmann on Saturday November 24, 2012 @01:13AM (#4824685)
This is not a particularly enlightened view. While many people think top-down neuroscience like cognitive psychology, using techniques such as fMRI is the entire field, the majority of subfields in neuroscience are bottom up, and attempting to answer smaller-scale questions more concretely than we can in humans.

To say that there are some over-interpreted cognitive psychology studies so all of neuroscience is worthless completely misses the point.

Re:Neuroscience: Under Attack by rd108 on Friday November 23, 2012 @09:41PM (#4824370)
To be fair, that's generally only a criticism of fMRI experiments. Far from all the neuroscience research being done.
Re:Neuroscience: Under Attack by lomendil on Friday November 23, 2012 @11:30PM (#4824541)
fMRI: Modern day phrenology
Re:Neuroscience: Under Attack by agravier on Saturday November 24, 2012 @01:17AM (#4824690)
That is not what the posted article is about, though, so the title is still misleading.