Myths about how the brain works

this is more democrat brainwashing - seriously if you are a democrat you are a total piece of fucking shit

My comparison period was 1900 to 1920.

obviously, Jerry Fodor was wrong. But anyone who studies cognitive science still gets this stuff shoved down his throat. The followers will however claim there's a difference between the brain and the mind.

from Wikipedia: "For Fodor, significant parts of the mind, such as perceptual and linguistic processes, are structured in terms of modules, or "organs", which he defines by their causal and functional roles. These modules are relatively independent of each other and of the "central processing" part of the mind, which has a more global and less "domain specific" character. Fodor suggests that the character of these modules permits the possibility of causal relations with external objects. This, in turn, makes it possible for mental states to have contents that are about things in the world. The central processing part, on the other hand, takes care of the logical relations between the various contents and inputs and outputs"

All of this seems really confused to me, or so simplified that it no longer makes any sense.

The simplest thing you can do in a scanner is have them sit there doing nothing while you acquire scans. In the end, you just have a 4d matrix of unsigned integers. For each voxel you can acquire an average over the scan and check whether it is significantly above zero using a t-test. Given enough data everything will be significantly greater than zero, including parts outside the head. Or you can compute a global mean to center all the voxles, and check which parts of the brain are significantly above the average, or significantly below the average. Extremely simple analyses (and so yes, there are lots more you could do).

In task fMRI, you have them do a task, and you use events in your task design as predictors of the BOLD, and then display a voxel map of either the beta values, or, more commonly, the T-values of those regression betas (or a contrast of those regression betas). In this case, you really aren't looking at activity. You are looking at correlations.

Those islands of activity in whole-brain analysis images in figures in papers happen because the result images are thresholded, e.g. at p Let's take a concrete example. You have a subject do a task where they have to choose between two gambles varying in risk and reward. Then, for each voxel, you predict the BOLD time course using a series of events (time of presentation of gamble options) with magnitude equal to the coefficient of variation between the two gambles. So now, for each voxel you have a beta value showing how CoV predicts BOLD. You notice that anterior insula on both cases has the highest beta values. You threshold at conventional statistical signficance, after correcting for multiple comparions, and all the spurious, or less important, correlations drop out of the image, and you are left with two bright spots on a map pin-pointed on the left and right anterior insula. See: in this anaylysis, not all "psychologically and biolotically meaninful activity" is being examined or looked at. For example, button presses events show up localized in the motor areas too, but they weren't looking at those. But they could have, if we were interested.

I completely agree with you and I don't think it's being pedantic at all. Clearly the 21st century is bearing the FRUIT of scientific discovery and we're seeing incredible iteration and innovation that is very exciting. But much of this is the result of things which were DISCOVERED in the 20th century.

Language is important. "Discovery" means something just as "inventing" means something. I see these words used all the time for things like websites (Facebook/Twitter) or computer hardware (Apple products most notoriously). Something can be a wonderful and very popular implementation without being either a discovery or an invention. Often these larger things DO contain many smaller real discoveries and inventions along the way! But people always seem to be referring to the end product as a whole, which I find bizarre.