Casting Light on the Dark Side of Brain Imaging

Most people find colorful brain scans highly compelling—and yet, many experts don’t. This discrepancy begs the question: What can we learn from neuroimaging? Is brain information useful in fields such as psychiatry, law, or education? How do neuroscientists create brain activation maps and why do we admire them? Casting Light on The Dark Side of Brain Imaging tackles these questions through a critical and constructive lens—separating fruitful science from misleading neuro-babble. In a breezy writing style accessible to a wide readership, experts from across the brain sciences offer their uncensored thoughts to help advance brain research and debunk the craze for reductionist, headline-grabbing neuroscience. This collection of short, enlightening essays is suitable for anyone interested in brain science, from students to professionals. Together, we take a hard look at the science behind brain imaging and outline why this technique remains promising despite its seldom-discussed shortcomings.

"With the advent of advanced brain-imaging technologies, psychologists are finally in a position to understand the neural underpinnings of mind and behavior. Raz and Thibault cover the fads and fallacies and pitfalls while still celebrating the achievements, and potential, of neuroscience." --John F. Kihlstrom, Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley "A dazzling collection of short, engaging writings on the hype, controversies, promises, and excitement generated by imaging the human brain. Great read for both neophytes and experts." --Marco Iacoboni, Author, Mirroring People; Professor, UCLA

Amir Raz, PhD, ABPH, is Canada Research Chair in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention at both the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University and the SMBD Jewish General Hospital. He received his PhD in computation and information processing in the brain from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. He went on to be a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Michael I. Posner at the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology of the Weill Medical College of Cornell University. He was then appointed to the position of Assistant Professor at Cornell University and subsequently at Columbia University in the City of New York. He is the recipient of multiple accolades, including the 2006 Young Investigator Award from the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Affective Disorders and the 2005 Early Career Award from the American Psychological Association (Division 30). Professor Raz is a diplomate of the American Board of Psychological Hypnosis. Having examined the safety and efficacy of psychiatric drugs across development, his active research interests span the neural and psychological substrates of attention, self-regulation, expectation, placebo, and consciousness. He is also conducting research into developmental psychopathology, the cognitive neuroscience of culture, authorship processes and atypical cognition. Using neuroimaging and other state-of-the-art techniques, his research elucidates the relationship between disparate attention networks and attentional planes such as hypnosis. Robert Thibault earned his Ph.D. from the Integrated Program in Neuroscience at McGill University. He investigates how and why we image the living human brain. His research has highlighted the psychosocial and placebo phenomena involved in neurofeedback and raised body posture as an important variable in brain imaging research. He now focuses on how to expedite scientific discoveries through efficient research systems and rigorous experimental practices—in other words, meta-research. His work is supported by a scholarship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).