print
'Brain Porn' Not So Seductive After All? : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR
by thenewgreen

    Yet a series of recent papers suggests the story may be more complex. If we are seduced by neuroscience, it might not be the pretty pictures that people find so alluring.

    In one set of studies, authored by Hook and Farah and published in the September issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, people judged research summaries that included fMRI images no more surprising, innovative, worthy of funding, or illustrative of good scientific reasoning than summaries accompanied by other images, such as photographs associated with the summarized research. (Hook and Farah's initial experiment did find that fMRI images increased people's ratings that the research summary was interesting, but this small effect wasn't replicated in their subsequent experiments.)