What the latest fMRI “crisis” means for the rest of science — To the outside observer, it can seem that fMRI research careens from one public crisis to another. Detecting brain activity in a dead salmon. Impossibly high correlations between brain activity and behaviour. Serious flaws in fMRI analysis software leading to claims of tens of thousands of papers being (partially) wrong…

Neural networks of neural networks — Brains receive input from the outside world, their neurons do something to that input, and create an output. That output may be a thought (I want curry for dinner); it may be an action (make curry); it may be a change in mood (yay curry!). Whatever the output, that “something”…

Letting go of your expertise to tell a better story — I was stuck on the eyeball. There I was, writing a book about the brain, a manuscript that became The Spike: An Epic Journey Through the Brain in 2.1 Seconds. …

The pervasive power of the written word — Nebulous is a good word to use here. If asked what books most influenced my own, The Spike: An Epic Journey Through the Brain in 2.1 Seconds, I could reel off some titles, could catalogue for you a litany of books from which I can draw a direct line to…

A paean to being boring — Can we go back to boring now? No wars launched by a slightly unhinged despot, no global inflation, energy crisis, or ongoing pandemic. No morally-bankrupt World Cup for which the usual euphemism of “questionable human rights record” doesn’t quite do justice to the thousands of workers who died building the…

Welcome back my friends, to the show that never ends — It’s the most wonderful time of the year. Chiefly because neuroscience stops churning out new stuff and we get to draw breath before plunging anew into the maelstrom. …

How researchers are changing the brain’s messaging system to tackle mental health disorders — There’s a disturbingly long list of ways in which the brain can go wrong. I might name for you a sample of mental health conditions: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, clinical depression, anxiety disorders of all kinds, obsessive compulsive disorder. Even just the list of movement disorders is miserably long: Parkinson’s disease…

The worm turns against genetic determinism — There’s a strangely persistent idea that your genes are the blueprint for your brain. Robert Plomin even called his book about the genetic influence on the mind “Blueprint”. But a blueprint is a detailed one-to-one schematic of what will be constructed. Genes are not that. Self-evidently not. For example, people…

What the pandemic revealed about scientific publishing — I was reading my umpteenth news story about Covid-19 science, a story about the latest research into how to make indoor spaces safe from infection, about whether cleaning surfaces or changing the air was more important. And it was bothering me. Not because it was dull (which, of course, it…