Brain imaging is a useful tool, but in the wrong hands it can be little more than hi-tech phrenology. Being able to say that you used single photon emission computed tomography to come to your conclusion sure sounds pretty, and it can seem like you know what you’re doing, but all too often the use of a fancy buzzword is only a ploy to get you noticed, no matter how trivial or even drecky your work is. Here’s a perfect example: a boring paper with almost nothing of interest in it gets published and highlighted in the New York Times, and why? Because the author couples expensive medical gear to religious nonsense, and obviously is very good at self-promotion. He’s a witch doctor in a nice white lab coat.
Andrew Newberg is an author of some rather New Agey popular books, an M.D., and a dualist. He’s the head of the “Center for Spirituality and the Neurosciences” (which is funded in part by the Templeton Foundation, wouldn’t you know it), and he thinks there is something outside the brain responsible for mind. How putting people in fancy gizmos and looking at cerebral blood flow is going to affirm his ideas is a complete mystery to me, but that’s what he does. And then afterwards, he waves his hands around and says the pretty colored pictures that most of his audience don’t understand support his claims.
