Call and response

From Ramsden et al. addendum

The (highly abbreviated) life story of a paper appearing in Nature often goes something like this: ideas are birthed and experiments envisioned. Pilot experiments are run, yielding beautiful preliminary data. Replication and controls are then gathered over the course of months, if not years of hard labor. The paper is written, submitted, and reviewed. A few (two is typical) rounds of review and revision later, it is published (with highly variable degrees of reviewer and editorial unanimity). But this is by no means the end, rather, just a milestone in the evaluation process by the community.  In journals, post-publication evaluation has traditionally occurred in the form of peer-reviewed follow-up papers or formal commentary. This may change someday as alternative forms of scientific publishing are explored, but for today we’ll talk about a formal addendum we’re publishing on a 2011 paper by Cathy Price and colleagues and invite you to add to the discussion.

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Telepathy? I think not

From Supp Fig 10 of Kay et al.

There is just something about neural decoding that captures the imagination. Scientists “reading out brain activity” to infer what someone was seeing or doing sounds like the stuff of science fiction. But in practice, with the right dataset and right computer algorithm, it can be done – providing the question you are trying to query the brain is simple enough. But no matter how simple the question, with every paper comes an orgy of stories in the mainstream press about how scientists can eavesdrop on your thoughts or even engage in electronic telepathy. Thereby infuriating scientists and science journalists in droves, sometimes detracting from some very cool work.

Today I’m going back a few years to a paper that typifies this effect, a study from Jack Gallant‘s lab about a model for decoding natural images from fMRI activity in early visual cortex.

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