Quite a lot of brain research uses the technique called fMRI—and now quite a lot of research shows that fMRI brain research fairly often leads to nonsense or bewilderment.
The authors, at Duke University, the University of Otago, and King’s College London, explain:
“Identifying brain biomarkers of disease risk is a growing priority in neuroscience…. Measuring brain activity using task functional MRI (fMRI) is a major focus of biomarker development; however, the reliability of task fMRI has not been systematically evaluated. We present converging evidence demonstrating poor reliability of task-fMRI measures….
Collectively, these findings demonstrate that common task-fMRI measures are not currently suitable for brain biomarker discovery or for individual-differences research.”
(Thanks to Edward Tufte for bringing this to our attention.)
Legacy of the Dead Salmon
The 2012 Ig Nobel Prize for neuroscience was awarded to Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller, and George Wolford, for demonstrating that brain researchers, by using complicated instruments and simple statistics, can see meaningful brain activity anywhere — even in a dead salmon.
That paper drew outrage from many neuroscientists, as did the awarding of that Ig Nobel Prize. Many other neuroscientists were pleased, though. Among them was Bethany Brookshire, then blogging under the pen name “Scicurious”, for Scientific American. Brookshire’s report about that Ig Nobel Prize began:
IgNobel Prize in Neuroscience: The dead salmon study
I have to say that I am incredibly pleased that this study won the Ignobel. Not just because it’s a really fun study, but also because it really is one of those studies that makes you laugh, and then makes you THINK. And in the case of this study in particular, it has changed a lot about how we think about making corrections in fMRI, and may have actually really affected the way the data are published. And so, I present to you: the dead salmon study….
Building on the Foundation of the Dead Salmon
The new, 2020 “What Is the Test-Retest Reliability…” study is drawing favorable attention from many neurosciences. It builds on the knowledge found by the dead salmon study. Duke University issued a proud press release about it, though for whatever reason did not mention the dead salmon. The press release begins:
STUDIES OF BRAIN ACTIVITY AREN’T AS USEFUL AS SCIENTISTS THOUGHT
Duke researcher questions 15 years of his own work with a reexamination of functional MRI data
The 25th Dead Duck Day, on June 5th, will be postponed till 2021. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, public open air gatherings are not allowed. So be on the lookout for the special (postponed) 25th anniversary edition in 2021.
This year, Dead Duck Day will have only two participants – me and the stuffed duck, accompanied by a bottle of beer, just as on the very first Dead Duck Day celebration, 25 years ago.
Kees Moeliker
Of course everybody is free and invited to have private Dead Duck Day celebrations, anywhere in the world, to commemorate the dramatic death of the duck — and the tragedy of billions of other birds that die from colliding with glass buildings.
Photographic and/or video images of the private short Dead Duck Day ceremony in Rotterdam will be posted here and on social media. #DeadDuckDay
Here is a photo from Dead Duck Day, when a paucity of pandemics permitted people to gather together in celebration. (photo Maarten Laupman)
Ig Nobel Duck
The mallard duck that is a vital part of Dead Duck Day became known to science as the first (documented) ‘victim’ of homosexual necrophilia in that species, and earned its discoverer the 2003 Ig Nobel Biology Prize.
posted by Kees Moeliker in Arts and Science, Ig Nobel | Comments Off on Dead Duck Day 2020 postponed till 2021
There’s been another artful repetition of the artfully repetitious musical art piece called “Vexations,” composed by Eric Satie—although this time, unlike a performance years ago by a different pianist, no scientists were recording electromagnetic signals from the pianist’s brain. (Thanks to Deb Kreuze for bringing it to our attention.)
This new performance gets a loving appreciation by Joshua Barone, in The New York Times:
The pianist Igor Levit is always one-upping himself. His recordings have swollen from a collection of four Beethoven sonatas to the entire cycle; his performances, from a traditional recital to, as of Sunday, a livestream lasting over 15 hours.
In an extraordinary act of musical self-flagellation, Mr. Levit played Erik Satie’s “Vexations” — a mysterious and absurd work consisting only of four lines repeated 840 times — to evoke and draw attention to the difficulties facing artists during the coronavirus pandemic….
Here’s video of about twelve hours of that performance by Igor Levit:
An Earlier, Meticulously Monitored Performance
Some years ago, we wrote about a scientific examination of another pianist who took on the task of enduring that piece of music:
German and Austrian researchers analysed what happened to pianist Armin Fuchs when he spent more than a full day playing over and over again, nonstop, an oddly-named piece of music by a French composer. They also analysed what happened to the music. This was a tour de force of artistic and neurological repetition.
The research team – Christine Kohlmetz, Reinhard Kopiez and Marc Bangert of the Hanover University of Music and Drama, and Werner Goebl and Eckart Altenmuller of the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, in Vienna – published a pair of monographs in 2003 describing what they measured in the pianist….
Here’s video of a just a few minutes of that experimental monitoring of Armin Fuchs:
posted by Marc Abrahams in Arts and Science | Comments Off on Vexations, over and over, yet again
