When researchers conduct brain imaging, they collect data from 200,000 little spots in the brain, which creates a lot of leeway for false positives, bias, and false negatives. If researchers do not do the proper corrections—to address the fact that they are doing a statistical test in each of those places—it is very easy to find a highly significant result that is not actually real. A few years ago, a group of researchers tried to illustrate this problem by putting a dead salmon in an MRI scanner. When they analyzed data without doing proper corrections, they found activation in the dead salmon’s brain. This indicates that, without conducting the necessary statistical tests, researchers can find activation pretty much anywhere.
