Photo: Hans-Petter Fjeld (CC-BY-SA)
In a remarkable display of statistical improbability, researchers have shown that a salmon was able to indicate what emotion an individual portrayed in a photo must have been experiencing. The salmon, which was “not alive at the time of scanning” was subjected to fMRI imaging. This procedure scans the brain in cubic units called voxels. It detects activation in the voxels. The trouble is, there are tens of thousands of voxels, so some of them will “light up” by chance; think of it as statistical noise. Normally, researchers use statistical corrections for these false positive results. In this study, the statistical noise of these false positives made it appear that the dead salmon was actually thinking about the photographs.
Who said science was boring?
