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Comment by prefrontal | Hacker News Reader

Hey all. I’m the author of the poster and subsequent paper. Happy to answer any questions that you might have.

Glad to see this on Hacker News so many years after the poster first went up!

I presume someone else has already thought to share with you zach weinersmith's interpretation of your results http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/fmri

Yeah! One of the other authors on the paper sent it my way right after it was published. Freaking amazing - I love it.

Did you actually hold up the photos for the dead fish to see? How did it feel like holding photos of people for a dead fish to see?

We were doing testing for an fMRI experiment that we planned to run with humans later. So, yes, all of the stimuli were presented to the salmon. It only felt a bit ridiculous at the time...

I would like to see a study of which regions of the brain are active in scientists forced to show photos to a dead fish.

PDF of the paper: https://www.dropbox.com/s/o7gb13j26v9f4dp/Bennett-Salmon-201...

Is JSUR a recognized academic journal? How have you been doing for citations of this work?

We were the inaugural article in what was to be an entire journal dedicated to surprising/odd results. The salmon paper went through a pretty solid peer review as part of publication in JSUR, so we felt good sending it there.

Our paper came out and got a lot of attention, which was good press for the journal. After that the JSUR founders found that they didn't have much time available and the journal folded a few years later. In the end, we were the only paper it published.

All the more special for your work to be the whole history of a journal I guess.

But it's a shame they couldn't continue, I would have loved to have something filling that niche.

Did it help? Did people understand the message you were sending and take corrective action?

Yeah, actually, we feel like it did serve as a solid illustration as to why proper statistical correction is necessary. We had a lot of emails saying what a useful tool it was for lab meetings and classes.

We did a review of the literature as part of our paper. In 2008 something like 30% of papers in major journals used uncorrected stats. In 2012 it was under 10%. The field was certainly already moving in the right direction, but I think we managed to help things along.

Thank you! This was one of my favorite papers while I was in grad school. I still talk about this all the time when I review papers.

Glad that you found it useful and/or humorous!

Is there a reason why you were scanning salmon? Are they useful as phantoms for other sequences?

My grad school advisor and I were always scanning interesting things when we had sequence testing to do. We scanned other objects like pumpkins and such as well. We scanned the salmon since we thought it would look interesting on a high resolution T1 scan. It looked really great in the end: https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2009/09/fmri...

Have you written anything else that's even half as funny?

I would love to say that I have, but I fear that I may have peaked in 2010.

What did you do with the Salmon afterward?

My wife and I actually ate it for dinner that night!

Do you have any other papers that would give me karma I mean that are interesfing?

Also, which FMRI papers have real results that you think are significant?

Sorry man - the karma train is probably done. We wrote a few other papers on fMRI reliability, but nothing with the popularity that the salmon paper had.

There are a huge number of fMRI papers that have significant results, statistically and in terms of impact. I have been out of the field for about five years now, so I am not up-to-date with the latest work. I am sure there is some amazing stuff going on.

Josh Carp also wrote a paper on methdological misbehavior in neuroimaging a while back:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22796459

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