Do images of the brain make us more likely to believe what we read? | Hacker News Reader

Do images of the brain make us more likely to believe what we read?

twin-cities.umn.edu

56 pointslaurex11 comments

Oddly, a lot of popularly used images of the brain are of my brain. I gave a permissive CC license on a still from an MRI of my brain many years ago on Flickr. I've seen my brain on academic journals, newspaper articles, magazine articles about crime, psychology, intelligence, and so on, for the last ten years. The bigger publications sometimes think to obfuscate my name from the MRI itself, but most don't.

When you get imaging done, it's often possible to request a DVD with the images - at the time, I used open source software called OSRIX to fly around the images and pick some stills.

How are you able to recognize MRI scans of your own brain in the wild?

Several ways: At first, years ago, enough publications or authors asked me to confirm permission to use the image that I realized it was popular. Some of the publications attribute the image to me. The MRI image itself (https://www.flickr.com/photos/lizhenry/2051224366) has my name on it. And, finally, a reverse image search, these days shows hundreds of thousands of uses. I always wanted to use my brain in the service of science and literature, but didn't know this is how it would happen! ;)

"check out the big brain on brad"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hrm-rPSCIBw

I've always wondered where these images came from.

Your story reminded me of the origins of Resusci Anne.

Radiolab had an interesting story of where the "death mask" came from. It's quite interesting if you have the time.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/172693-death-mask

Oh, I love that. I didn't have the patience to listen to the radio show but here's a link to an article about L'inconnue that explains a little of the history of the use of the model of her face, and the connection to the toymaker who eventually designed the CPR model! https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24534069

Wikipedia also does not disappoint, with the lists of literary references to the mask of her face: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Inconnue_de_la_Seine

You're the Lena of brains...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

Now I’m not sure if I’m believing this because it’s based on scientific research or because there’s a picture of a brain on the page.

Maybe the page itself is the research experiment and they’re polling people/running sentiment analysis on whether or not people are buying it. So meta...

In that case there should be a page for the control group without brains.

There are a few people like that. Apparently you don't need a brain to be a mathematician or french public servant:

http://mentalfloss.com/article/70204/man-without-brain

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2003/oct/02/research.h...

It's certainly the case that neural nets work flawlessly because they're like the brain - ask any journalist. Without doubt, an image of the brain enhances NN performance

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