IgNobel Prize in Neuroscience: The dead salmon study (2012) | Hacker News Reader

IgNobel Prize in Neuroscience: The dead salmon study (2012)

blogs.scientificamerican.com

95 pointsdhuramas18 comments

I am the first author of the salmon poster/paper. If you all have any questions I am happy to answer!

How many free drinks has this fact gotten you?

At least six, most of them in Cambridge on the night we won the IgNobel prize.

How can you be sure the salmon wasn't really responding to the pictures?

Good question. Ultimately, in fMRI we are looking for changes in the local ratio of oxygenated to deoxygenated blood. As neurons begin firing in a brain region more oxygen-rich blood is dumped in by the circulatory system. If the salmon really was responding to the pictures there would need to be blood flow for these changes to be detectable using fMRI. Since the salmon had been prepared by the supermarket there was nothing to circulate blood around.

Have you ruled out zombie salmon... or salmon with commensal micro-biological activity such as a rust?

We just had the one salmon to scan, unfortunately. Regardless of the pre-existing condition of the salmon (zombie, rust, etc) there were no significant voxels of activity once we applied proper statistical corrections. This strongly points to correlated noise as the cause of the uncorrected results.

Thank you for responding. I have been very curious on whether Rusts are active in salmon. I was not serious about zombie salmon though. One salmon is a rather small sample size regardless of the common sense reasoning around the subject at hand.

What happened to the salmon after the experiment? Did the fMRI scan seem to have had any effect on the taste?

I cooked it for dinner. We kept it cold in the snow outside the building all day while we worked. Tasted like regular salmon when we ate it.

This is still one of my favourite IgNobel winners for Physics from 1999: The optimal way to dunk a biscuit in a cup of tea *

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/462987.stm

* biscuit = cookie in the UK

TLDR; researchers at UC Santa Barbara, intending to show how statistics can be used misleadingly, received statistically significant results when scanning a salmon with fMRI to show that it's brain responded differently to photos of different social situations. The salmon was dead.

(sauce: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/9t3bc4)

This belongs to "pure gold dust" category of my neurofeedback-related readings. Makes a good point about the prevalence of data dredging in scientific (and esp. medical) communities.

I'm glad to read that they ate the salmon.

As we're talking about serious (though not entirely un-ludicrous) experiments concerning dead fish, I'm not going to miss an opportunity to post this video of a dead fish placed in "fast flowing water" (it's actually a tank with a jet and an outlet, but the effect is much the same).

Which way do you think the dead fish will move, upstream or downstream? Place your bets now.

https://vimeo.com/44887922

Very interesting article, even if from 2012.

Do you mean that it was even more interesting at the time, in 2012?

The dead salmon has aged like fine wine.

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