As we used to quote on the ACES site, "Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out." Thomas Cardinal Wolsey.
We are happy to see that a number of experts are attempting to thwart inaccurate science reporting.
As Language Log, notes, Seed Magazine offers this caution:
In a recent study, Deena Skolnick, a graduate student at Yale, asked her subjects to judge different explanations of a psychological phenomenon. Some of these explanations were crafted to be awful. And people were good at noticing that they were awful—unless Skolnick inserted a few sentences of neuroscience. These were entirely irrelevant, basically stating that the phenomenon occurred in a certain part of the brain. But they did the trick: For both the novices and the experts (cognitive neuroscientists in the Yale psychology department), the presence of a bit of apparently-hard science turned bad explanations into satisfactory ones.
and
Newspapers, magazines, TV and blogs very often discuss psychology these days as a series of studies that involve some measure of neural activity, usually fMRI. The most compelling studies are those which probe the brain while the subject is made to think about something controversial, such as politics, sports teams, race, sex, corporate brands or morality. It makes for great press releases. But fMRI imagery has attained an undue influence, and we shouldn't be seduced.
Here's a short list of some of the web sites warning us about bad science.
Professor Alistair B. Fraser's list
Ben Goldacre in The Guardian
About's Urban Legends
Wikipedia
In an earlier column, and as a good example of what experts find far too often in print, Language Log dissects a David Brooks column and finds some misunderstanding of the results of brain research.
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