Dead salmon and voodoo correlations: should we be sceptical about functional MRI?

A preprint attracted a great deal of attention recently when it reported resting state functional connectivity between the temporal pole and remote brain regions of five patients who had previously undergone temporal disconnection surgery (Warren et al., 2017). Some commentators likened the report to the infamous ‘dead salmon’ paper of 2009, in which Craig Bennett and co-workers identified a cluster of activated voxels in the brain of a dead fish that had been ‘asked’ to perform a social perspective-taking task while lying inside a functional MRI scanner (Bennett et al., 2009). The dead salmon paper also triggered a huge response in blogs and social media, with many quick to claim that the results were damning for functional MRI. But what is behind this appetite for studies that seem to discredit functional neuroimaging, and to what extent is such scepticism justified?

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