The really surprising result of Bennett’s paper isn’t that one or two voxels in a dead fish passed a statistical test; it’s that a substantial proportion of the neuroimaging articles he surveyed didn’t use statistical safeguards (known as “multiple comparisons correction”) that take into account the ubiquity of the improbable. Without those corrections, scientists are at serious risk of running the Baltimore stockbroker con, not only on their colleagues but on themselves.
