The New Mind Readers Quotes

“George Costanza gave to Jerry Seinfeld about how to fool a polygraph test: “Jerry, just remember. It’s not a lie if you believe it.”
― Russell A Poldrack, The New Mind Readers: What Neuroimaging Can and Cannot Reveal about Our Thoughts

“While acute pain is a useful signal to help prevent and limit injury, when it becomes chronic it can lead to misery, disability, and sometimes suicide.”
― Russell A Poldrack, The New Mind Readers: What Neuroimaging Can and Cannot Reveal about Our Thoughts

“the gut has its own as well, known as the enteric nervous system, with about half a billion neurons—but it’s certainly the most important when it comes to the things that make us uniquely human.”
― Russell A Poldrack, The New Mind Readers: What Neuroimaging Can and Cannot Reveal about Our Thoughts

“the belief in what they call “biogenetic” explanations for mental illness has been a “mixed blessing”: while it leads people to be less likely to blame the mentally ill for their problems, it actually makes them more likely to think that the mentally ill are dangerous, and also makes them more pessimistic about the ability of mentally ill people to improve through treatment.”
― Russell A. Poldrack, The New Mind Readers: What Neuroimaging Can and Cannot Reveal about Our Thoughts

“when reading about scientific research of any kind to be sensitive to overselling and oversimplification—if it seems like you are being given a sales pitch, then you probably are, and that’s usually not the sign of solid research.”
― Russell A Poldrack, The New Mind Readers: What Neuroimaging Can and Cannot Reveal about Our Thoughts

“The brain region that he points to as being “associated with feelings of love and compassion” (the insular cortex) is active in as many as one-third of all brain imaging studies.”
― Russell A Poldrack, The New Mind Readers: What Neuroimaging Can and Cannot Reveal about Our Thoughts

“the insular cortex of the brain, which is associated with feelings of love and compassion.”
― Russell A Poldrack, The New Mind Readers: What Neuroimaging Can and Cannot Reveal about Our Thoughts

“The complexity of the brain is enormous, and it seems highly unlikely that any dichotomy will adequately describe it.”
― Russell A Poldrack, The New Mind Readers: What Neuroimaging Can and Cannot Reveal about Our Thoughts

“almost anything could be found to be statistically significant.”
― Russell A Poldrack, The New Mind Readers: What Neuroimaging Can and Cannot Reveal about Our Thoughts

“Science can help us understand the situation, but ultimately the decision about where to draw the line on punishment is a moral, legal, and ethical decision, not a scientific one.”
― Russell A Poldrack, The New Mind Readers: What Neuroimaging Can and Cannot Reveal about Our Thoughts

“The experience of acute pain has been studied extensively using fMRI, generally by subjecting subjects to painful stimulation using a heat probe (or, in studies of visceral pain, a rectal balloon).”
― Russell A Poldrack, The New Mind Readers: What Neuroimaging Can and Cannot Reveal about Our Thoughts

“the idea of reverse inference is really not very different from the concept of decoding that was seen in the work of Jim Haxby, and you would be correct: in each case we are using neuroimaging data to try to infer the mental state of an individual. The main difference is that the reverse inference that I ridiculed from the New York Times was based not on a formal statistical model but rather on the researcher’s own judgment. However, it is possible to develop statistical models that can let us quantify exactly how well we can decode what a person is thinking about from fMRI data,”
― Russell A Poldrack, The New Mind Readers: What Neuroimaging Can and Cannot Reveal about Our Thoughts