There's this weird snobbishness about fMRI: it's uniquely terrible, the people are hacks, etc. It seems particularly common amongst first and second-year grad s

There's this weird snobbishness about fMRI: it's uniquely terrible, the people are hacks, etc. It seems particularly common amongst first and second-year grad students who are doing something they think is "harder" science. I hate it. In the right hands, fMRI can be a really powerful technique for probing neural activity in healthy human subjects; in fact, it's one of the only ways to do so that has decent spatial resolution and thus lets you link brain structure and function. It certainly does have problems. There are plenty of ways to subtly mess up the data analysis or over-interpret results. The experimental design is often lacking, etc. However, I think these largely reflect the very low barrier of entry to fMRI research--all you really need is a laptop and somewhere willing to sell you scanner time (almost all major universities or hospitals)--rather than some intrinsic limitation of the field. The good work remains very good.