3 ms·
re: the mri paper discussed, I haven't read it, but between-group comparisons of that sort are always prone to confounding variables--you can try to match on th
by jonnycomputer 5y ago
re: the mri paper discussed, I haven't read it, but between-group comparisons of that sort are always prone to confounding variables--you can try to match on things like race, gender, social status, age, iq, and diagnoses, etc. but its hard to know whether you've matched everything you need to do. My recommendation is a longitudinal design. Mass brain scans of diplomatic staff at yearly intervals. You'll want to control for age-related changes, though there won't be that many over the course of one or two years, and other things, like covid, which seems to reduce grey matter quite substantially.
- joe_the_user 5y agoYeah, Even more, it's confounded by picking a control group and a study group and then asking "what's different?" without necessarily knowing why X should be different. What reason do they have to think white matter should be less? Afaik, none. It's something like p-hacking.
- jonnycomputer 5y agoI'm inclined to agree with you. But, not having read the paper, they may have cited research that would discuss what sorts of damage would be likely to occur if it were a radio or sonic attack. I think that any radio or sonic attack would probably cause whole-brain damage, not localized lesions. Also white matter, gray matter volumes, DTI tract length and connectivity measures would be the first things I would look at for this sort of thing, so its not necessarily like you are p-hacking by looking for outcome measures that happen to be significant. But again, haven't read the paper.