4 ms·
Weak science. They ran a battery of 12 tests and looked for one with a statistically significant difference at the 5% level. If there were no actual differenc
by mil22 3y ago
Weak science.
They ran a battery of 12 tests and looked for one with a statistically significant difference at the 5% level.
If there were no actual differences, how many tests would you need to run to find at least one that by chance shows significance? If you run 20, you’d expect 5% to do so, on average, which is 1. Running 12 and finding 1 is not a significant finding.
Then, suspiciously, the only statistically significant cognitive test improvement they found was on trial 5 of a verbal learning test, which showed little to no improvement on any of the other trials. That makes no sense.
Finally the brain changes had a p-value of 0.046, which is barely significant by even the weak 5% threshold, and the brain changes weren’t correlated with the test result improvements.
Perhaps interesting, but only if replicated.
- ClassyJacket 3y agohttps://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/
- vixen99 3y agoGood point but anecdotally I think there is something here. Most of us have the experience at some point in our lives when an unusually-encountered smell evokes an event or earlier period in our lives. Many people report that this then links to a further array of memories. Nothing unusual about this. Proust famously described this in his extensive magnum opus 'Remembrance of Things Past' and so have many other authors to a lesser degree. So it's more than 'perhaps interesting'; there's plenty of circumstantial evidence that exposure to such chemicals might work to renew lapsed connections.