As a recent Psychology PhD, I agree completely, and I'll add this: people outside the field commonly believe that neuroimaging tools like fMRI are better and "h

As a recent Psychology PhD, I agree completely, and I'll add this: people outside the field commonly believe that neuroimaging tools like fMRI are better and "harder" science than more traditional experiments that measure human behavior, but they have it totally wrong. Here's an analogy for computer nerds: imagine if you had an "fMRI" of your computer's operation. You'd see that different tasks result in different parts of the computer "lighting up". Tasks such as graphics, disk I/O, numerical processing, etc., would lead to different patterns of activation. And if your scanner had could resolve, say, 0.1mm voxels in your CPU, you might even learn that certain parts of the CPU are related to certain tasks. But what all this tells you is something about the gross physical structure of the computer; it doesn't tell you much about the abstract, logical structure of the computer. To draw an analogy, you learn something about the brain, but not very much about the mind. What's of interest to most people (except hardware engineers) is what the computer does, not what parts activate. With a "computer fMRI", you'd learn little about how, say, a filesystem works, how a programming language works, or much of anything that's of interest at the functional level of the computer. The same is true of fMRI and humans: it doesn't tell us much about the mind works. Instead, it tells us that there's a brain region associated with some task. For example, one of the major recent-ish findings with fMRI is that there's a small brain region that's associated with face recognition. I'm not saying that traditional experimental psychology is going to answer everything. The mind is very complicated and I'm pessimistic that we'll ever have a good reductive model, the way that we do in many other sciences. I'm also not saying that neuroimaging is totally useless -- but it's certainly not as enlightening as many people imagine. Here's a summary of a paper that found that lay people thought that psychological explanations were more convincing with neuroscience talk (even though the "neuroscience" was totally irrelevant), and that those with experience in neuroscience/psychology thought the opposite: http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2008/03/when_we_see_a_brain_light_up_o.php http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2008/03/when_we_see_a... Here's another one that did something similar, but with brain pictures: http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2008/06/whats_more_convincing_than_tal.php http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2008/06/whats_more_co...