There's an insidious fallacy at play in a lot brain imaging studies. I've heard it termed "neurorealism": the idea that something isn't real unless we can point

There's an insidious fallacy at play in a lot brain imaging studies. I've heard it termed "neurorealism": the idea that something isn't real unless we can point to an area of the brain that "lights up" when it happens. (And the converse: any behavior we can associate with someone's brain "lighting up" must be intimately linked to that behavior.) It's tempting to look at the visible differences between, say the fMRI of a psychopath and that of a normal person and say "oh, look, area x is clearly different, so we've found the center of psycopathy!", but there are waaaaay too many variables in play for that to be a valid inference. The best neuroscientists know this is rubbish... but the press does not.