I have an innate reaction to sort of roll my eyes when a neuro-(fill in your favorite noun here) study finds a new brain center for fear, hatred, budgeting, Visa cards, or whatever. fMRI images are exciting and certainly hold a lot of potential, but just like it took astronomers centuries to begin making sense of all those images they found in their telescopes, I imagine it will take us a while to figure out what all these brain images really mean.
Mindhacks gives a reminder of why we should be skeptical. I especially love this quote:
A former chairman of the Harvard Psychology deptartment once asked
me “Gerd, do you know why they love those pictures [the fMRI activity
maps]? It is because they are like women: they are beautiful, they are
expensive and you don’t understand them”
