flynn002

Corticogenesis: younger neurons migrate past older ones using radial glia as a scaffolding. Figure from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_development#/media/File:Corticogenesis_in_a_wild-type_mouse.png " Billy was a likable twelve-year old boy whose major areas of difficulty were described by his parents as follows: 1) marked difficulty in reading and retaining what he read; 2) some trouble with arithmetic; 3) extreme slowness in completing homework with writing and spelling of poor quality; 4) slowness in learning to tell time (learned only during the past year); 5) lapses of attention with staring into space; 6) "dizzy spells" with "blackouts"; 7) recurring left frontal headaches always centering around and behind the left eye; 8) occasional enuresis until recently; 9) disinterest in work; 10) sudden inappropriate temper outbursts which were often violent; 11) enjoyment of irritating people; and 12) tendency to cry readily. " Drake (1968), p . 488 Poo...

This morning I did a very mean thing. I saw an author announce to the world on Twitter that they had just published this paper , and I tweeted a critical comment. This does not make me happy, as I know just how proud and pleased one feels when a research project at last makes it into print, and to immediately pounce on it seems unkind. Furthermore, the flaws in the paper are not all that unusual: they characterise a large swathe of literature. And the amount of work that has gone into the paper is clearly humongous, with detailed analysis of white matter structural integrity that probably represents many months of effort. But that, in a sense, is the problem. We just keep on and on doing marvellously complex neuroimaging in contexts where the published studies are likely to contain unreliable results. Why am I so sure that this is unreliable? Well, yesterday saw the publication of a review that I had led on, which was highly relevant to the topic of the paper – genetic variants affecti...