来源：《自然》
原文刊登日期：2022年3月17日
In 2019, neuroscientist Scott Marek was asked to contribute a paper to a journal that focuses on child development. Previous studies had shown that differences in brain function between children were linked with performance in intelligence tests. So Marek decided to examine this trend in 2,000 kids.
2019年，神经学家斯科特·马雷克被要求向一份专注于儿童发展的期刊投稿。此前的研究表明，儿童大脑功能的差异与智力测试的表现有关。所以马雷克决定对2000名儿童进行研究。
Brain-imaging data sets had been swelling in size. To show that this growth was making studies more reliable, Marek, based at Washington University in St. Louis, and his colleagues split the data in two and ran the same analysis on each subset, expecting the results to match. Instead, they found the opposite. “I was shocked. I thought it was going to look exactly the same in both sets,” says Marek. “I stared out of my apartment window in depression, taking in what it meant for the field.”
大脑成像数据集的规模一直在扩大。为了证明这种增长使研究更加可靠，圣路易斯华盛顿大学的马雷克和他的同事们将数据分成两部分，并对每个子集进行了相同的分析，希望结果吻合。然而，他们发现了相反的结果。“我非常震惊。我认为结果会在两组中看起来会完全一样，”马雷克说。“我沮丧地望着公寓窗外，明白这对该领域意味着什么。”
Now, Marek and his colleagues show that even large brain-imaging studies, such as his, are still too small to reliably detect most links between brain function and behaviour.
现在，马雷克和他的同事表明，即使是像他的研究那样的大型脑成像研究，数据量也仍然太小，无法可靠地检测到大脑功能和行为之间的大多数联系。
As a result, the conclusions of most published ‘brain-wide association studies’ — typically involving dozens to hundreds of participants — might be wrong. Such studies link variations in brain structure and activity to differences in cognitive ability, mental health and other behavioural traits. For instance, numerous studies have identified brain anatomy or activity patterns that can distinguish people who have been diagnosed with depression from those who have not. Studies also often seek biomarkers for behavioural traits.
因此，大多数发表的“大脑关联研究”——通常涉及几十到数百名参与者——的结论可能是错误的。这些研究将大脑结构和活动的变化与认知能力、心理健康和其他行为特征的差异联系起来。例如，许多研究发现，大脑解剖结构或活动模式可以将被诊断为抑郁症的人与没有被诊断为抑郁症的人区分开来。研究还经常寻找行为特征的生物标志物。
“There’s a lot of investigators who have committed their careers to doing the kind of science that this paper says is basically junk,” says Russell Poldrack, a cognitive neuroscientist at Stanford University, who was one of the paper’s peer reviewers. “It really forces a rethink.”
斯坦福大学的认知神经学家罗素·波尔德拉克是该论文的审稿人之一，他说：“有很多研究人员致力于做这类科学，而这篇论文称其基本上是垃圾。这真的迫使人们重新思考。”
The authors emphasize that their critique applies only to the subset of research that seeks to explain differences in people’s behaviour through brain imaging. But some scientists think that the critique tars this field with too broad a brush. Smaller, more detailed studies of brain–behaviour links can produce robust findings, they say.
作者强调，他们的批评只适用于那些试图通过大脑成像来解释人们行为差异的研究。但一些科学家认为，这种批评是一竿子打翻一船人。他们说，对大脑行为联系的更小、更详细的研究可以产生有力的发现。