Brain studies get more interest in the media, because the brain is truly one of the last great unknowns of the human body. While our understanding of the brain has made great strides in the past few decades, we still have only very basic and rudimentary knowledge of this important organ. Honestly, researchers still aren’t quite sure how the brain even works.
When you consider where we are with our understanding of the brain’s basic functions, you have to take studies that use brain imagery with a healthy grain of salt. The consumption of sugar by the brain is thought to indicate important brain activity, but it’s a correlational association that researchers have documented.
The latest “gee whiz!” brain study showed that when you put a muted cell phone next to someone’s ear for 50 minutes while they were sitting in a positron emission tomography — or PET — scan machine. Even though the cell phone was on mute so the participants couldn’t hear the phone call, there was a 7 percent increase in activity (as measured by blood glucose levels) in the area closest to the cell phone’s antenna.
What does this mean?
In a little-noticed article over at The New York Times late last week, Benedict Carey noted how one of Columbia University’s premier research centers — the Kreitchman PET Center — had to halt all of its research studies because researchers were caught cutting corners. Not just once, but over and over again.