Neuroskeptic

Last updated
Pen nameNeuroskeptic
OccupationBlogger
NationalityBritish

Neuroskeptic is a British neuroscientist and pseudonymous science blogger. [1] [2] They are known for their efforts uncovering fake and plagiarized articles published in predatory journals. [3] [4] They have also blogged about the limitations of MRI scans, which they began writing about after realizing that they and their colleagues did not entirely understand how some of their own MRI results had been produced. [5] Their use of a pseudonym has been criticized as unethical, an accusation that they have denied. [6] [7] A 2013 Wired article by David Dobbs described Neuroskeptic as "one of the most insightful neuro-psycho-bloggers out there today". [8]

Contents

Reception

The blog has been nominated for the following awards:

Publications

Related Research Articles

In philosophy and neuroscience, neuroethics is the study of both the ethics of neuroscience and the neuroscience of ethics. The ethics of neuroscience concerns the ethical, legal and social impact of neuroscience, including the ways in which neurotechnology can be used to predict or alter human behavior and "the implications of our mechanistic understanding of brain function for society... integrating neuroscientific knowledge with ethical and social thought".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vlog</span> Form of blog for which the medium is video

A vlog, also known as a video blog or video log, is a form of blog for which the medium is video. Vlog entries often combine embedded video with supporting text, images, and other metadata. Entries can be recorded in one take or cut into multiple parts. Vlog category is popular on the video-sharing platform YouTube.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michelle Dawson</span> Canadian autism researcher

Michelle Dawson is a Canadian autism researcher who was diagnosed with autism in 1993–1994. Since 2004, she has worked as an autism researcher affiliated with the Autism Specialized Clinic of Hôpital Rivière-des-Prairies in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nancy Kanwisher</span> American neuroscientist

Nancy Gail Kanwisher FBA is the Walter A Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. She studies the neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying human visual perception and cognition.

Helen S. Mayberg was born in 1956 in California. She is an American neurologist. Mayberg is known in particular for her work delineating abnormal brain function in patients with major depression using functional neuroimaging. This work led to the first pilot study of deep brain stimulation (DBS), a reversible method of selective modulation of a specific brain circuit, for patients with treatment-resistant depression. As of August 2019, she has published 211 original peer-reviewed articles, 31 books and book chapters, and acted as principal investigator on 24 research grants. Mayberg is coinventor with Andres Lozano of “Method for Treating Depression Mood Disorders and Anxiety Disorders using Neuromodulation,” US patent 2005/0033379A1. St. Jude Medical Neuromodulation licensed her intellectual property to develop Subcallosal Cingulate Deep Brain Stimulation for Treatment-Resistant Unipolar and Bipolar Depression for the treatment of severe depression. As of 2018, Mayberg holds positions as Professor of Neurology and Neurosurgery and Professor, Psychiatry and Neuroscience, both at Mount Sinai Medical School, and Professor of Psychiatry, Emory University; Emory University Hospital. Since 2018, she has served as Director, Nash Family Center for Advanced Circuit Therapeutics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

ScienceBlogs is an invitation-only blog network and virtual community that operated initially for almost 12 years, from 2006 to 2017. It was created by Seed Media Group to enhance public understanding of science. Each blog had its own theme, speciality and author(s) and was not subject to editorial control. Authors included active scientists working in industry, universities and medical schools as well as college professors, physicians, professional writers, graduate students, and post-docs. On 24 January 2015, 19 of the blogs had seen posting in the past month. 11 of these had been on ScienceBlogs since 2006. ScienceBlogs shut down at the end of October 2017. In late August 2018, the website's front page displayed a notice suggesting it was about to become active once again.

The Human Connectome Project (HCP) is a five-year project sponsored by sixteen components of the National Institutes of Health, split between two consortia of research institutions. The project was launched in July 2009 as the first of three Grand Challenges of the NIH's Blueprint for Neuroscience Research. On September 15, 2010, the NIH announced that it would award two grants: $30 million over five years to a consortium led by Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Minnesota, with strong contributions from University of Oxford (FMRIB) and $8.5 million over three years to a consortium led by Harvard University, Massachusetts General Hospital and the University of California Los Angeles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PET-MRI</span>

Positron emission tomography–magnetic resonance imaging (PET–MRI) is a hybrid imaging technology that incorporates magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) soft tissue morphological imaging and positron emission tomography (PET) functional imaging.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Gorski</span> Science-based medicine advocate

David Henry Gorski is an American surgical oncologist and professor of surgery at Wayne State University School of Medicine. He specializes in breast cancer surgery at the Karmanos Cancer Institute. Gorski is an outspoken skeptic and critic of alternative medicine and the anti-vaccination movement. A prolific blogger, he writes as Orac at Respectful Insolence, and as himself at Science-Based Medicine where he is the managing editor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Predatory publishing</span> Fraudulent business model for scientific publications

Predatory publishing, also write-only publishing or deceptive publishing, is an exploitative academic publishing business model that involves charging publication fees to authors only superficially checking articles for quality and legitimacy, and without providing editorial and publishing services that legitimate academic journals provide, whether open access or not. Namely, the rejection rate of predatory journals is low, but seldom is zero. The phenomenon of "open access predatory publishers" was first noticed by Jeffrey Beall, when he described "publishers that are ready to publish any article for payment". However, criticisms about the label "predatory" have been raised. A lengthy review of the controversy started by Beall appears in The Journal of Academic Librarianship.

Paul S. Knoepfler is an American biologist, writer, and blogger. He is a professor in the Department of Cell Biology and Human Anatomy, the Genome Center, and the Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of California, Davis School of Medicine. In 2013, Knoepfler was named one of the 50 most influential people in the stem cell field.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ed Yong</span> British science journalist (born 1981)

Edmund Soon-Weng Yong is a British-American science journalist. He is a staff member at The Atlantic, which he joined in 2015. In 2021, he received a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for a series on the COVID-19 pandemic.

Danielle N. Lee is an American assistant professor of biology at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, best known for her science blogging and outreach efforts focused on increasing minority participation in STEM fields. Her research interests focus on the connections between ecology and evolution and its contribution to animal behavior. In 2017, Lee was selected as a National Geographic Emerging Explorer. With this position Lee traveled to Tanzania to research the behavior and biology of landmine-sniffing African giant pouched rats.

Food blogging is a feature of food journalism interlinking a gourmet interest in food, blog writing, and food photography. Food blogs are generally written by food enthusiasts often referred to as a “foodies” and can be used commercially by the blogger to earn a profit. The first food blog launched in July, 1997 as a running feature on the Chowhound web site. Titled “What Jim Had for Dinner”, Chowhound founder Jim Leff cataloged his daily eating.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Doris Tsao</span> American neuroscientist

Doris Ying Tsao is an American systems neuroscientist and professor of biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She was formerly on the faculty at the California Institute of Technology. She is recognized for pioneering the use of fMRI with single-unit electrophysiological recordings and for discovering the macaque face patch system for face perception. She is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and the director of the T&C Chen Center for Systems Neuroscience. She won a MacArthur "Genius" fellowship in 2018. Tsao was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bethany Brookshire</span> American science journalist

Bethany Brookshire is an American science journalist. She writes for Science News for Students.

Social cognitive neuroscience is the scientific study of the biological processes underpinning social cognition. Specifically, it uses the tools of neuroscience to study "the mental mechanisms that create, frame, regulate, and respond to our experience of the social world". Social cognitive neuroscience uses the epistemological foundations of cognitive neuroscience, and is closely related to social neuroscience. Social cognitive neuroscience employs human neuroimaging, typically using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Human brain stimulation techniques such as transcranial magnetic stimulation and transcranial direct-current stimulation are also used. In nonhuman animals, direct electrophysiological recordings and electrical stimulation of single cells and neuronal populations are utilized for investigating lower-level social cognitive processes.

Sharlene D. Newman is an American cognitive neuroscientist, executive director of the Alabama Life Research Institute at the University of Alabama (UA), Professor in the Department of Psychology at UA, and an adjunct professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dimitri Van De Ville</span> Swiss-Belgian computer scientist and neuroscientist specialized in brain activity networks

Dimitri Van De Ville is a Swiss and Belgian computer scientist and neuroscientist specialized in dynamical and network aspects of brain activity. He is a professor of bioengineering at EPFL and the head of the Medical Image Processing Laboratory at EPFL's School of Engineering.

Jessica Hullman is a computer scientist and the Ginni Rometty associate professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University. She is known for her research in Information visualization.

References

  1. Costello, Victoria (2016-03-21). "Pseudonyms in Science: Neuroskeptic speaks to Neurocritic, Dr Primestein and Neurobonkers". PLOS SciComm. Retrieved 2018-04-26.
  2. Chawla, Dawmeet Singh (2017-01-17). "Mystery as controversial list of predatory publishers disappears". Science News. Retrieved 2018-04-27.
  3. Mandelbaum, Ryan F. (2017-07-24). "Scientific Journals Publish Bogus Paper About Midi-chlorians from Star Wars". Gizmodo. Retrieved 2018-04-26.
  4. "Journals pull two papers after blogger shares plagiarism suspicions". Retraction Watch. 2017-02-01. Retrieved 2018-04-26.
  5. Lyon, Louisa (2017-07-26). "Dead salmon and voodoo correlations: should we be sceptical about functional MRI?". Brain. 140 (8): e53. doi: 10.1093/brain/awx180 . ISSN   0006-8950. PMID   28899026.
  6. Teixeira da Silva, JaimeA. (2017-12-01). "Are Pseudonyms Ethical in (Science) Publishing? Neuroskeptic as a Case Study". Science and Engineering Ethics. 23 (6): 1807–1810. doi:10.1007/s11948-016-9825-7. ISSN   1353-3452. PMID   27830481. S2CID   195282150.
  7. "Am I An Unethical Pseudonym?". Neuroskeptic. 2016-11-10. Retrieved 2018-04-26.
  8. "How Churchill and Lincoln Can Help You Whup Depression". WIRED. 2013-05-16.
  9. "Research Blogging Awards 2010". researchblogging.org. Retrieved 14 March 2022.
  10. Parr, Chris (1 December 2012). "Science blog awards recognise youth and experience". Times Higher Education. Retrieved 14 March 2022.