TY - JOUR T1 - Fallacies in Neuroscience: The Alzheimer's Edition JF - eneuro JO - eNeuro DO - 10.1523/ENEURO.0530-21.2021 VL - 9 IS - 1 SP - ENEURO.0530-21.2021 AU - Karl Herrup Y1 - 2022/01/01 UR - http://www.eneuro.org/content/9/1/ENEURO.0530-21.2021.abstract N2 - In his editorial entitled “On Fallacies in Neuroscience,” Bernard (2020) takes his fellow neuroscientists to task for failures in logic that lead to the promulgation of fallacies and their entrenchment in the scientific literature. Drawing on his background in mathematics and philosophy, he highlights two common errors in logic that permeate our field.The first error he discusses leads to a fallacy known as “reverse inference.” The example he cites is subtle, but all the more telling because it “feels” correct before we are shown the problem. Imagine that my brain is in a scanner when I experience a bout of fear. The scan shows that a particular brain region (Bernard calls it Area Z) lights up brightly with the onset of my fear. One would be correct in proposing that Area Z is likely involved in my brain's processing of fear. The fallacious conclusion, however, would be to assert that if Area Z is lit, I must be experiencing fear. That is the “reverse” of the experimental design, which was to induce fear and see which brain region activates. As Bernard (2020) points out, one could easily imagine that if I were experiencing a different emotion, even joy, Area Z might also light up. Without a lot more data, all we know is that the region is correlated with my experience of fear. We do not know that it is either necessary or sufficient to cause my fear.The second error he describes leads to a fallacy known as “affirming the consequent.” His choice of example in this case is far easier to grasp. He starts with two objectively true statements. The first one is a conditional statement: if Francis Bacon wrote Hamlet, then he had to have been a great writer. … ER -