ABSTRACT
The primary purveyors of neurohype are the news and entertainment media, both of which are notorious for oversimplifying and sensationalizing scientific claims. Neurohype may render many of us vulnerable to what the late neuroscientist Barry Beyerstein termed "brainscams": commercial products that capitalize on neuroscientific assertions that are largely or entirely devoid of scientific support. Partly underpinning the rhetorical power of neuroscience, especially neuroimaging information, may be two intertwined notions: "neuroessentialism" and "neurorealism". Neurorealism, which appears to be even more germane to the popularity of neurohype, refers to the often inchoate belief that brain-based information is somehow more genuine or valid than is non–brain-based information. The misinterpretation of neuroimaging data is perhaps the most widespread and publicly visible manifestation of neurohype. A fundamental desideratum for a newly developed psychological measure is incremental validity. The nature of examining activity in the brain at multiple time points across thousands of voxels can generate the multiple-comparisons problem.
