What neuroscience doesn't know

The scan tells you where the blood went. It does not tell you what the person was thinking. These are different claims, and they are often swapped for each other in the translation from journal to headline.

Most of what we confidently say about the brain is at a level of abstraction so coarse that the specific brain in question barely matters. A hundred years from now, we'll look at current fMRI papers the way we look at phrenology charts: not wrong, exactly, but pointed at the wrong grain.

The honest version of a brain paper would start: we found something interesting in a group average and are not sure what it means. That version doesn't travel as well.