wired.com

Scanning Dead Salmon in fMRI Machine Highlights Risk of Red Herrings

So, as the fish sat in the scanner, they showed it "a series of photographs depicting human individuals in social situations." To maintain the rigor of the protocol (and perhaps because it was hilarious), the salmon, just like a human test subject, "was asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing." The salmon, as Bennett's poster on the test dryly notes, "was not alive at the time of scanning."

[penbrydd]

Perhaps the most cutting criticism of brain imaging studies is the one with the dead fish.

the voxels representing the area where the salmon’s tiny brain sat showed evidence of activity. In the fMRI scan, it looked like the dead salmon was actually thinking about the pictures it had been shown.

Which is to say, with 130k datapoints per scan, some of them are going to be garbage, and it’s important to make some effort to filter them out.