Nicky Penttila

[crankypants alert]

I remember getting so mad last year reading the op-ed “This is your brain on politics” in the New York Times. At my job, we work so hard to get people interested in brain science and to help them understand it, then a not-flake but well-respected researcher comes out with something flaky like this—claiming to read undecided voters’ preferences for specific candidates via brain-scanning. Makes us all sound like phrenologists. 

Geoffrey Aguirre in a new story in Dana Press’s Cerebrum journal aims to head off the be-all, end-all claims of brain-scanners, and in the process gives one of the better explanations of how the machine and its users interact that I’ve read. But it’s long, and not in the Sunday section of a major daily newspaper, and not written in a style that screams at you or calls your enemies haters, so I’m not sure how many minds it will influence. 

Heading into this election, we’re still trying to second-guess the answers non-representative samples of people give to badly worded political surveys. How about—carefully—counting their votes?