A major discovery (and not the good kind) can mean that up to 40,000 research studies about how the brain functions published over the past 15 years could go out the window. There has been a bug (and not the insect kind) in the software used to create functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) images of the brain. fMRI is an imaging technology widely used to generate pictures of the brain and its activity. If you have ever seen a picture of the brain with different colors in different parts of the brain showing brain activity, that’s fMRI. So, many of the studies that have told us what happens in your brain when you work, play, exercise, have sex, etc. may be wrong. This is (in technical language) not good. Think of how much time, effort and money may have been wasted. Think of how wrong conclusions about the brain may have led to developing and using the wrong treatments.
