Signal and noise
What fMRI taught me about paying attention.
A lot of fMRI analysis is deciding what to ignore. The signal you care about is small. The noise is everywhere. The pipeline is a series of choices about what counts as real.
I think about that outside the lab too. Most of what happens in a day is noise. The hard part isn’t collecting more information — it’s figuring out what to stop attending to.
I’m still not very good at this. But at least I have a framework for feeling bad about it.