Science: Growing Too Fast?

There's a widespread perception among scientists that we're living in an era of relentless growth in terms of the number of scientific papers being published.

Many say that quantity has increased at the expense of quality: people are publishing "any old rubbish" or splitting their work into as many papers as possible, driven by the publish-or-perish culture of modern academia.

But is this true? To try and find out, I looked at the number of papers published each year, in English, on PubMed, for the past 30 years.

Here's the data: it shows an increase in the number of papers coming out each year, except for a small negative blip around the year 1997:

Now, when I first eyeballed this curve, I got the impression that growth has accelerated recently, consistent with the "recent pressure to publish" idea.

But here's the same data with each year's publications expressed as a ratio to the previous year's:

This reveals that the relative annual growth in the number of papers published has actually been pretty constant over the past 30 years. It's generally been around 4% (ratio of 1.04), and almost always within the range 2% to 6%. In other words, every year, scientists publish the same number of papers they did last year, plus about 4%.

The past few years have not seen especially strong growth, relatively speaking. At most we can say that year-on-year growth has been at the upper end of the historical range, 4 to 6%, but that's no faster than in the 1980s.

Still, this is a lot of growth. Assuming that it stays at 5% year on year, we'd expect a million new papers published in 2016, and two million in 2030.

But is that really feasible? Is there any good reason that science should grow exponentially in this way? Can that continue, or will we reach "peak science" or at least a plateau?

Brain Wiring - More Mess Than Manhattan?

Earlier this year, Harvard neuroscientist Van J. Wedeen and colleagues published a Science paper saying that brain white matter 'wiring' is organized in a grid-like fashion, with sheets of fibres crossing each other.

As Ed Yong put it, that the brain is full of Manhattan-like grids.

However, they were wrong - and that neat grid structure was purely an artefact of the method they used. So say London-based critics Marco Catani and colleagues in a Technical Comment just published.

Catani et al argue that the analysis Wedeen et al used was unable to distinguish two crossing fibres, unless the angle between them was very large, i.e. close to a right angle. In other words, they only saw right angles - and hence neat parallel sheets - but the other angles were still there.
 
They present some data of their own, showing the distribution of fibre-crossing angles in 10 healthy brains:

This shows no clear peak at 90 degrees as the grid theory proposes. Some fibres do cross at right angles, but only about 12% of them. The rest cross at a wide range of other angles.

Catani et al finish up by saying that we know, from cutting up brains, that it's just not a grid:

Crossing ... fanning, merging, and kissing are other modalities that are frequently observed in postmortem anatomy and not visible with current diffusion methods. Finally, the grid model does not take into account the presence of thalamic fibers, which project radially in all brain regions. This implies that most white matter voxels have multiple populations of fibers... merging at progressively tangential angles to reach the same cortical areas. Current tractography reconstructions are biased toward solving only crossing. This information is well known to anatomists, and there is a serious risk in proposing the grid model as “a means to validate MRI tractography through consistency with grid structure”. 

Ouch!

Wedeen et al respond robustly, however. They defend the accuracy of their technique, holding that it's more sensitive than alternatives, and say that even supposing their method had a bias towards detecting right angles, that wouldn't explain why they saw neat overlapping sheets.

They also point out that some earlier neuroanatomists did spot the kind of abrupt 'corners' and orthogonal tracts predicted by their theory, such as this drawing of a monkey brain:

They conclude:

The thesis that brain pathways adhere to a simple geometric system best accounts for the available evidence—not like London, but Manhattan; not unfathomable, but unlimited.

Marco Catani, Istvan Bodi, and Flavio Dell’Acqua (2012). Comment on “The Geometric Structure of the Brain Fiber Pathways” Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1223425

The Rise of Science Spam

I'm not sure if it's just me, but in the past few months I've been getting an inordinate amount of scientific spam.

This is at my real-world email address, under the name I publish my papers. I can only think that some nefarious hucksters are trawling scientific journals and harvesting contact details from the author lists. Either that, or a legitimate organization I've signed up to has shared their mailing list; but a robot seems more likely.

Whatever's going on, it's getting worse, at least for me. A few months ago, I got maybe one piece of sci-spam a week, which was tolerable. Now it's up to half a dozen or more per week and getting ridiculous. Here's what I've got just in the past 10 days.

Lab Products

These I can kind of see the point of: if you have a product to sell, you want to advertise it to people who might want to buy it. The problem is that as someone who scans brains, and last touched a pipette about 8 years ago, I really don't want to buy:

Two readouts for the price of one - Calcium and Arrestin. Select Any Gq-Coupled Calcium Cell Line and Save! Special Fall Savings!

Nor am I interested in:

Dear Colleague, Through your publications, we have noted that our Catalase antibody (GTX110704) may be useful to your current work. Catalase is a peroxisomal enzyme that converts hydrogen peroxide to oxygen and water, making it a key feature of the cell’s defense against oxidative stress...

To be honest, if you need to be told what catalase is, you're unlikely to want to buy a product that will let you measure it... but that's just my opinion, and I'm not a spammer.

Conferences

This is where it gets weird. Spam inviting people to conferences, doesn't make sense, because by definition, if a conference is resorting to spam to get attendees, it's not very good. Respected conferences are often oversubscribed; the whole point about a conference is that people want to be there, because other interesting people are expected to be there. Reputation is everything.

 Here's a few I've been offered in the past two weeks:

31 October 2012 is the deadline to save on registration for APAL 2012. Covering current and specialty aspects of mental health, this is one gathering that you cannot afford to miss! ... Please note that payment can be made by credit card.

and...

1st International Conference on Cultural Psychiatry in Mediterranean Countries, Tel Aviv, Israel | 5-7 November, 2012 The countdown has begun: Less than 2 months to WPA-TPS in Tel Aviv.

and...

Dear colleague, I welcome you to our first international conference on the topic of Integrated psychiatry and clinical psychology as our valued guest speaker. Because of your publication profile, we invite you to present ideas related to your works on related to the topic of the conference. Psychiatry and clinical psychology branches have evolved rapidly in past couple of decades. So much so that several sub-branches have emerged as parts of these sciences. The theme of present conference is integrated psychiatry and clinical psychology...

Journals

If you are resorting to spam to get to people to write for your journal, I don't ever want to read it and will never cite anything published in it.

Even if you were only angling for readers, I'd be suspicious of your integrity, but to spam for people to submit to you is absurd. Even mediocre journals nowadays get far more submissions than they can ever print. So if your journal isn't even mediocre enough to attract people then you have a real problem.

Journal of Anesthesiology and Clinical Science (ISSN 2049-9752)

Journal of Anesthesialogy [sic] & Clinical Science is an Open Access and peer reviewed Journal which aims to publish top quality papers on administration of anaesthesia during surgeries and pain management etc. The Journal has well [sic] established Editorial Board and follows rigorous peer review for all the [sic] manuscript's [sic]. visit [sic] the Journal to find latest [sic] articles published... We invite you to submit your research work/paper for the Anesthesialogy and Clinical Science Journal...

Oh, and you also have a problem if you can't spell your own journal title nor write coherent English despite claiming to only accept high quality scientific papers in that language.

Has anyone else noticed a surge of this kind of thing recently?

Publication Bias in Animal Research

Publication bias has historically been thought of mostly in the context of clinical trials. But I have been banging on for the past 4 years about how it's a problem for more 'basic' science as well.

I'm not alone in my concerns as an interesting new paper reveals: Publication Bias in Laboratory Animal Research. The authors surveyed the approximately 3,000 Dutch scientists involved in research on laboratory animals. The response rate was about 20%.

When asked how much animal research ends up being published, university researchers estimated about half, but industrial scientists put it at only about 10% - which, if true, suggests that publication bias in Pharma animal work is extremely serious.

In terms of solutions, the survey considered two ideas which Neuroskeptic readers will be familiar with - public pre-registration of studies:

Mandatory anonymous publication of research protocols of all ethics-approved animal research experiments in a publicly available database

and also open access to all data:

Mandatory anonymous publication of a brief structured form in a publicly available database, that gave main results or explained why an experiment could not be completed

On average the surveyed researchers felt that these measures would aid scientific progress; improve the validity of the literature; and prevent wasteful duplication of effort - but they also worried that it would increase bureaucracy.

Now, bureaucracy is second only to bias on my list of Things I Hate About Science, so I share their concern - but I really think registration wouldn't have to involve any extra paperwork. In many cases, it could be implemented simply by making existing data public.

For instance, grant applications, and requests for ethical approval, already contain detailed a priori protocols in most cases. They could so easily be published (perhaps with certain details removed for confidentiality reasons) and turned into a powerful weapon against publication bias.

Having said that though - it easily could end up being needlessly complicated and obstructive, as so much of the scientific process unfortunately is today. It will all depend on how it's implemented.

This is why I think it's so important that, as scientists, we reform science ourselves, and get it right, rather than leaving it to the bureaucrats, who won't.

Ter Riet G, Korevaar DA, Leenaars M, Sterk PJ, Van Noorden CJ, Bouter LM, Lutter R, Elferink RP, and Hooft L (2012). Publication bias in laboratory animal research: a survey on magnitude, drivers, consequences and potential solutions. PloS one, 7 (9) PMID: 22957028

Militarization of Neuroscience?

US military tech hothouse DARPA have an exciting announcement:

Tag Team Threat-recognition Technology Incorporates Mind, Machine
DARPA links human brainwaves, improved sensors, cognitive algorithms to improve target detection...

In what is - to my knowledge - the first example of the direct militarization of neuroscience, DARPA have developed a system in which electrical responses in a human brain are an integral step.

A soldier watches a screen on which, via various cameras, possible battlefield "threats" are shown. The cameras are fancy, and fancy image-recognition algorithms prioritize images that resemble threats - stuff that looks a bit like a tank, an IEDs, etc. But that's just the set-up.

The neuroscience core is that rather than just having a guy watching this screen and pressing a button if he spots something, they have a guy wired up with EEG to record brain activity. The system registers a threat when a picture causes a P300 response.

Now, the P300 is an electrical wave triggered by stimuli that are somehow 'meaningful' to the individual person. If you ask someone to press a button whenever they see a red light, for example, and then show them various lights, red ones will elicit a P300.

Very clever. But it may be too clever for its own good.

We already have a system that can detect the P300. It's the brain. No, most of us don't think of it as in those terms - we think of it as "Oh!" or "WTF?" or "Button press time" - but that response is the P300 (or rather something that precedes it because the P300 takes 300 milliseconds to peak, but you can respond faster than that.)

So why the EEG?

You could program a computer to detect P300s in a guy's brain and set off an alarm. DARPA apparently have. But it would be easier and cheaper to just 'program' the guy's brain to detect the P300 and push an alarm button - by asking him to do that. The human brain is a supercomputer that's been in development for hundreds of millions of years and it's primary job is to detect threats and act on them as quickly as possibly. One day technology might be able to do better but I don't think we're there yet.

DARPA say:

In testing of the full CT2WS kit, the sensor and cognitive algorithms returned 810 false alarms per hour. When a human wearing the EEG cap was introduced, the number of false alarms dropped to only five per hour, out of a total of 2,304 target events per hour, and a 91% percent successful target recognition rate.

All that tells us is that having a human check the pics via EEG is better than having no human involved at all. That's fine, but would a human just checking the pics via a button, be even better? We're not told. Maybe DARPA ran those tests and it really does offer advantages, but off the top of my head I can't think of any, and it wouldn't be the first time that the allure of high-tech neuroscience has blinded smart people to the fact that there's an easier, less sexy solution.

Unless...

OK. This is going to make me sound like a conspiracy nut. But there's one scenario in which the P300 has a decided advantage: unlike a button press, it's involuntary. It would work even if the guy doesn't want to co-operate.

So suppose you've captured a terrorist and you want to know who his terrorist friends are or where they've put the bomb. But he's not talking and Samuel L Jackson is off sick. So you wire him up to this system and show him a bunch of pictures of all the possible suspects or targets on your database. His brain will respond with a P300 to the ones he recognizes.

That would probably work - sometimes - and the P300 is already being trialled in some legal contexts for just that purpose although it's not clear how reliable it is.

So it's just possible that this whole soldier-scanning-the-battlefield story is merely an elaborate front (and perhaps a useful source of crucial calibration data) for a device to allow the CIA to read minds. I warned you it would make me sound crazy. Quick! Pass the tinfoil hat...!

Control A Robot With Your Brain?

A paper just out makes the dramatic claim that you can control a robot using thought alone, Avatar style, thanks to a 'mind reading' MRI scanner. But does it really work?

Dutch neuroscientists Patrik Andersson and colleagues bought a robot - an off-the-shelf toy called the 'Spykee' -  which is equipped with Wifi and  a video camera. The controlling human lay in the scanner and real-time fMRI was used to record brain activity. The video feed from the robot was showed on a screen in the scanner, completing the human-robot loop.

Participants controlled the robot with their brain. Specifically, they had to focus their attention on one of three arrows - forward, left, and right - shown on the screen.

During an initial training phase they focussed on each arrow in turn, to provide examples of the resulting brain activity: these were then fed into a machine learning algorithm that learned to recognize the pattern of BOLD activation for each command. Then in the second phase, they could control the robot just by thinking about the correct arrow - the scanner 'decoded' their brain activity and sent the appropriate commands to the bot over Wifi.

None of the elements of this process are new - real time fMRI has been around for a few years, so has machine learning to decode brain activation - but it's the first time they've been put together in this way.

And it's pretty awesome. The participants were able to guide their 'avatar' around a room to visit a number of target locations. They weren't perfectly accurate, and it took 10 or 15 minutes to navigate a few meters of ground... but it worked.

However... were they really using their minds, or just their eyes?

This is my main concern about this paper: participants were told to keep their eyes focussed on the middle of the screen and just mentally focus on the arrows to give commands. If they did indeed keep their eyes entirely stationary, then the patterns of brain activation would indeed represent pure 'thoughts'.

But if they were moving their eyes slightly (even unconsciously), the interpretation would be rather different. Moving their eyes would change the pattern of light hitting their retina, and this would be expected to change brain activation in the visual system of the brain.

So, maybe the fancy fMRI decoding system wasn't reading their mind, it was just acting as an elaborate means of tracking eye movements - which would be much less interesting. If you want to control a robot with your eyes, there are cheaper ways.

Andersson et al acknowledge this issue, and they claim, for various reasons, that this probably wasn't what happened here - but they didn't measure eye movements directly, so it does remain a worry. Eye tracking devices suitable for fMRI are widely available but this study used an ultra-powerful 7 Tesla scanner which, the authors say, made it impossible. So there's more work to be done here.

Andersson P, Pluim JP, Viergever MA, and Ramsey NF (2012). Navigation of a Telepresence Robot via Covert Visuospatial Attention and Real-Time fMRI. Brain topography PMID: 22965825

Recommend Me An Agent

I'm looking for a literary agent.

I have an idea for a book, it's non-fiction, about science, for a general audience. It'll cover some  themes I've written about on this blog, although it'll all be new material.

Anyway, if you can recommend any good agents who you think might be interested in this or if you are one and are interested - please let me know. You can email me at neuroskeptic at gmail dot com. I live in the UK, so a London-based agent would be ideal, but I'm open to all suggestions.

Brains In A Dish Need Sleep Too?

All animals sleep, but despite decades of research, neuroscientists still have no clear answer as to why. Now a dramatic new study reveals that sleep may be a fundamental state that even brain cells growing in a dish need.

Swiss neuroscientists Valerie Hinard and colleagues cultured mouse cortical neurons in dishes equipped with arrays of electrodes. This allowed them to record the electrical activity produced by the growing 'brain'. They also measured the expression of different genes in the neurons, and compared these to gene expression in real mouse brains.

They found that while cultures of neurons started out fired randomly, after about 10 days, the cultures entered a state of synchronized periodic firing, with the whole population of cells firing together in slow cycles of activity - with a frequency of 1 cycle every 5 to 15 seconds. This is extremely slow - by contrast the "slow waves" characteristic of animal sleep cycle about 30 times faster - but the authors say that such ultra-slow waves have been seen in sleeping animals too.

But the dishes could be 'woken up' by adding a mixture of neurotransmitters, which abolished the burst cycles. They reappeared about 24 hours later. Gene expression changes in the cells in the 'sleep' and 'wake' state were significantly correlated with changes seen in real mice deprived of sleep.

Finally - and this might end up being the most important bit - the authors compared the biochemistry of the 'sleep deprived' dishes to the 'well rested' ones. They found remarkably few major changes, but they did observe a significant increase in the levels of lysolipids.

Lysolipids are breakdown products of phospholipids, which make up the membranes of all living cells. When present in membranes, lysolipids can act as 'detergents', distorting their structure. That's bad. These results suggest that sleep might serve to prevent the build up of lysolipids. If that pans out, it would mean that the function of sleep is very primitive, a fundamental biological necessity for any connected network of neurons, even what amounts to a random medley thrown together on a plate.

This study used cultured mouse neurons, but it's possible to grow human brain cells in a dish too. The obvious next step will be to check if human neurons exhibit the same sleep/wake-like states - and whether the very slow synchronized firing is really like human sleep. If so, could this help understand insomnia? Narcolepsy? Maybe even jetlag?

It's also got implications for all other brain-in-a-dish research. Scientists may literally need to ensure that their dishes get enough sleep in future studies.

It's all very exciting. I don't study sleep in my own research, but I try to keep up with the literature as I find it very interesting. I've covered various aspects of sleep neuroscience previously. So while I'm no expert, this seems to me like truly groundbreaking stuff, and potentially a "game changer" for the whole of neuroscience.

Hinard V, Mikhail C, Pradervand S, Curie T, Houtkooper RH, Auwerx J, Franken P, and Tafti M (2012). Key electrophysiological, molecular, and metabolic signatures of sleep and wakefulness revealed in primary cortical cultures. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 32 (36), 12506-17 PMID: 22956841

Cocktail-Party Neuroscience

"That's all very well, but what about the real world?"

This, or something to this effect, is a stock criticism of much of psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Studies of human behavior and brain function under carefully controlled laboratory conditions don't tell us much about everyday life, the argument goes.

It's a serious point. But a group of neuroscientists have now sought to dispel such worries in rather spectacular fashion. With the help of some nifty wireless headsets, Alan Gevins and colleagues of San Francisco took electroencephalography (EEG) out of the lab and organized an EEG party - allowing them to record brain electrical activity from 10 people as they chatted and drank vodka martinis. An electroencephalorgy one might say.

This is perhaps the only time in history that scientists have admitted, on record, to getting drunk with their research funding.

Pics or it didn't happen? They have pics:

And more:

The odd device held by the girl in blue is an alcohol breathalyser, which brings us onto the purpose of the study, which was to measure the effect of alcohol on brain activity.

The authors first measured the effect of alcohol on brain alpha, beta and theta band activity under standard lab conditions, and then checked to see if the results translated to the party. They did, surprisingly well in fact (although the whole thing relied on a multivariate model of the kind that make purists suspicious.)

Still, only 40% of the party data was deemed unusable due to electrical artifacts caused by participants speaking, swallowing, chewing and so forth, which is pretty good, and suggests that real-world EEG could be much more feasible than many neuroscientists would have predicted (given how annoying these sources of noise can be even under lab conditions I'd have guessed it would be more like 90%).

Now I'll make an admission: when I first read this paper, I was cynical. I felt sure it was some kind of advert for the authors' products, probably the nifty wireless EEG caps they used. "Oh very clever," I thought. "You run a wacky study, it goes viral, and you get free advertising. Well, it's worked on me, but I'm going to call you out on it."

However, the authors were one step ahead, because the paper assures readers that:

The authors are employed by the San Francisco Brain Research Institute and SAM Technology which are 100% supported by competing research grants from the U.S. Federal Government... The organization only performs research and offers no services or products. None of the authors perform consulting work. It is very unlikely that any corporation, investor, etc. would find it commercially worthwhile to buy or license the technologies that the authors have made to do their research.

OK then.

Gevins A, Chan CS, and Sam-Vargas L (2012). Towards measuring brain function on groups of people in the real world. PloS one, 7 (9) PMID: 22957099

Geometric Illusions in Astronauts

Geometric illusions in astronauts sounds like the title of a late 70s prog album, but it's actually the topic of a remarkable psychology paper just published.

Authors Gilles Clement and colleagues of the impressively-named International Space University were interested in the effects of zero gravity on optical illusions and the perception of shape.

They hypothesized that our sense of gravity pointing down (via the inner ears) is responsible for certain visual illusions. In the Inverted T illusion, for example, two lines of equal length seem different, the vertical line appearing longer than the horizontal one.

So they took 8 astronauts due to spend time on the International Space Station (ISS). Using a computer display setup, the astronauts were tested before, during, and after their time in orbit - the spaceflights lasting up to 180 days.

The results showed that the magnitude of the inverted T illusion was decreased after a long spaceflight,  although only a little bit. See above.

Also, when asked to draw a square and an even-sized cross, the astronauts tended to draw the vertical lines shorter when in space, compared to back on earth: unlike with the inverted T illusion, this happened immediately, rather than only after prolonged time in zero G.

For two other illusions, the Muller-Lyer and the Ponzo, there was no effect, however.

The authors write that these data support the idea that our sense of gravity affects our visual perception, and say that this is consistent with what happens in patients with inner-ear damage that affects the sense of up and down.

The data are pretty noisy because of the small sample size, but for once, the authors have a pretty good excuse for why it was hard to recruit participants...

Clément G, Skinner A, Richard G, and Lathan C (2012). Geometric illusions in astronauts during long-duration spaceflight. Neuroreport PMID: 22955144

When Data Filtering Introduces Bias (fMRI Edition)

A couple of months ago I blogged about a paper showing that 'filtering' of EEG data can create spurious effects.

Now, we read about another form of bias that filters can introduce, this time for fMRI: Filtering induces correlation in fMRI resting state data.

Australian neuroscientists Catherine Davey and colleagues consider temporal filtering of fMRI data in studies looking at correlation (brain functional connectivity).

Because both very high frequency and very slow changes in the fMRI signal are probably caused by artefacts, rather than interesting brain signals, it's common to use a filter to try and extract the medium-frequency changes that are of most interest (e.g. approximately 0.01 to 0.1 Hz).

However, while this filtering is very useful, Davey et al show that it can - ironically - create artefacts of its own: here's the data from one volunteer scanned during a simple task and then analyzed in 4 different ways:

Without filtering (A) there's a huge amount of 'connectivity' - too much to be realistic. This is why filtering is important.

But filtering, without correcting for the effects of the filter, actually makes things worse (B). It solves one problem but at the cost of creating another. The problem is those pesky autocorrelations. The authors say, however, that they've calculated a way to correct for filter-induced correlations (D) and that this gives more realistic results. They recommend that this should be used in future connectivity studies, but don't go into much detail regarding the question of what this means for the existing literature.

Perhaps data 'filtering' is a misleading term. It implies that all you're doing is removing the unwanted noise, leaving pristine, crystal clear data, a bit like a water filter. Mmm. What could go wrong? In fact mathematical 'filters' can put stuff into the data as well as take it out, so should we stop using that word and just call them what they are: modifications?

Davey CE, Grayden DB, Egan GF, and Johnston LA (2012). Filtering induces correlation in fMRI resting state data. NeuroImage PMID: 22939874

Naomi Wolf's "Vagina"

Naomi Wolf's "Vagina" is full of bad science about the brain - is an article I wrote for the New Statesman. It's about a new book which is... not very good.

I didn't come up with the title by the way, but I do rather like it.

See also the Neurocritic's take.

This Is Your Brain On Management

Have you ever wondered whether how the brains of managers work? New research from a group of German neuroscientists and management experts reveals all: Dissociated Neural Processing for Decisions in Managers and Non-Managers

The results were rather remarkable:

Using fMRI, the researchers found that managers' brains were less active in a number of areas, compared to the brains of non-managers, when doing the same task. By contrast, managerial brains were more active than the others only in one small area (caudate nucleus). See above.

So overall, managers had less brain activation during the task. Does that mean they have defective brains? Could this be a neurobiological explanation for the behaviour of Pointy Haired Boss and David Brent?

Not at all, say the authors. The lower activation in the brains of managers means that they were more efficient:

the managers might have found a more efficient way of sorting the presented words. This might have enabled them to faster decide for their preferred category...  Managers as expert decision-makers would seek to find a rule or heuristic on which they could base their decisions. According to previous studies, this phase of rule identification would involve the caudate nucleus

While non-managers wasted brainpower on thinking through the task with several areas of their cerebral cortex, the managers (so to speak) downsized their neurological expenditure by outsourcing the work to their caudate nucleus, an area responsible for applying a simple but effective rule.

One of the problems with these kinds of group-comparison fMRI studies is that under-activation can equally well be glossed as "deficient" or "efficient". Curiously, it usually ends up being whichever fits with the author's narrative.

That's assuming you agree that the task was about "decision making". It consisted of seeing a long series of pairs of words, one "individualistic" such as 'power' and one "collectivistic" such as 'harmony'. Participants just had to pick which word they liked best. There were no right or wrong answers. I'm not sure what kind of manager would have to do anything like that in real life. Maybe a manager of a fridge magnet poetry manufacturer?

That's also assuming the results are solid. The authors provide few details on the fMRI methods (the main results are said to be "cluster-level corrected at p less than 0.0013", which is an unusual threshold to use and an extremely strict one (0.05 cluster-level is more common; this is about 40 times stricter).

Still. If you do buy these results, the message is: management is literally about using as little of your brain as possible...

Caspers S, Heim S, Lucas MG, Stephan E, Fischer L, Amunts K, and Zilles K (2012). Dissociated neural processing for decisions in managers and non-managers. PloS one, 7 (8) PMID: 22927984