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"The scientists exchanged one last look and held their breath. Everything was ready. The electrode was in place, threaded between the two hemispheres of a living cat's brain; the instruments were tuned to pick up the chatter passing from one half to the other. The only thing left was to listen for that electronic whisper, the brain's own internal code. The amplifier hissed - the three scientists expectantly leaning closer - and out it came, loud and clear. "We all live in a yellow submarine, yellow submarine, yellow submarine ...." "The Beatles' song! We somehow picked up the frequency of a radio station," recalled Michael S. Gazzaniga, chuckling at the 45-year-old memory. "The brain's secret code. Yeah, right!" Dr. Gazzaniga, 71, now a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is best known for a dazzling series of studies that revealed the brain's split personality, the division of labor between its left and right hemispheres. But he is perhaps next best known for telling stories, many of them about blown experiments, dumb questions and other blunders during his nearly half-century career at the top of his field. "

"These points are extremely well-taken, particularly his last comments about the use of brain scans as indications of the brain's functions. I'm delighted to see a scientist of Gazzaniga's stature provide these cautions. Others have also worried about the over-interpretations of brain scans, a question I raised in my Psychology Today blog posting "MRI's: The new phrenology?" How many times have you heard the expression "the brain lights up"? The brain does not behave in technicolor; it's just that the colors make for a better story when researchers are trying to sell their results to the public and funding agencies. It's important that we not over-interpret the pretty colors that brain scans provide but instead recognize that everyone's brain is a little bit different and that activity in a region doesn't signify exactly what a person is thinking or feeling. I hope that we will keep these cautions in mind even as brain scans become more and more commonplace. "