A useful cautionary note:

A paper published online in September by the journal Cognition shows
that assertions about psychology — even implausible ones like “watching
television improved math skills” — seem much more believable to
laypeople when accompanied by images from brain scans. And a paper
accepted for publication by The Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
demonstrates that adding even an extraneous reference to the brain to a
bad explanation of human behavior makes the explanation seem much more
satisfying to nonexperts.

Eric Racine, a bioethicist at the Montreal Clinical Research
Institute, coined the word neurorealism to describe this form of
credulousness. In an article called “fMRI in the Public Eye,” he and
two colleagues cited a Boston Globe article about how high-fat foods
activate reward centers in the brain. The Globe headline: “Fat Really
Does Bring Pleasure.” Couldn’t we have proved that with a slice of pie
and a piece of paper with a check box on it?

The way conclusions from cognitive neuroscience studies are reported
in the popular press, “they don’t necessarily tell us anything we
couldn’t have found out without using a brain scanner,” says Deena
Weisberg, an author of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience paper. “It
just looks more believable now that we have the pretty pictures.”

This reminded me of some of the misuses of evolutionary biology by law professors that Michael Weisberg and I discussed in a recent paper.