Hello and welcome to serious inquiries only.

This is, oh my God, it's episode 500.

All right, well, I didn't know that until now because the, yeah, I didn't plan on doing a 500 thing.

That's pretty freaking cool, though.

And, you know, it works out perfectly because episode 500 is going to be core SIO.

We've got a science thingy for you.

I think especially in this day and age, sometimes it's nice to just learn something, talk about something scientific that has

nothing to do with Trump or politics or anything. It's just good old science learning. And we all know

who is a great guest for that. Of course, Dr. Janessa Seymour. So this episode comes from a couple

different things. For one, there's a study that Janessa references that looks at, well, I guess it's kind of

meta. It's not a literal meta study, but it's kind of meta in that it looked at how often

studies get cited, and it showed that if there's a picture of a brain on the study, as in like

a functional MRI, I take it, that increases the number of citations that a study gets, which is

kind of crazy to think about.

And also, I think a lot of science and skeptic-minded people will be familiar with the fact

that often functional MRI pictures of brains, you know, with a little red activity on them,

can be used to make claims that might not necessarily stand up to scrutiny.

It might be maybe over claiming a little bit.

And there's a reason behind that. And it's something that Janessa knows very well from her

scientific experience. There's a reason why those functional MRI images can never be as

accurate as you might think. And sometimes when you think something's more accurate than it is,

that can definitely cause problems. And there's another reason we're talking about this, which is there's a recent study that is

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