The purported rise of brain scanning technologies in criminal cases has paralleled the growth of neurolaw within legal scholarship. But as with many new interfaces with law, the tendency to overplay the implications such technologies have regarding entrenched legal norms often ignores the mutable nature of our scientific understandings.

Vaughan Bell over at Mind Hacks has a great new post up titled The fMRI Smackdown Cometh which highlights the growing skepticism regarding many of the brain scanning claims made of late:

Over the last few months, the soul searching over the shortcomings of fMRI brain scanning has escaped the backrooms of imaging labs and has hit the mainstream.

Numerous articles in hard hitting publications have questioned some common assumptions behind the technology, suggesting a backlash against the bright lights of brain scanning is in full swing...

It starts with this simple question: what is fMRI measuring?

When we talk about imaging experiments, we usually say it measures 'brain activity', but you may be surprised to know that no-one's really sure what this actually means.

Bell provides a compelling litany of scholarly articles which highlight how much we do not know when it comes to the operations of the mind and the very real limitations of brain scans.