
I almost destroyed the backseat pocket of an airline seat this summer. The vandalism was inadvertent, assuredly, though the anger that fueled it was not. While waiting for my plane to take off, I had read a magazine article claiming to show that fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) studies were “uncovering” the voting preferences of test subjects. An adjacent article announced that researchers could now predict the buying preferences of other test subjects using the same imaging technologies.