Martin Lindstrom claims that neuroimaging shows that people have fallen in love with their phones. He writes that "the flurry of activation in the insular cortex of the brain … is associated with feelings of love and compassion." Tal Yarkoni explains the astonishing ignorance underpinning this argument:
I’d be pretty surprised, actually, if you could present any picture or sound to participants in an fMRI scanner and not elicit robust insula activity. Orienting and sustaining attention to salient things seems to be a big part of what the anterior insula is doing (whether or not that’s ultimately its ‘core’ function). So the most appropriate conclusion to draw from the fact that viewing iPhone pictures produces increased insula activity is something vague like “people are paying more attention to iPhones”, or “iPhones are particularly salient and interesting objects to humans living in 2011.” Not something like “no, really, you love your iPhone!”
Yarkoni follows up on the broader pushback from scientists here.
The Dish 