Something called the James S. McDonnell Foundation has a Web site it calls the Neuro-Journalism Mill, dedicated to tracking good and bad (mostly bad) reporting on neuroscience. It separates press reports into two categories — wheat and chaff — based on these criteria:

To be considered Chaff, the article must demonstrate one (or more than one) of the following flaws:

• seriously misrepresents the original science
• covers research of dubious value
• wildly extrapolates the reported findings
• presents an overly simplistic interpretation of a complex finding

Recent chaff includes:

“Men’s Brains Have More Cells, Say Scientists Who Counted”

“Cockroaches Can Learn — Like Dogs and Humans”

“Learn More About the Cognitive Paparazzi!”

“Why Do Most 16-Year-Olds Drive Like They’re Missing a Part of Their Brain?”

“Cells That Read Minds”

Among the wheat… this July 2 New Yorker piece on whether brain scans can really detect lies (short answer: not yet, not by a long shot).

It’s a fun site — though the authors don’t lie when they call themselves “curmudgeonly.” I’ll certainly be checking in with it regularly as I begin to write on this blog more about developments in neuroscience.

Still, I wonder if these folks aren’t trying to suck too much of the fun out of the entire endeavor of reporting on the leaps and bounds being made in understanding the human mind and human behavior. Sure, some of the headlines above take a serious field and force its findings into the template of the Weekly World News. At the same time, is any journalism that takes complex research and makes it accessible to non-academic readers a crime against science? Is joyless skepticism, as opposed to guarded optimism (or even wonderment), the only acceptable tone for one to take?

It could be the case that such an approach is necessary. These are very tough topics for people to grapple with intellectually. A recent study (PDF) suggests that “people are much more willing to buy bad scientific explanations of phenomenon if they contain some sort of neuroscience reference - such as a comment that the phenomenon is associated with activity in a certain part of the brain - even if that reference is irrelevant to the logic of the argument being made.” It’s something to keep in mind as a reader, a reporter, or a writer.

Still, I think with a little more knowledge on the part of the reader — more education in basic neuroscience, as with economics, would be a good idea at the high school level — most of the sillier stories would stop being believed. Meanwhile, there’s plenty in the field to be excited about, even keeping it all in perspective.