Comment Blech (Score 1) 103
Every fMRI story I read is summarized basically by "Guy 1 puts Guy 2 in fMRI and now ALL THE SECRETS OF THE BRAIN HAVE BEEN REVEALED AND WE CAN CONTROL LAZERS WITH OUR MIND".
That would be like saying "I looked in a telescope and NOW I AM EMPEROR OF SPACE"
fMRI is a painfully inexact technique, and sample sizes for fMRI studies are generally very small (either very few subjects or few trials compared to a non-MRI study), because of the expense of MRI time and the difficulty in finding subjects who will actually do what you tell them to do (think about this, concentrate on that, for an hour, in an MRI, without moving at all). Add onto that the incredibly poor spatial and temporal resolution (relative to the speed and scale of the brain), the incredible noisiness of the results, the fact that fMRI measures blood flow (NOT neural activity, although the two are certainly closely related).
A good analogy might be looking at a CPU with an infrared webcam and trying to figure out how it works. With very careful investigation you could certainly figure some stuff out, but it would be extremely difficult and slow, and you'd never be able to get beyond a certain level of detail.
Bottom line, while fMRI studies can be very useful, it takes lots of corroborating studies to make any firm statement about how the brain works, and you certainly would be hard pressed to say you 'decoded' anything about the brain in just one study.