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of the matter. He was dogless because of his living situation but had grown up with dogs. He was dating a girl whose role it was to assess the monkeys used in research at Emory for cage compatibility. A monkey matchmaker.
    To Gavin’s question, I replied, “To see what they’re thinking.”
    “I don’t think you need an MRI to do that,” Gavin said. “It’s
‘Squirrel!’
”
    That got a good laugh—we were all fans of Pixar’s
Up
—which of course triggered a round of other what-dogs-are-thinking jokes, centered around food and butt sniffing.
    Monica Capra surprised me by being the first in the lab to say this was a good idea. Born and raised in Bolivia, a country ravaged by poor economic policies, Monica had obvious reasons for becoming a professor of economics herself. Unsatisfied with theory, she had gone on to specialize in experimental economics, doing actual tests to verify that people behaved the way other economists said they did. A colleague had introduced us eight years earlier, and because of our mutual interest in decision making, we had hit it off, designing fMRI experiments together ever since.
    Monica was a tough cookie, always critical and not shy about poking holes in the ideas of others. Underneath her shell she was a warm person, but she was allergic to dogs. She was the last person in the lab I would have expected to support this.
    “People spend an enormous amount of money on their dogs,” she said. “They are important to many people. I think it’s important to figure out why.”
    Kristina Blaine, who coordinated all the activities of the lab, voiced her support too, which was strange considering that she lived with four cats.
    Sitting next to Monica was Jan Barton. Jan (pronounced
yahn
) is also from South America, in his case, Argentina. Jan is a professor ofaccounting. Monica had told him about the kind of research we were doing in the lab, and he had started hanging out with us to figure out how to use neuroimaging in accounting, which was a completely novel application of fMRI and something nobody had done before—always a risk to one’s academic career. Jan had a dog that was on Prozac for anxiety—he just smiled at the idea of scanning dog brains.
    Lisa had been deep in thought and said finally, “If we start scanning dogs, does that mean we’ll have dogs in the lab?”
    “I guess it does.”
    “Yaaayyy!”
    I turned to Andrew. There was no way I was going to be able to do this by myself. I still had to teach and supervise the rest of the research projects in the lab. Andrew was the only grad student. This meant he had the most free time to spare. He was also the only person in the lab besides myself who had the necessary technical knowledge about MRI.
    “Andrew, do you want to do this?”
    “Hell, yeah!”
    “Not to rain on the puppy parade,” Lisa said, “but what is the scientific question?”
    There are two types of experiments in science: fishing expeditions, where you start collecting data without a clear idea of what the right questions are, and hypothesis-driven experiments, where you start with a specific question to answer. Every middle school student would recognize the latter type as the foundation of the
scientific method.
Most people think that hypothesis-driven experiments are the only way scientific progress occurs. And science journals strongly prefer hypothesis-driven experiments.
    The recipe for the typical hypothesis-driven experiment is simple: Take a well-accepted scientific theory. Find some minuscule aspect of that theory that nobody has ever verified before. Do an experimentthat proves that aspect and supports the theory as a whole. Publish.
    These experiments make for easy reading and are a surefire way to get results published, building up a résumé that will ensure promotion and tenure at a university. These types of experiments are also popular with funding agencies because the risk of failure is minimal. By my estimate, nearly all