The BBC reports a study that found unusual patterns in the brain scans of anorexics and former anorexics.

All the explanations suggest that the different scans show some underlying difference in these brains from non-anorexics. This difference is presented as a sign of an underlying mental illness with a causal relationship to anorexia.

The findings in the American Journal of Psychiatry point to a brain region linked to anxiety and perfectionism……. Dr Ian Frampton of Exeter University, who has himself been conducting MRI studies in patients with anorexia, said: “This shows how the brain might be important in eating disorders.
“There may be networks in the brain that make someone vulnerable to developing an eating disorder.”
Establishing a neurobiological cause might help remove some of the blame and stigma that surrounds conditions like anorexia, he said.
A spokeswoman from the eating disorders association “beat” said: “This demonstrates how complex eating disorders are and underlines that they should be treated as a serious mental illness and not a silly diet gone wrong.” (from the BBC report)

All this seems like a big leap from the evidence to me. The effects of starvation on the brain’s functions would be my first suggested explanation. You could test this easily, by scanning the brains of some of the many people in the world who have experienced unwilling starvation. Maybe the experimenters did this and it didn’t get reported in the pop science version.

Is it cynicism or scepticism to doubt these kinds of assertions? (See great post by Alun Salt – who seems to have become the blog-imptetus-du-weekend – discussing the role of honest doubt, as shown in the AZT discovery.)

I was uncynically delighted to see that, while this blog was away, badscience.net has been saying things that I find myself saying – more ineptly and with very much less scientific knowledge – such as Evolutionary Psychology is teleological and the prospect of infinite free energy defies the laws of physics.

Where Alun talks about cynicism he seems to mean starting from to a refusal to believe encouraging evidence, whereas scepticism suggests that one will accept the evidence if it is persuasive. All the same, there are plenty of claims that demand a cynical response. (“Conspiracy theory” views about UFOS; the assertion that climate change is a myth that somehow benefits the government; new Aids “treatments” using an untested couple of herbs; denials of the use of torture. need I go on?) Mere scepticism doesn’t do full justice to these claims.

Sometimes, cynicism is a crucial part of the sceptical response to the world. A cynic asks “Who benefits from this?” or says “I’ve heard this nonsense before and it was proved false then.”

A little cynicism about the sources of the WMD evidence, that was used to justify the start of the T.W.A.T. (TM Nullifidian) might have saved many lives and spared the world from years of going to hell in the proverbial handbasket.