Great article. Here’s AI’s view of the study. The study examining young adults’ brain responses to vape imagery provides an interesting mechanistic insight into how appealing product visuals can elicit rapid neural activation, measured via EEG. However, its extremely small sample size (38 participants), artificial lab setting, and focus on images rather than actual vaping behaviour severely limit its generalisability. While scientifically valid within its narrow scope, the findings cannot be interpreted as evidence of addiction, health risk, or vaping uptake in the real world. As such, the study is primarily a proof-of-concept for neural response to visual cues, and any alarmist claims extrapolating these results to population-level harm are unwarranted.
Quite simply it is very disappointing that an article as poor as this one could be accepted for publication in a periodical associated with the Medical Journal of Australia.
"Participants viewed pictures of vape devices on a screen, and the researchers measured how quickly the brain responded to those images. Now put a chocolate bar in front of them and perform the same test."
Exactly. I appreciate you drawing attention to this one because I have a partly-written Substack on a few similar studies. These studies are not entirely new of course, but I've seen a resurgence of them in recent months.
They all use a fancy methodology like EEG, eye tracking, etc to measure responses to vaping content. My reaction reading these studies was the same as yours: what's the evidence that this is unique to vaping, as opposed to food images, or advertisements with people in them? Most people naturally fixate on faces and the fact that it occurs when there's a vape in the image or video plays absolutely nothing scientific without testing against a control condition (which is disturbingly absent in these high profile publications).
Hee hee. I do so luv a well written destruction of a piss poor "scientific" report of verbal diarrhea. Where are all the brain dead smokers who started nicotine use 40 yrs ago? This ex smoker ain't one, I thunk?,
"Forced to package cigarettes in a dull green box, the emergence of vapes has provided tobacco companies with an opportunity to return to the good old days: dressing up their addictive product in playful packaging, bright colours, cartoons, and appealing fonts."
The whole article is framed as Big Tobacco devious marketing to hook a whole new generation. Yet if one looks at the study, one immediately notices that none of the devices shown are made or sold by tobacco companies. No doubt the media will buy all this without a moments thought. All this demonstrates is that Tobacco Control's marketing (propaganda) is far more effective than any tobacco company could hope for.
Great article. Here’s AI’s view of the study. The study examining young adults’ brain responses to vape imagery provides an interesting mechanistic insight into how appealing product visuals can elicit rapid neural activation, measured via EEG. However, its extremely small sample size (38 participants), artificial lab setting, and focus on images rather than actual vaping behaviour severely limit its generalisability. While scientifically valid within its narrow scope, the findings cannot be interpreted as evidence of addiction, health risk, or vaping uptake in the real world. As such, the study is primarily a proof-of-concept for neural response to visual cues, and any alarmist claims extrapolating these results to population-level harm are unwarranted.
Quite simply it is very disappointing that an article as poor as this one could be accepted for publication in a periodical associated with the Medical Journal of Australia.
"Participants viewed pictures of vape devices on a screen, and the researchers measured how quickly the brain responded to those images. Now put a chocolate bar in front of them and perform the same test."
Exactly. I appreciate you drawing attention to this one because I have a partly-written Substack on a few similar studies. These studies are not entirely new of course, but I've seen a resurgence of them in recent months.
They all use a fancy methodology like EEG, eye tracking, etc to measure responses to vaping content. My reaction reading these studies was the same as yours: what's the evidence that this is unique to vaping, as opposed to food images, or advertisements with people in them? Most people naturally fixate on faces and the fact that it occurs when there's a vape in the image or video plays absolutely nothing scientific without testing against a control condition (which is disturbingly absent in these high profile publications).
Exactly. Without a proper control condition the findings don’t really tell us anything meaningful about vaping itself.
The key question should be - is the response different from other common stimuli? And the answer is no.
"Academics" still cling to the view that "Believe the science" means their word is gospel.
Hee hee. I do so luv a well written destruction of a piss poor "scientific" report of verbal diarrhea. Where are all the brain dead smokers who started nicotine use 40 yrs ago? This ex smoker ain't one, I thunk?,
Nice stack my friend
"Forced to package cigarettes in a dull green box, the emergence of vapes has provided tobacco companies with an opportunity to return to the good old days: dressing up their addictive product in playful packaging, bright colours, cartoons, and appealing fonts."
The whole article is framed as Big Tobacco devious marketing to hook a whole new generation. Yet if one looks at the study, one immediately notices that none of the devices shown are made or sold by tobacco companies. No doubt the media will buy all this without a moments thought. All this demonstrates is that Tobacco Control's marketing (propaganda) is far more effective than any tobacco company could hope for.