On making the publishing process "more rapid, rational and equitable"

We had a previous extended discussion on the ways in which scientists might react to the rejection of a submitted manuscript which followed a post over at double-doc’s place. The discussions following all of these posts touched on one of the annoyances of manuscript peer review, namely requests for the authors to provide extensive additional experimental work to justify acceptance for publication.
It seems a trio of senior chaps have been reading blogs.

"I'll PubMed it and find out…"

Most of the audience for this blog will be familiar with the use of “Google” as a verb to describe searching the World Wide Web for information on a given topic. “I googled a half-dozen mojito recipes which we tried out on the Fourth”. “Did you google your blind date/new postdoc to make sure he isn’t a psycho?”. “You got dinner plans after the conference sessions end for the day? No? Lemme google up some restaurants.”
The applications of “to google” are endless and endemic. Many, if not all, readers will admit to the fact that the ability to nearly instantly seek out a large amount of data (some accurate, some not, some misleading, true) on any topic of interest has become a default part of daily life. Those of you with iPhones, well, a part of hourly life perhaps?
Lagging well behind this transformation of our information-age lives, but assuredly steaming right along behind, is the verb-ification of PubMed. For some of us, it is here already. This is the area where I am sympathetic to the antics of the Open Access Acolytes™.

Phunctional Imaging Is The Phrenology Of The Twenty First Century

Functional imaging approaches such as fMRI that indirectly detect changes in correlates of neuronal activity in volumetrically defined brain locations are extremely popular right now. Investigators put animals or human subjects in an imaging rig, and then have the subject perform tasks or respond to various stimuli. The idea is that by detecting particular brain regions that become more active during certain phases of a task, one gains insight into how the brain processes information.
This is an open thread for our commenters to discuss whether this set of approaches is a total waste of fucking time and effort that generates pretty picture fodder for making up wackaloon fantasy stories about how the brain works, or, alternatively, is really providing us with information that will lead to a genuinely more satisfying understanding of neural information processing. Go at it!