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Well, shows like CSI, and authors like Dan Brown, clearly illustrate that you can be wildly successful without knowing anything about your subject (see note at the end for examples). But if your goal is to actually be a good author and produce a quality work, then I wouldn't follow either of their examples.
The worst thing that will happen is you'll get something blatantly wrong and thoroughly alienate any reader who happens to know enough about the subject to know that you're wrong. This is particularly problematic if the thing you get wrong is very basic information, because that means: a) more people will know you're wrong, and b) it will likely be that much more repulsive because of the relative ease with which you could have gotten it right.
Ideally, you would take some time to get at least a cursory education in the field you're dealing with, and then also have an expert in the field as a consultant, or at least as a final reviewer to tell you whether or not you've produced something that will alienate them and others in their field.
Assuming you don't have the resources for this, a very brief introduction to the field might still be possible, using online resources like wikipedia. This will at least give you some sense of what the field is about. But do not use this brief introduction as a means to "knowledge-drop" buzzwords into your story that you don't actually understand. You may also be able to find a professor, or even a student, at a nearby university who can help you with a final review.
I would say the most important thing is to not put in anything that could potentially be very wrong. If you're unsure, gloss over it, or leave it out altogether. If you don't know the difference between alpha waves and beta waves, then don't try to distinguish between them in the story.
If you want to go into more detail about the field, I think the only safe way to do it is to learn more about it. The more detail you want to use, the more you'll need to learn in order to make sure you're using it correctly. I think you'll benefit much more from a story which doesn't provide a lot of details on an obscure topic, then one which provides incorrect details on an obscure topic.
Personal anecdotes about this, vis. CSI and Dan Brown
The first and last episode of CSI I ever watched stated that someone fell off a three story building and reached "critical velocity" of 9.8 meters per second per second. I was only in high school at the time, and I still knew enough physics to know that this didn't make any sense. It would take a much further fall to reach critical velocity, and velocity is measured in meters per second, not meters per second per second. The figure they were actually referencing is the acceleration due to gravity on the earth's surface. This bothered me so much I never watched the show again. What was particularly troublesome was that anybody in a high school physics class could have gotten this right, which illustrated both ignorance and laziness on the part of the writers.
You probably already know that Dan Brown has been widely discredited for including a plethora of false information in his books, despite claiming that he does a lot of research and that all of the facts in his books are true. The one that bothered me most was his novel "Digital Fortress." I'm a computer engineer, and the book was so riddled with not only inaccuracies and errors, but things that just straight up didn't make sense, that I was thoroughly disgusted by the whole thing and haven't read any more of his books. Again, what was most bothersome were the things that anybody who had done even a little bit of computer programming (say for instance a middle schooler) would have caught as bogus. It just gives the reader a sense of "what on earth made him think he could write this story when he clearly has absolutely know familiarity what so ever with the topic?"
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