Evolution is a basic, biological process

quote:

---

Admittedly, we haven't explored all aspects of this electrochemical activity, but we are making great strides in measuring it, e.g' with Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI). Numerous tests have been reported in the literature re the use of FMRI to examine the activity in the brain when a person is thinking certain thoughts or doing certain tasks.

---

Speaking as a wife of a man who does FMRI work at the moment, I will say that while FMRI research is great and shows us pictures of the brain, behavioral work can tell us just as much.My husband finds FMRI research tedious and clunky, whereas behavior experiments are easier to make more precise and the analysis is much more straightforward. Not to mention a whole lot cheaper.They are complementary approaches, really, and both are useful, but the ooohs and ahhhhs elicited by the big toys are not reflective of their superiority as research tools.

quote:

---

Well I wandered down to the physics department and asked a couple of profs (actual profs not the title that you yanks seem to hand out left,right and centre)

---

Um, what exactly do you mean by this?Why does most of the rest of the world send their best and brightest to University in the US if we hand out a lot of meaningless titles?

quote:

---

If one sits on a hill above the factory and watches raw materials go in one side and cars come out the other, one can try to figure out what is going on inside. On the other hand, if we had some way of detecting what is going on inside the factory, perhaps with a very sensitive magnetometer which could show us where the steel goes, we could begin to trace the fabrication paths in the factory and begin to understand how autos are made

​

Sitting on the hill is the behavioral approach. We place subjects in a situation, watch their behavior and try figure out why they do what the do.

​

On the other hand, the sensitive magnetometer is analogous to FMRI. Using this technique, we can match our behavioral observations with the map of brain activity provided by FMRI, which shows which area(s) of the brain is/are active when the behavior occurs and begin to learn in detail how the brain works.

---

You'd think that would be how it works, wouldn't you? Just knowing that area X of the brain is active during task Z doesn't tell you anything, really, except in a very broad sense, like a surgeon not wanting to muck up the part of the brain that deals with speech, for instance.If you want to map functions to areas, you first have to know what those functions are through behavioral research.There are times that behavior may not change but activity in the brain might/does, (like the same task performed by young and old subjects utilize different brain areas) which is a concept that my husband thinks is not fully appreciated by many in the field. This is a place where FMRI would be valuable on its own.Right now, however, the biggest benefit of FMRI is that it is an additional convergent line of evidence for behavioral research. Indeed, one emergent problem with the attraction many have to doing FMRI work is that they do not have a good grounding in the behavioral research. The result is that they cannot properly interpret the brain activity because they don't understand what is required at a cognitive level to do a task.Jim tells me that this problem is getting better nowadays, mainly because more behavioral researchers are getting into FMRI work. MR machines used to be available pretty much only to MD's, and a lot of that initial research was pretty poor quality because MD's don't generally have the background that allows them to understand congnition.This message has been edited by schrafinator, 01-10-2005 11:05 AM

quote:

---

One thing the article doen't point out is that the FMRI machine "sees" glucose and glucose is "burned" during mental activity, so the amount of mental activity is proprtional to the amount of glucose being "burned"

---

Small correction...You are thinking about PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scans WRT glucose, and the PET scanner actually "sees" the radioactivity in the radioactive glucose solution the subject was injected with before the scan.If you are an Intro Psych student, FMRI measures blood flow.If you are an Engineering or Physics student, FMRI measures changes in blood flow via changes in the magnetic properties of hemoglobin due to blood oxygenation.(My thanks to my husband for this information.)