Valiant

As a favor to friends in my academic department, I have frequently been a guinea pig in the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. In most of these cases, I fight valiantly against slumber as the stimuli flash on the small screen in front of me and the hypnotic, high-pitched beeps of the scanner reverberate all around. This time, though, it was different. Martin Monti, a fellow neuroscientist at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, England, was going to read my mind. As the bed I lay on slid robotically into the giant doughnut-shaped scanner, I had a strange sensation that I was about to be seen naked--mentally, at least.The task was simple: Monti would ask me questions--did I have any siblings, did I think England was going to win the soccer match that night, and so on. If I wanted to answer “yes,” then I would imagine myself playing tennis, activating a known set of motor regions in my brain by doing so. If I wanted to answer “no,” then I was to imagine navigating around the rooms of my home, activating an entirely different set of areas involved in scene perception. Given that each scan--and thus each of my yes or no answers--took five minutes, the conversation was not the most riveting I had ever had, but when Monti accurately guessed my response every time, it was nonetheless thrilling and unnerving in equal measure.



Magnetic resonance imaging - Functional magnetic resonance imaging - England - Brain - Medical Research Council

Not a raucous rock star, a talking dog, a mutant creation nor Ashton Kutcher could save the box office this weekend. For despite their valiant efforts Get Him to the Greek, Killers, Marmaduke and Splice had nothing on a green ogre this soft weekend at the movies. Greek got the closest to knocking Shrek off