Word: fmri
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...drugs--mostly pot--as well. I was, by any reasonable measure, an active alcoholic. Fortunately, with a lot of help, I was able to stop. And now I was on my way to McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., to have my brain scanned in a functional magnetic-resonance imager (fMRI). The idea was to see what the inside of my head looked like after more than a quarter-century on the wagon...
...hardest to resist when I was with my drinking buddies, hearing the clink of glasses and bottles, seeing others imbibe and smelling the aroma of wine or beer. The researchers at McLean have invented a machine that wafts such odors directly into the nostrils of a subject undergoing an fMRI scan in order to see how the brain reacts. The reward circuitry in the brain of a newly recovering alcoholic should light up like a Christmas tree when stimulated by one of these alluring smells...
Although the results are undeniable, it's still unclear what's going on in the patients' brains. The researchers will start to explore this question next summer by taking pictures of the brain before and after surgery using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanners. Since the brain devotes roughly 35% of its power to vision, they hypothesize that when this sense is compromised, others, like smell and touch, take over the visual-processing circuits. After surgery, they suspect, the sense of sight reclaims its territory inside the brain...
...test his theory, Knutson and his team devised a way to mimic these same intuitive reactions in the lab. He gave subjects $20 each and, while they were in the fMRI machine, presented them with pictures of 80 products, each followed by a price. Subjects then had the option of purchasing each item on display. As they viewed products they preferred, Knutson saw activity in the nucleus accumbens, a region of the brain involved in anticipating pleasant outcomes. If, on the other hand, the subjects thought the price of these items was too high, there was increased activity...
With the help and encouragement of the Dalai Lama, Davidson recruited Buddhist monks to go to Madison and meditate inside his functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) tube while he measured their brain activity during various mental states. For comparison, he used undergraduates who had had no experience with meditation but got a crash course in the basic techniques. During the generation of pure compassion, a standard Buddhist meditation technique, brain regions that keep track of what is self and what is other became quieter, the fMRI showed, as if the subjects--experienced meditators as well as novices--opened their minds...