Word: fmri
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Stephen is not in Vegas. He's watching a video monitor in Paul Glimcher's neural-science lab at New York University. And his head is plugged into a high-powered Siemens functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner (fMRI). His name is not actually Stephen; he's a composite research subject. Glimcher is at the frontal lobe of an intriguing network of brain researchers and economists who are using advanced medical technology to try to figure out why people make the decisions they do--what brand of cereal, which mutual fund--and what part of the brain tells them...
Research from fMRIs and other machines bears all this out. Gerald Zaltman, a professor at Harvard University, says 95% of consumer decision making occurs subconsciously. Read Montague, a professor at the Baylor College of Medicine, gave subjects the "Pepsi Challenge" in an fMRI scanner. Result: people found Pepsi more pleasing to the palate--their reward center lit up--but Coke's branding hit literally at the core of their sense of self, a much stronger bond. This affirms what we all suspected: brands are so powerful that we are sometimes more likely to buy something we identify with than something...
They were not difficult to find. Students immediately began to call Aron's psychology lab to volunteer. Mashek weeded out those who had metal in their heads (such as lip, tongue or nose jewelry or braces on their teeth) that would affect the magnet in the fMRI machine. She also excluded those who were claustrophobic, those taking medication that could affect brain physiology, and men and women who were left-handed. Brain organization can vary with handedness, and we needed to standardize our sample as much as possible...
Before we could understand the results of our scanning, we had to make an in-depth analysis of the brain pictures. The fMRI machine that we were using shows only blood-flow activity in specific brain regions rather than the chemicals involved. But because scientists know which kinds of nerves connect which kinds of brain regions, they can often surmise which brain chemicals are active when specific regions begin to glow...
Another striking result from our FMRI experiment concerned activity in the ventral tegmental area (VTA), a central part of the reward circuitry of the brain. This result was what I was looking for. As you know, I had hypothesized that romantic love is associated with elevated levels of dopamine or norepinephrine. The VTA is a mother lode for dopamine-making cells. With their tentacle-like axons, these nerve cells distribute dopamine to many brain regions, including the caudate nucleus. And as this sprinkler system sends dopamine to various parts of the brain, it produces focused attention as well as fierce...