Word: fmri
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...known for his antireligious book The End of Faith. But he is also a neuroscientist. In a study reported in the Annals of Neurology, Harris presented 14 people with 360 statements designed to elicit belief, disbelief or uncertainty. He tracked their brain response with a functional magnetic resonance imager (fMRI) and got some very revealing results...
...true or false. Faith, however, is more vulnerable. He admits that those who regard faith as a communion with the divine, at least partly independent of body chemistry, may object if he shows that it is "essentially the same as other kinds of knowing or thinking." Pictures from an fMRI would not make that case definitively--but Harris knows that nobody is likely to produce competing photos of the divine part...
...study published in this month’s issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, graduate student Samuel T. Moulton ’01 and Psychology Professor Stephen M. Kosslyn used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to assess whether individuals can have knowledge that does not come from normal perceptual processes. This focus on the brain sets their study apart from previous ESP research...
...procedure involved participants viewing sets of photographs while inside an fMRI scanner. Some of the pictures, designated “ESP stimuli,” were also presented to the subject via the different forms of ESP. Stimuli shown telepathically were presented simultaneously to another person—the subject’s relative, romantic partner or friend—in a separate location. Stimuli presented by clairvoyance, the ability to perceive distant things or events, were displayed on a computer located outside the subject’s field of vision. Finally, pictures presented through precognition, the ability...
...find. He suspects the machines will show that "belief is belief is belief." And that conclusion, he admits, may put him at loggerheads with familiar foes. No one, he says, could accuse him or anyone else of trying to disprove God's existence on the basis of an fMRI. But faith is more vulnerable. "People who feel that religious faith is a singular operation of the brain - if they admit that it's an operation of the brain at all - would object to what I'm doing, since it may show that faith is essentially the same as other kinds...