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posted by janrinok on Sunday December 04 2016, @06:06PM   Printer-friendly
from the watching-thoughts dept.

By significantly increasing the speed of functional MRI (fMRI), researchers funded by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) have been able to image rapidly fluctuating brain activity during human thought. fMRI measures changes in blood oxygenation, which were previously thought to be too slow to detect the subtle neuronal activity associated with higher order brain functions. The new discovery that fast fMRI can detect rapid brain oscillations is a significant step towards realizing a central goal of neuroscience research: mapping the brain networks responsible for human cognitive functions such as perception, attention, and awareness.

[...] Combining several new techniques, Jonathan R. Polimeni, Ph.D., senior author of the study, and his colleagues at Harvard's Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, applied fast fMRI in an effort to track neuronal networks that control human thought processes, and found that they could now measure rapidly oscillating brain activity. The results of this groundbreaking work are reported in the October 2016 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @12:23AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @12:23AM (#437022)

    They are not measuring any "activity" in the brain, they are measuring blood!

    fMRI measures changes in blood oxygenation, which were previously thought to be too slow to detect the subtle neuronal activity associated with higher order brain functions.

    Maybe blood chemistry "associated" with brain functions, maybe not. As Buckaroo Banzai said, "When you're this far into the brain, it's all the same."