Why does music feel so good? "Music moves people of all cultures, in a way that doesn’t seem to happen with other animals. Nobody really understands why listening to music — which, unlike sex or food, has no intrinsic value — can trigger such profoundly rewarding experiences. Salimpoor and other neuroscientists are trying to figure it out with the help of brain scanners."
posted by Defying Gravity
on Apr 15, 2013 -
72 comments
The Love Competition: Can one person experience love more deeply than another? That’s what The Stanford Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging and filmmaker Brent Hoff set out to understand when they hosted the
1st Annual Love Competition. Seven contestants, ranging from 10 to 75 years of age, took part. They each spent five minutes in an fMRI machine, thinking deeply about love and allowing the imaging technology to measure activity in their dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin/vasopressin pathways.
[via]
posted by hincandenza
on Feb 18, 2012 -
44 comments
Are you tired of reading about how neuroscientists have discovered the area of the brain devoted to a single, oddly-specific function, but lack access to the sophisticated neuroimaging technologies needed to refute them?
NeuroSynth has you covered.
[more inside]
posted by logicpunk
on Nov 18, 2011 -
12 comments
Vegetated State conversations: To find out whether a simple conversation was possible, the researchers selected one of the four - a 29-year-old man who had been in a car crash. They asked him to imagine playing tennis if he wanted to answer yes to questions such as: Do you have any sisters? Is your father's name Thomas? Is your father's name Alexander? And if the answer to a question was no, he had to imagine moving round his home.
posted by bigmusic
on Feb 3, 2010 -
22 comments
Functional MRI (fMRI) is a widely used technique of brain imaging in the cognitive sciences, allowing researchers to visualize what part of the brain is responding to certain stimuli, resulting in
striking images of
live brains. These days, fMRI is seeing more non-research use, such as forming the basis of controversial
new lie detectors. Craig Bennett, a postdoctoral researcher at UCSB,
submitted a whole Atlantic salmon to fMRI analysis, and found that this fish could apparently detect, and respond to, the the emotional state of human beings (
poster). Remarkable science, especially considering the salmon was dead at the time.
[more inside]
posted by Rumple
on Sep 24, 2009 -
59 comments
Don't Even Think About Lying fMRI is poised to transform the security industry, the judicial system, and our fundamental notions of privacy. I'm in a lab at Columbia University, where scientists are using the technology to analyze the cognitive differences between truth and lies. By mapping the neural circuits behind deception, researchers are turning fMRI into a new kind of lie detector that's more probing and accurate than the polygraph, the standard lie-detection tool employed by law enforcement and intelligence agencies for nearly a century.
posted by robbyrobs
on Jan 5, 2006 -
62 comments
"The Brighthouse Institute for Thought Sciences plans to change the marketing world by using modern neuroscience methods to observe and understand the true drivers of consumer behavior. The Thought Sciences team uses functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), a safe and non-invasive technique, to observe patterns in brain activity that reveal how a person is processing and/or evaluating a product, object or advertisement." (From their
press release.) Is this the next logical step beyond focus groups? And does this seem just a little bit creepy to anyone else?
posted by Johnny Assay
on Dec 4, 2002 -
25 comments
