Here’s a scientific study that combines the era’s most irresistible topics — romance, food, and dieting — with the era’s favorite cogno-intellectual expensive electromechanical procedure, fMRI. The study is: “The way to her heart? Response to romantic cues is dependent on hunger state and dieting history: An fMRI pilot study,” Alice V. Ely, Anna Rose Childress, Kanchana Jagannathan, Michael R. […]
Tag: fMRI
Finnish solution of the nude body / brain question
A team of Finnish researchers reached new partial understanding of how human brains react to nude bodies. They published a study about it: “Facilitated early cortical processing of nude human bodies,” Jussi Alho, Nelli Salminen, Mikko Sams, Jari K. Hietanen, Lauri Nummenma, Biological Psychology, epub May 7, 2015. (Thanks to Neil Martin for bringing this to […]
Dogs ‘n kids ‘n brain-related pictures
Maybe dogs and kids are a key, arriving at last, to understanding how the brain thinks thoughts and feels emotions. Maybe. It’s still essentially a mystery how the brain (which has been called “the most complex object in the universe“) does most of what it does. The mystery is especially deep about how — specifically — […]
Spiraling difficulty of reliably interpreting scans of people’s brains
This new study suggests that some people’s personalities make it more difficult to get accurate MRI (and fMRI) pictures of their heads: “Individual Differences in Impulsivity Predict Head Motion during Magnetic Resonance Imaging,” Kong X-z, Zhen Z, Li X, Lu H-h, Wang R, et al., (2014) PLoS ONE, 9(8): e104989. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0104989. The authors are at Beijing […]