The brain is constantly buzzing with electrical activity. Here's how scientists study the signals that may someday help explain the nature of consciousness itself.
, one of the world’s leading neuroscientists and researchers of consciousness, says that scientists are gradually working to connect the dots between different aspects of consciousness and the dynamic states of the brain that give rise to them. And because any explanation that scientists provide for the inner workings of consciousness is attained by studying neural activity, it's important to understand how they obtain and analyze data on the brain.
This isn’t necessarily a problem. Thermometers don’t measure temperature directly — they measure the volume of mercury in a glass tube, which is tightly coupled with temperature. Problems can crop up when coupling is incomplete, noisy or complex. Meanwhile, blood oxygenation, also known as the hemoglobin response, isto be most tightly coupled with specific synaptic events that play a significant role in neurological communication.
Few brain scanning methods have better spatial resolution than fMRI, barring intracranial recordings like electrocorticography that can isolate activity from single cells. But these invasive techniques, where electrodes are placed directly on the brain, are limited to animal models or specific clinical contexts where patients suffer from conditions like epilepsy that require a high level of precision when locating seizures. By contrast, fMRI strikes a good balance between precision and coverage.
A bigger problem for fMRI is that blood oxygenation is drawn out over time, which makes it difficult for neuroscientists to pinpoint precise moments of activity. Typical fMRI images are taken from an average of brain activity over time, usually just a matter of seconds, somewhat like a long-exposure photograph. And this can cause problems as highly dynamic or fast neural processes become blurred.
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