Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Paper

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Functional magnetic resonance imaging is a technique that measures and maps the brain and its activity. These maps can process the brain’s activity and the different networks for thoughts, memories, speech, movement, and sensation. This technique is safe and noninvasive, and is important for understanding how a healthy brain works. When there is activity in the brain, blood will flow to or from certain areas of the brain. The fMRI will look at the blood flow to help understand how the brain works. This is different from an MRI, which creates images of organs and tissues by using a magnetic field and radio waves (Watson). The way fMRI scans the brain is because areas of the brain that are activated will receive more oxygen-rich blood. Oxygen-rich …show more content…
During the scanning, different movements or thoughts will be performed to see what brain regions received more blood-flow. Some examples of these tasks include answering questions, looking at visual stimuli, or moving certain parts of the body (Watson). Some reasons for using fMRI besides learning which brain region is responsible for certain processes include monitoring brain tumors, or finding which areas of the brain seizures are coming from. It can also help determine brain functioning after Alzheimer’s or brain tumors. fMRI also plays a part in understanding and analyzing certain emotions (Watson). In the article, “Don’t Even Think About Lying,” by Steve Silberman, he mentions another use of fMRI, which is lie detection. The fMRI can track the flow of blood to specific areas of the brain’s prefrontal cortex that are linked to truth telling. This also makes it able to show blood flow patterns that are linked to lying. This raises some ethical concerns however for using fMRI as a lie detector, one of which being the reliability of the fMRI lie detection. Not unlike existing polygraphs, an fMRI lie-detection test would be likely to produce false positives and false negatives. The process of lying could be different from person to person, which makes some results uncertain