Chapter Content
Okay, so I wanted to just give you a little, uh, background on the research that my lab does, because, well, you know, it's kind of important for understanding everything. Basically, we use this thing called functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, and it's a fancy way of looking at brain activity.
So, the deal is, all your cells need oxygen to work, right? And blood is what brings the oxygen to 'em. So, fMRI, it measures changes in blood flow in the brain. And the idea is, the more blood flowing to a certain area, the more active those neurons are. So, it gives us a peek into, you know, where the brain is really working hard.
And we can do all sorts of things while people are in the scanner. We can show them pictures on a screen, play sounds through headphones, or even have them do little tasks, like, uh, pressing buttons or using a joystick or just, like, imagining stuff. And it helps us see how the brain activity changes with all these different things.
It's pretty cool because it lets us see what's happening in the brain without having to, like, constantly interrupt people and ask them what they're thinking. You know, because sometimes, just asking the questions can actually change what they're thinking! So it's kind of cool to see the brain's reaction, you know, without them really thinking about it.
Like, how emotional is a decision they're making? Is it automatic or are they really having to put effort into it? Are they thinking about other people, their feelings, or just, you know, basic stuff? All these things, it's useful to measure brain activity as it complements, and compares to the thoughts or intentions of the individual, which helps us understand choices.
Now, in some parts of the brain, we know a lot about what different areas do. Like, if we see activity in the visual cortex, we can actually figure out pretty well what kind of image the person's looking at. Which is pretty wild, right?
But when we get to more complicated stuff, like higher-level thoughts, you know, things about our own identities or how we understand other people, things get a little trickier. The brain scans, they can't tell us exactly what someone's thinking. We're mostly making educated guesses based on what we know about which brain areas are active.
So, like, we might see activity in a certain area and think, "Okay, they're probably feeling a sense of reward," or, "They're probably thinking about what other people are thinking." But we can't know for sure because, you know, most brain regions do more than one thing. Like, we couldn't specifically see what thoughts they imagined that other person to be having or specifically whom they had in mind. It's not that precise, unfortunately.
Another thing, and this is a big one, is that the people who participate in these studies are, you know, not exactly a representative sample of the whole world. fMRI is expensive. It's usually only available at big research universities. And it's just, like, easier to study college students. So, a lot of the early studies, and even some more recent ones, have mostly been done with, well, white, Western, educated young adults. Which is definitely a problem. Information about, you know, their religion or sexual orientation, is often not measured or reported.
And also, the results we see are based on averaging across lots of people's brains. Which is fine, but, you know, everyone's brain is a little different. So, these findings are more about what's common across the group of people who were scanned, not necessarily what's true for absolutely everyone.
Now, people are working on trying to fix this, trying to get a more diverse group of participants, but there's still a lot we don't know about how these things might change for different people, with different backgrounds and identities, across different cultures. There's just so much more to learn.
And, you know, this whole field is still pretty new compared to other areas of science. We're learning more and more all the time. That's what makes it so exciting, but it also means that, well, we don't have all the answers yet. This is kind of just a snapshot of what we know right now. And I'm sure that, as we keep doing research, our understanding is going to keep growing and changing. It's a really cool time to be on the front lines of this stuff, looking ahead.