There are some basic conceptual problems hovering about the widespread use of brain scans as pictures of mental activity. As applied to medical diagnosis (for example, in diagnosing a brain tumor), a brain scan is similar in principle to an X-ray: it is a way of seeing inside the body. Its value are instantiated in localized brain regions. This premise is known as the modular theory of mind.
It may in fact be that neither mental activity, nor the physical processes that constitute it, are decomposable into independent modules. Psychologist William Uttal contends that rather than distinct entities, the various mental processes are likely to be properties of a more general mental activity that is distributed throughout the brain. It so for a reason. To cleanly separate emotion from reason-giving makes a hash of human experience.
But if this critique of the modular theory of mind is valid, how can one account for the fact that brain scans do, in fact, reveal well-defined areas that “light up” in response to various cognitive tasks? In the case of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), what you are seeing when you remains after the subtraction represents the metabolic activity associated solely with the cognitive task in question.
One immediately obvious (but usually unremarked) problem is that this method obscures the fact that the entire brain is active in both conditions. A false impression of neat functional localization is given by differential brain scans that subtract out all the distributed brain functions. This subtractive method produces striking images of the it is illustrated so well by the products of the subtractive method?
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