Outline and evaluate one or more ways in studying the brain?

FMRI is a method of studying the brain founded on the assumption that the more active regions of the brain require the most energy, which is in the form of glucose and oxygen found in oxygenated blood. Therefore, it can be assumed that these active areas have the greatest level of oxygenated blood flowing through them. Patients are placed in a scanner to test this, with researchers even asking patients to complete tasks within the scanner, such as viewing a visual stimulus to see if there is an association between psychological processes and regions of the brain.

FMRI has the benefit of being a non-invasive method of studying the brain requiring neither surgical intervention nor the use of harmful radiation. It also offers a more objective way of understanding psychological phenomena than self-reports do. In fact, it can also be used in circumstances where giving self-report is not possible, such as the case of patients in a vegetive state. One researcher asked a patient in a vegetive state to think of tennis to let his physicians know if he was in any pain. This was possible as thinking of tennis has been found to be associated with increase brain activity in certain regions which allowed the researcher r to conclude that the patient was not in any pain. (AO3)

Although FMRI is non-invasive, it requires extensive machinery that relies on the individual in the scanner staying very still- making it not cost effective and not routinely used on children. In addition to this, it is a very indirect ways of studying the brain, focusing on changing on the blood flow rather than on a neural activity. This suggests that it cannot necessarily be seen as a quantitative measure of determining correlations between psychological process and brain activity. (A03)