"It's pretty painless. Basically you just need to lie there and make sure you don't move your head".
This is what I say to all the girls... who are taking part in my fMRI studies. Head movement is a big problem in fMRI. If your head moves, your brain moves and all fMRI analysis assumes that the brain is perfectly still. Although head movement correction is now a standard part of any analysis software, it's not perfect. It may be a particular problem in functional connectivity studies, which attempt to measure the degree to which different parts of the brain are "talking" to each other, in terms of correlated neural activity over time. These are extremely popular nowadays. It's even been claimed that this data may help us understand consciousness itself (although we've heard that before). A new paper offers some important words of caution. It shows that head motion ...
