On Twitter this week I joked that neuroscientists could save money on brain scanners by just asking people how active their brains are.
However, it turns out that there has already been a study that actually asked people to do this, as I found out thanks to Niclas Kuper’s very helpful reply.
This paper came out back in April (not April 1st) but I missed it at the time. It’s called Self-rated amygdala activity: an auto-biological index of affective distress
In this study, the authors asked 63 people to estimate their own ‘threat-related amygdala activity’ (TRA). The same participants had earlier taken part in an fMRI study in which TRA was measured using an emotional faces task.
It turned out that the participants weren’t able to accurately report their own TRA – there was no absolutely no correlation between the self-report ratings and the actual fMRI-measured TRA.
However, self-rated amygdala ...
