Meta-Neuroscience: Studying the Brains of Neuroscientists

How do neuroscientists' brains work? In a remarkable (and very meta) new paper, German researchers Frieder Michel Paulus et al. scanned some neuroscientists (their own colleagues) using fMRI, to measure the brain response to seeing neuroscience papers. The study is out now in PLoS ONE: Journal Impact Factor Shapes Scientists' Reward Signal in the Prospect of Publication Paulus et al.'s paper has already got a lot of attention: it's been featured on the famous Improbable Research blog, who call it "obviously a joke intended for the small community of scientists who use FMRI equipment". However, they say, it's also "a good example of how a joke meant for insiders can be difficult or impossible to explain to anyone else". Well, I don't think it's too hard. Basically, the neuroscientists were put in the scanner and shown various stimuli. Some of these were pictures of money. There were low, medium, or large amounts: