Wouldn't it be cool if you could measure brain activation with fMRI... right as it happens?
You could lie there in the scanner and watch your brain light up. Then you could watch your brain light up some more in response to seeing your brain light up, and watch it light up even more upon seeing your brain light up in response to seeing itself light up... like putting your brain between two mirrors and getting an infinite tunnel of activations.
Ok, that would probably get boring, eventually. But there'd be some useful applications too. Apart from the obvious research interest, it would allow you to attempt fMRI neurofeedback: training yourself to be able to activate or deactivate parts of your brain. Neurofeedback has a long (and controversial) history, but so far it's only been feasible using EEG because that's the only neuroimaging method that gives real-time results. EEG is unfortunately not very good at localizing activity to specific areas.
Now MIT neuroscientists Hinds et al present a new way of doing right-now fMRI:
Computing moment to moment BOLD activation for real-time neurofeedback. It's not in fact the first such method, but they argue that it's the only one that provides reliable, truly real-time signals.
Essentially the approach is closely related to standard fMRI analysis processes, except instead of waiting for all of the data to come in before starting to analyze it, it incrementally estimates neural activation every time a new scan of the brain arrives, while accounting for various forms of noise.
They first show that it works well on some simulated data, and then discuss the results of a real experiment in which 16 people were asked to alternately increase or decrease their own neural response to hearing the noise of the MRI scanner (they are very noisy). Neurofeedback was given by showing them a "thermometer" representing activity in their auditory cortex.
The real-time estimates of activation turned out to be highly correlated with the estimates given by conventional analysis after the experiment was over - though we're not told how well people were able to use the neurofeedback to regulate their own brains.
Unfortunately, we're not given all of the technical details of the method, so you won't be able to jump into the nearest scanner and look into your brain quite yet, though they do promise that "this method will be made publicly available as part of a real-time functional imaging software package."
Hinds, O., Ghosh, S., Thompson, T., Yoo, J., Whitfield-Gabrieli, S., Triantafyllou, C., & Gabrieli, J. (2010). Computing moment to moment BOLD activation for real-time neurofeedback NeuroImage DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.07.060
