Ways of studying the brain

• Functional Magnetic Resonance imaging - a technique for measuring brain activity. Detects changes in blood oxygenation & flow that indicate increased neural activity
• FMRi evaluation:

  • ✅Non-invasive & doesn’t introduce the brain to potentially harmful radiation
  • ✅More objective & reliable than verbal reports
  • ❌Not a direct measure of neural activity
  • ❌Ignores communication between different regions
• Electroencephalogram - a method of detecting small electrical charges from the activity of brain cells using electrodes attached to the scalp
• How does FMRi measure brain activity?


  By detecting changes in blood oxygenation & flow that indicates increased neural activity
• Electroencephalogram Evaluation:

  • ✅Measure of brain activity in real time - can actually measure a particular task
  • ✅Useful in clinical diagnosis (e.g. epilepsy)
  • ❌Can’t measure activity in deeper brain regions
  • ❌Doesn’t distinguish between activities originating in adjacent brain areas
• Event-related potentials - a technique that uses raw EEG data & uses it to investigate cognitive processing of a specific event. It achieves this by taking multiple readings & averaging them in order to filter out all brain activity that isn’t related to the appearance of the stimulus
• Event-related potentials Evaluation:

  • ✅Useful for studying effects of specific experimental manipulation
  • ✅Can measure processing of stimuli in the absence of a behavioural response
  • ❌Requires many trials to get meaningful data
  • ❌Restricted to the shallow areas of the brain
• Post-mortem examinations - way of examining the brains of people who have shown particular psychological abnormalities prior to their death in an attempt to establish the possible neurobiological cause for this behaviour
• Post-mortem examinations evaluation:

  • ✅More detailed explanation than scanning
  • ✅Central part in understanding origins of schizophrenia
  • ❌Many confounding variables
  • ❌Unable to follow-up - can’t establish relationship