ABSTRACT
Functional brain imaging brings many new offerings to the table of cognitive neuroscience, particularly offerings that help refine our understanding of the dynamic and adaptive properties of brain function that underpin learning and development. It is a little ironic that a methodology that is classically associated with static, still images, should be informative about dynamics and plasticity. But the association is no longer correct. In the early days of functional neuroimaging, in the late 1980s, the scanners were less sensitive, so that all that was possible was a group average image depicting the areas of brain activation, averaged over several participants, contrasting a small number of experimental conditions. The current instrumentation, namely high-speed fMRI, is far more sensitive yielding enough data to observe reliable effects in single participants in a few minutes per experimental condition. Capturing the dynamics requires only a fast enough shutter speed and a willing participant.
