ABSTRACT
Scientific advance is largely dependent on methodological and technological advance. Neurobiology is currently experiencing a number of methodological advances of revolutionary proportions, not the least of which is the advent of methods for noninvasive functional neuroimaging. One may be able to indirectly infer a tremendous amount about how a neural system functions by both observing and quantifying its input (stimuli) and output (behavior). For the study of olfaction, the latter relates to olfactory psychophysics (reviewed in Chapter 10 of this volume). But to completely understand the function of a neural system, one must also have methods to directly measure and record its neural activity. For the case of olfaction, one would want to reliably measure where in the brain olfactory information is processed, and how this information is processed.
