The methodology is straightforward. You take your subject and
slide them into an fMRI machine, a humongous sleek, white ring,
like a donut designed by Apple. Then you show the subject images
of people engaging in social activities — shopping, talking,
eating dinner. You flash 48 different photos in front of your
subject's eyes, and ask them to figure out what emotions the
people in the photos were probably feeling. All in all, it's a
pretty basic neuroscience/psychology experiment. With one catch.
The "subject" is a mature Atlantic salmon. And it is dead.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a powerful tool
that allows us to capture incredible amounts of information
about what happens in our brains. It's relatively new —
neuroscientists began using fMRI in the early 1990s — and it
produces colorful images that help bring numbers to life for the
general public. All of those things are strengths for fMRI.
Unfortunately, they're also all weaknesses. New tools vastly
expand our understanding of the hum