We’ve learned a lot about how the brain works from functional magnetic resonance images. I should clarify: we’ve learned a lot about the human brain. Thousands of people have volunteered to lie down inside fMRI scanners and have the activity in their brains monitored as they perform different kinds of mental tasks, or even just do nothing at all. We must resist the temptation to look at the pretty fMRI images and think they’re just photographs of the mind. They’re actually more like very complex, statistically worked-over graphs. But even with those caveats, there’s a lot to learn from them. But fMRI only works if you hold very, very still. Having been scanned myself for a story a few years