Music Therapy Today - World Federation of Music Therapy

Brain Reader Part 1: Researchers can now see what your brain is doing just by
So what makes EROS special?
Science already has multiple other ways to view brain activity, but every
method has its own set of limitations.
Functional MRI (fMRI) is a brain-imaging method based on showing
where blood is flowing in the brain. It's based on the assumption that
blood will flow to the areas of the brain where neurons are active.
However, it takes much more time for blood to flow than it takes neurons
to be active. "So you present a stimulus and you wait one, two, three, four
seconds… and now you see a response of the brain by using functional
MRI," explains Gratton.
Fabiani says that although four seconds may not seem like a lot of time,
it's ages in terms of brain activity.
The brain acts in the range of milliseconds rather than seconds. So
although fMRI gives you a very good picture of brain structure, and
where in the brain activity is happening, it suffers from a time delay.
Other methods of visualizing brain activity do work in the milliseconds
range, such as electrical measures like ERPs and electroencephalography.
But, unlike fMRI, they don't show very accurately where the activity is
happening.
The type of images they produce are more like line graphs showing the
intensity of activity over time, but that don't tell researchers in which
region it's happening.
Odds and ends - themes and trends 453