From A conversation about the brain
helix. But fMRI is used for a much wider range of experiments, ones that involve many loops, for example, scanning the cortical responses of people looking at cartoons that do or do not require a theory of mind in order to understand the joke. The paths through sensory+motivational space are presumably quite different in these two cases, but the trace left behind, in terms of different activity in the cortex, blurred over a long time course as fMRI does, may be quite slight and not the best way of describing the difference between the responses to the two types of cartoon. According to a perspective like this, there is no theory of mind 'portion' of the cortex or even theory of mind ‘network’ (a currently popular idea). Instead, the pattern of paths through sensory+motivational space is quite different for someone who views a cartoon and has a theory of mind compared to someone who does not. The idea that every capacity must have a separate ‘area’ or ‘network’ in the cortex belongs to a quite different conception of the brain.
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- Gallagher, H. L., Happé, F., Brunswick, N., Fletcher, P. C., Frith, U., & Frith, C. D. (2000). Reading the mind in cartoons and stories: an fMRI study of ‘theory of mind’in verbal and nonverbal tasks. Neuropsychologia, 38(1), 11-21.