The body is a unified system controlled by the brain. If special keys and approaches are selected, and one learns how to influence the brain’s work, genuinely inexhaustible possibilities arise for the human being. However, phenomenal consciousness is illusory, and science still does not find such quality in the human brain or the outside world. The atoms in the brain are not colored, nor do they make up a colorful inner image. Yet they have no other qualitative properties, which makes understanding cognition almost impossible (Gonslaves & Cohen, 2010). It is accurate, however, that cognitive scientists speak about the presence of representations in the brain. They do not mean internal pictures or stories people observe instead of observing the world directly.
Scientists represent patterns of triggering neurons that respond to specific features of the world that the brain uses to build models of its environment. Representations, in this sense, are not things or cognition; instead, they are parts of the mechanism that makes the brain partially aware of something. By modeling the world, the brain creates sensitivity and a disposition that puts one in direct contact with the world (Gonslaves & Cohen, 2010). Such representations need not share properties with the things they represent. It could be said that phenomenal consciousness is an optional feature of the brain, in addition to the physical properties described by science.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging is one of the most advanced methods of neuroimaging. It is based on imaging oxyhemoglobin-saturated regions of the brain, which become visible when processed through interaction with the scanner’s magnetic field. Its main advantage is its high spatial resolution: fMRI can visualize active areas as small as one cubic millimeter, showing exactly where the activity occurs (Gonslaves & Cohen, 2010). However, the most significant problem is that the temporal resolution of this method is shallow since the saturation of brain regions with oxygenated blood relative to the activation of their neurons is relatively slow. Thus, fMRI does not accurately visualize brain activity occurring within a few milliseconds. Therefore, imaging using this method requires repeated tasks dozens of times.
References
Gonsalves, B. D., & Cohen, N. J. (2010). Brain imaging, cognitive processes, and brain networks. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5(6), 744-752.