FumRy

I like reading about things that I don't understand; one of those areas involves the use of Functional MRI (fMRI), which is described in the all-knowing Wikipaedia and other sources this way: Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measures the haemodynamic response related to neural activity in the brain or spinal cord of humans or other animals. The idea is that whereas normal MRI provides detailed images of the soft tissue interior structure of the body, fMRI measures changes in blood flow as a result of neural activity. You can therefore infer what the brain is doing, rather than simply being able to see the brain itself. (Isn't it amazing to be able to casually say 'see the brain itself?' Michelangelo would have been awed.) The increase in blood flow shows the part of the brain that 'light up' (technical term (g) ) when actions were taken.

What brings this to mind is an article I came across this morning in Brain: A Journal Of Neurology on Neural basis of irony comprehension in children with autism: the role of prosody and context. The article describes fMRI studies of autistic children to see whether the portions of the brain that light up when a normally-developed child detects sarcasm also light up when an autistic child does. The conclusion was that autistic children have at least the basic ability to 'understand' sarcasm, though they have to explicitly invoke it; that is, they don't 'just know', they have to 'think about it' - but, having done so, they can handle it, sometimes, particularly if they have cues such as prosody - how the statement is made - or context - the semantic environment in which it's made.

I think its a fascinating area, and I wish I knew more about it.