Functional magnetic resonance imaging or functional MRI (fMRI) is an MRI procedure that measures brain activity by detecting associated changes in blood flow. The primary form of fMRI uses the blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) contrast, discovered by Seiji Ogawa. This is a type of specialized brain and body scan used to map neural activity in the brain or spinal cord of humans or animals by imaging the change in blood flow (hemodynamic response) related to energy use by brain cells. Since the early 1990s, fMRI has come to dominate brain mapping research because it does not require people to undergo shots, surgery, or to ingest substances, or be exposed to radiation.

The procedure is similar to MRI but uses the change in magnetization between oxygen-rich and oxygen-poor blood as its basic measure. This measure is frequently corrupted by noise from various sources and hence statistical procedures are used to extract the underlying signal. The resulting brain activation can be presented graphically by color-coding the strength of activation across the brain or the specific region studied. The technique can localize activity to within millimeters but, using standard techniques, no better than within a window of a few seconds.

Alphonso Joseph D'Abruzzo (born January 28, 1936), better known as Alan Alda, is an American actor, director, screenwriter, and author. A six-time Emmy Award and Golden Globe Award winner, he is best known for his role as Hawkeye Pierce in the TV series M*A*S*H. He is currently a Visiting Professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook School of Journalism and a member of the advisory board of The Center for Communicating Science.

In 1996, Alda was ranked #41 on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time.

Alda was born Alphonso Joseph D'Abruzzo in The Bronx, New York City. His father, Robert Alda (born Alphonso Giuseppe Giovanni Roberto D'Abruzzo), was an actor and singer, and his mother, Joan Browne, was a former showgirl. His father was of Italian descent and his mother was of Irish ancestry. His adopted surname, "Alda," is a portmanteau of ALphonso and D'Abruzzo. When Alda was seven years old, he contracted Poliomyelitis. To combat the disease, his parents administered a painful treatment regimen developed by Sister Elizabeth Kenny that consisted of applying hot woolen blankets to his limbs and stretching his muscles. Alda attended Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains, New York. In 1956, he received his Bachelor of Science degree in English from Fordham College of Fordham University in the Bronx, where he was a student staff member of its FM radio station, WFUV. Alda's half-brother, Antony Alda, was born the same year and would also become an actor.

Nancy Kanwisher is a Professor in the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT. She studies the neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying human visual perception and cognition. Her work investigates object recognition, visual attention, and perceptual awareness, as well as response selection, social cognition and the human understanding of numbers. Her lab has identified several regions of the brain that play specialized roles in the perception of specific categories of visual stimuli such as faces, places, and bodies, most notably the fusiform face area.

Kanwisher joined the MIT faculty in 1997, and prior to that was a faculty member at UCLA from 1990 to 1994 and at Harvard University from 1994 to 1997. She received her Ph.D. in 1986 from MIT. In 1999, she received the National Academy of Sciences' Troland Research Award, and in 2005 she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Kanwisher is one of the primary supporters in the field of Cognitive Neuroscience of a strong localization thesis, that highly specific and high level cognitive processes are localized across subjects to specific areas of the brain. She was first to report and defend the existence of a specific cortical region devoted to face processing, a region that she called the FFA (Fusiform Face Area). In normal human subjects, this region of inferior temporal cortex is more active than other brain regions during times when the subject is viewing, recognizing, categorizing or performing any visual processing related to faces, and neurological patients with lesions in this area have been shown to be unable to recognize faces. She has used a variety of evidence to defend her theory against possibility of the effect being generated by low-level feature processing, domain-general holistic processing, attention, or expertise.

John Gabrieli is a neuroscientist at MIT, and an associate member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. He is a faculty member in the department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and director of the Martinos Imaging Center, part of the McGovern Institute. Gabrieli is an expert on the brain mechanisms of human cognition, including memory, thought and emotion. His work includes neuroimaging studies on healthy adults and children as well as clinical patients with many different brain disorders, including schizophrenia, depression, Alzheimer's disease, autism and dyslexia.

As a graduate student with Suzanne Corkin at MIT he carried out research with the famous H.M., who was a globally amnesic patient as a result of epileptic surgery. Gabrieli was able to show the importance of the parahippocampal cortex in the formation of memories. In collaboration with Christopher deCharms and colleagues he was the first to demonstrate that human subjects could learn to control their own brain activity using real-time feedback from functional MRI.