of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that utilized an injected contrast agent.

From Science,
November 1, 1991. Copyright © 1991 by AAAS. Reprinted with permission from AAAS.

Plate 3. A view of my brain from the bottom, showing in red areas of my brain that were active when I
viewed faces. The activity follows along the fusiform gyrus on each side (which is outlined with a
dashed white line).

Plate 4. One way to analyze connectivity in the brain is to look at how the activity of the entire brain is
related to a particular location, or seed. This figure shows a map of regions across the brain whose
activity (shown in yellow and red) is correlated with that of a seed region (shown in blue) that is located
in the motor cortex. This analysis reproduces the original findings by Biswal, which showed that the
motor cortex on the opposite side of the brain was correlated at rest. Generated using data obtained
from the Human Connectome Project.
Plate 5. The image of brain activation in a dead salmon from Craig Bennett’s 2009 poster. The tiny red
spot was the location of significant activation found when the proper correction for multiple
comparisons was not applied. Image courtesy of Craig Bennett.
Plate 6. The results from Adrian Owen’s 2006 paper, showing in red/yellow the brain areas active
while imagining playing tennis (left) and imagining navigating one’s house (right) in the vegetative
patient (top) and healthy controls (bottom). From “Detecting Awareness in the Vegetative State” by
Adrian M. Owen, Martin R. Coleman, Melanie Boly, Matthew H. Davis, Steven Laurys, & John D.
Pickard, Science, 08 September 2006: 1402. Copyright © 2006 by AAAS. Reprinted with permission
from AAAS.

Plate 7. A map showing brain areas in the left hemisphere whose activity was greater the first time
subjects decided whether a word was abstract or concrete, compared with the second time. The areas
shown in red/yellow showed a statistically significant reduction in their activity when a word was
repeated. Generated using data from the OpenfMRI project.

Plate 8. Mapping networks in the brain. The left panel shows the regions, or parcels, identified in the
right hemisphere of my brain, looking at the middle of the hemisphere. The plots in the right panel
show the fMRI signal in two of the parcels that are part of the default mode network (marked with
stars). Despite being at different ends of the brain, these regions show activity that fluctuates in a very
similar manner across the 10-minute resting fMRI scan.

Plate 9. Results from three meta-analyses performed using Neurosynth. The three sets of results are
shown together; areas shown in red are those where activation was associated with working memory
across studies, green was associated with pain, and blue with reward. These results show that different
psychological states engage reliably different patterns of activity across the brain.
Plate 10. The areas (shown in red) found by Etkin and colleagues to show differences in brain structure
related to mental illness that were common between different diagnoses. The left panel shows a view of
the middle of the brain, highlighting the anterior cingulate, and the right panel shows the side view,
highlighting the insula (though most of the insula is hidden away within the folds of the brain).
Generated using data generously provided by Amit Etkin.
 CHAPTER 7

DECISION NEUROSCIENCE

Imaging the Brain’s “Buy Button”

Angelina Jolie announced in the New York Times in 2013 that she had chosen
to have an elective double mastectomy, even though she did not have cancer.
She made this choice because of her family history of breast cancer (her
mother had developed the disease in her 40s and died of it at 56) and because
she carries a mutation in a particular gene (BRCA1) that puts her at high risk
of breast cancer. Her doctors had estimated that she had an 87% chance of
developing the disease at some point in her life. On the other hand, the
surgery carries a small risk of death (less than 1%), and it’s also possible to
have complications that could reduce one’s quality of life. What would you
do in this situation?
Every day we make thousands of choices. Some of them are
inconsequential—should I eat yogurt or eggs for breakfast this morning?
Others are not very important in the short term, but might have consequences
in the long term—should I take the stairs or the elevator to my office on the
third floor? Others are life altering, like Jolie’s choice to undergo major
surgery now in order to avoid an uncertain risk of disease in the future. For
many years, the way that we make these choices has been studied by
economists and psychologists, who have developed powerful theories that
can describe many aspects of how we make decisions. In the past two
decades, a new field called neuroeconomics has emerged that has attempted
to describe how the brain makes these decisions, and neuroimaging has
played a central role in the development of this new field.