@PessoaBrain @NicoleCRust
To go Eric Schwartz on both sides: yes, what most fMRI paradigms are measuring the difference between showing you a picture of your ass and a hole in the ground.. but the brain is homeostatic with measurable energy needs (usually irrelevant to what we want to measure).. I think the minimum experiment would be 2x2x2 with two conditions, two groups and two timepoints around an intervention.. thinking about whether a sham is necessary

@NicoleCRust @PessoaBrain
I would make the analogy writ large to the MT finding (which I thought you first described but now think is Osborne et al. 2004): neurons encoding the most information about object direction have RFs with the highest derivative rather than peak response.. in neuroimaging particularly, most of the effort is aimed at peak response areas rather than finding areas where intervention causes the largest measurable change (way harder to do)

@dbarack @Neurograce @NicoleCRust
IMO consciousness is not study-able because it’s too hard to define its scope in a testable way.. you’re usually not C of eye movements, but they are vital to decisions.. you can be aware of how you’re scrubbing a pan, or just that you are scrubbing one.. pro sports players are told ‘don’t think about it’ routinely.. aware intention and measurable behavior can’t be put into the same mesoscale consistently

@DrYohanJohn
I think you have to be very careful in thinking about this.. some areas are phase stable barring intervention like TTX (SCN), once you get into ephys, you get into the problem of are neurons phase stable in oscillation or in the context of a wave that may change direction as behavior occurs.. you often can’t measure the latter.. and then there are ERPs that are simply easier to interpret in the Fourier domain.. short guess: phase locks while behaviorally relevant