fMRI: A Modern Cerebrascope? The Case of Pain

This article examines the application of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in neuroscience, particularly in the imaging of pain. It provides a brief primer on functional magnetic imaging techniques and describes pain processing and pain inhibiting systems. It discusses experiments where fMRI has illustrated what has gone wrong in the pain network's response to stimuli and suggests that imaging studies of pain have a crucial role to play in diagnosing pain disorders as well as advancing a theoretical framework for explaining them. It also offers suggestions for how to improve fMRI experiments and their theoretical implications.