Blood-oxygen-level dependent

Blood-oxygen-level dependent or BOLD fMRI is a method of observing which areas of the brain are active at any given time. It was found by Dr. Seiji Ogawa and Dr. Robert Turner, working independently, in 1990. Neurons do not have internal reserves of energy in the form of sugar and oxygen, so their firing causes a need for more energy to be brought in quickly. Through a process called the hemodynamic response, blood releases oxygen to them at a greater rate than to inactive neurons, and the difference in magnetic susceptibility between oxyhemoglobin and deoxyhemoglobin, and thus oxygenated or deoxygenated blood, leads to magnetic signal variation which can be detected using an MRI scanner. Given many repetitions of a thought, action or experience, statistical methods can be used to determine the areas of the brain which reliably have more of this difference as a result, and therefore which areas of the brain are active during that thought, action or experience.

Almost all fMRI research uses BOLD as the method for determining where activity occurs in the brain as the result of various experiences, but because the signals are relative, and not individually quantitative, some question its rigor. Other methods which propose to measure neural activity directly have been attempted (for example, measurement of the Oxygen Extraction Fraction, or OEF, in regions of the brain, which measures how much of the oxyhemoglobin in the blood has been converted to deoxyhemoglobin ), but because the electromagnetic fields created by an active or firing neuron are so weak, the signal-to-noise ratio is extremely low and statistical methods used to extract quantitative data have been largely unsuccessful as of yet.