And the ubiquitous depictions generated by fMRI in turn perpetuate that very orientation: the scans offer a vivid visual affirmation of the assumption that everything worth observing happens within the bounds of a single skull. Scientists who might have wished to investigate the role of social interaction on cognition have until recently been hampered by technical constraints; for many years following the introduction of fMRI, researchers were all but required to examine the individual in seclusion, shut inside the solitary bore of the MRI machine. Thus the neuroscientific study of how people
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