fMRI – the quick guide

Wouldn’t you like to read the minds of the people you do business with? Sorry, fMRI doesn't do that, but it does try to see what goes on in the brain.

MRI is a medical-scanning technology familiar to millions around the world – but functional MRI is a new application to study the brain in action. It’s important to medicine, of course – but also, one day, to fragrance companies and other consumer marketers. The most immediate profits are for the companies that make the equipment, itself.

What is it? | The technology | Where's the buzz? | Any money in this?

What is it?

fMRI stands for functional magnetic resonance imaging.

The MRI bit came about as a name change because medics did not like telling patients that they would undergoing nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). MRI uses strong magnetic fields to look at atoms – that’s where the nuclear (think nucleus) comes in.

The technology

Body scanners, widely used in medicine, combine fMRI and sophisticated imaging software and you can build images of bits of the body for diagnosis.

You could think of fMRI as X-rays with a difference. Where X-rays look for broken bones, TB and so on, MRI started as a way of scanning the body to diagnose things like tumours and brain injuries. One estimate suggests that around 75 million MRI scans happen every year.

The latest interest in MRI, the advance that adds the functional tag, is in studying what goes on in the brain. To quote from a group at the University of Oxford, fMRI is “a technique for determining which parts of the brain are activated by different types of physical sensation or activity, such as sight, sound or the movement of a subject's fingers”.

It works by doing MRI on the brain and watching the increased blood flow to the activated areas of the brain. The idea is to look at areas in the brain that are in action when we are smelling, speaking, moving, seeing, hearing, feeling and remembering. This means that we can use it as a window on the senses.

To quote another group of academics, this time at Columbia University in New York City, “This new ability to directly observe brain function opens an array of new opportunities to advance our understanding of brain organization, as well as a potential new standard for assessing neurological status and neurosurgical risk.”

fMRI does not come cheap. You could shell out up to $2.5 million for the kit.

Where's the buzz?

Businesses like the idea of fMRI because, to pick one example, researchers can pin down which bits are involved in various emotions and our use of our senses.

Fortune magazine has put its finger on the potential when it says that “fMRI is making its way out of the labs and into marketers’ toolkits for studying consumers’ emotions and motivations”.

Think of it this way: You have developed a new fragrance – that’s what the people who make those things calls scents and smells. You want to sell it as “fresh,” or “invigorating”. In the past that has just been a case of objectivity, asking people what they feel when they smell something.

Now you can subject people to something fresh or invigorating and watch which bits of the brain light up. Then if your scent activates the same regions of the brain – it turns out the brain’s smell bits are close to the emotion bits – there is a better chance that people really will experience the emotional responses you have described.

The biggest uses of fMRI are in medicine. (For an idea on what it would be like should you ever need the technique, read this note for patients.) As well as diagnosing brain ailments, medics talk of using fMRI to help people do “brain exercises” after a stroke. Then there is the work on brain damage in premature babies.

Any money in this?

See the above quote from Fortune.

Another new idea in its early stages, so the early moneymakers will be the companies that make the kit. GE Healthcare makes MRI kits and will sell you hardware for fMRI. GE is involved in The Alzheimer’s Center at the Albany Medical Center in New York State.

Frost & Sullivan puts the US MRI market at $1.46 billion in sales of 1,055 scanners in 2002. Small businesses aren't likely to knock GE off its perch. There are, though, opportunities to develop software and to bring the benefits of fMRI to all those marketing folks who would like to read our minds.

For example, the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia is affiliated to the University of Pennsylvania where the School of Medicine has fMRI kit. The two got together to study what happens in the brain when we eat. They found that “food cravings activate brain areas related to emotion, memory and reward – areas also activated during drug-craving studies”.

Monell has a list of seriously powerful corporate sponsors who pay to get their work done, some of them in the food business. Not all of them will be in the market for fMRI, but sure as heck they get exposed to its delights by Monell.

Hardly a day goes by without newspaper stories about what happens in bits of the brain, usually uncovered with fMRI. Someone is going to cash in.