Working with Brain Scans

Abstract

A significant part of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) practice in neuroscience is spent in front of computer screens. To investigate the brain neuroscientists work with digital images. This paper recovers practical dealings with brain scans in fMRI laboratories to focus on the achievement of seeing in the digital realm. While looking at brain images, neuroscientists gesture and manipulate digital displays to manage and make sense of their experimental data. Their gestural engagements are seen as dynamical phenomenal objects enacted at the junction between the digital world of technology and the world of embodied action.