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British Psychological Society Book Award

Congratulations to Professor Barbara Sahakian (Department of Psychiatry) and Julia Gottwald (Department of Psychiatry), winners of the British Psychological Society Book Award in the Popular Science Category for their book, Sex, Lies and Brain Scans: How fMRI Reveals What Really Goes on in Our Minds. Through the annual awards, the Society seeks to recognise works of excellence in the literature of psychology.

The book explores functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), which allows us to examine the human brain non-invasively, and observe brain activity in real time. Through fMRI, we are beginning to build a deeper understanding of our thoughts, motivations, and behaviours.

As neuroscientists unravel the regions of the brain involved in reward and motivation, we are likely to develop the capacity to influence responses such as morality using drugs. In romantic love, we are likely to develop the capacity to influence responses such as love using drugs. fMRI studies have also been used to indicate that many people who would not regard themselves as racist show a racial bias in their emotional responses to faces of another racial group. Meanwhile, the reliability of fMRI as a lie detector in murder cases is being debated - what if the individual simply believes, falsely, that he or she committed a murder?

The authors of Sex, Lies and Brain Scans consider the techniques of fMRI and what information it can give us, showing which applications are possible today and which are science fiction.

Posted on 18/10/2017