Casting Light on the Dark Side of Brain Imaging

Authors

Amir Raz Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Amir Raz, PhD, ABPH, is Canada Research Chair in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention at both the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University and the SMBD Jewish General Hospital. He received his PhD in computation and information processing in the brain from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. He went on to be a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Michael I. Posner at the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology of the Weill Medical College of Cornell University. He was then appointed to the position of Assistant Professor at Cornell University and subsequently at Columbia University in the City of New York. He is the recipient of multiple accolades, including the 2006 Young Investigator Award from the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Affective Disorders and the 2005 Early Career Award from the American Psychological Association (Division 30). Professor Raz is a diplomate of the American Board of Psychological Hypnosis. Having examined the safety and efficacy of psychiatric drugs across development, his active research interests span the neural and psychological substrates of attention, self-regulation, expectation, placebo, and consciousness. He is also conducting research into developmental psychopathology, the cognitive neuroscience of culture, authorship processes and atypical cognition. Using neuroimaging and other state-of-the-art techniques, his research elucidates the relationship between disparate attention networks and attentional planes such as hypnosis. Robert T. Thibault Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Robert Thibault earned his Ph.D. from the Integrated Program in Neuroscience at McGill University. He investigates how and why we image the living human brain. His research has highlighted the psychosocial and placebo phenomena involved in neurofeedback and raised body posture as an important variable in brain imaging research. He now focuses on how to expedite scientific discoveries through efficient research systems and rigorous experimental practices-in other words, meta-research. His work is supported by a scholarship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).