Using small numbers of subjects in fMRI-based research.

The preceding speculations may not sound very novel to some ears. Indeed, when I started to describe the above ideas to any fMRI researcher who has been involved in the field for a substantial number of years, their response is invariably a comment to the effect that, "Oh yes, we are doing something like that right now in our lab." What I think they mean, of course, is that sometime in the uncertain future they might run all their own existing tasks on a few subjects, if they can get around to it and if they can find the software for some of those earlier tasks. The heart (and hard parts) of the present speculation would be creating a repository of (publicly available) interesting tasks and creating software to embody neuropsychological models and the associated imaging data. At the risk of completely losing my audience, it is the image presented in Isaac Asimov's novel Second Foundation for integrating theory and information across many different sources that is the true challenge.