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“What is more conscious than consciousness? It’s a kind of joke I play with some Italian friends who constantly tell me to buy extra virgin olive oil. What is more virgin than virginity, you know? I don’t understand… ahahaha.”
Louis Sokoloff interviewed by Eli Kabillio, 1998


Sokoloff was an American neuroscientist, recognized as one of the pioneers of functional brain imaging.
Functional imaging, also known as physiological imaging, is a medical diagnostic technique aimed at observing or measuring changes in metabolism, blood flow, regional chemical composition, and absorption.
Unlike structural imaging, which focuses on anatomy, functional imaging seeks to detect the physiological activity of specific tissues or organs. To obtain this information, medical imaging methods are often used that employ tracers or probes. These tracers, often analogous to naturally occurring compounds in the body, such as glucose, allow the spatial distribution of physiological activity to be visualized.
For this purpose, isotopes with chemical and biological properties similar to those of natural compounds are used. Thanks to the proportional relationship between tracer and substance of interest, nuclear medicine specialists can estimate the actual intensity of certain compounds within the body, thereby helping to assess the risk of developing specific pathologies.



“To confirm this, brain imaging shows that lying requires a higher level of brain activation than telling the truth.”