“The cerebellum shows up a lot of time when you’re doing neuroimaging research,” says Green, and it’s often difficult to account for, since most fMRI tasks are designed to explicitly limit movement-any movement can affect the clarity of the signal picked up by the machine. And in fact, a lot of scientists are really excited about the possibility of redefining the cerebellum’s long-held motor role. Challenging pre-established notions is kind of what science is supposed to do. Now, none of this is to say that implicating a new brain area in creative processing is a bad thing. That lack of definition makes it tough to study, even though the researchers tried to focus on a specific kind. But creativity is, in the end, a human construct. It makes sense that a design scholar would want to know how creativity works-in this case, a person who teaches a creativity course at Stanford's d-school actually suggested the study. Like what? Well, interdisciplinary collaborations are often a good thing, especially between science and the arts. That means any successive studies done with fMRI have to meet a much, much higher bar. The problem is, a lot of the questions that can be answered simply with fMRI data have, by virtue of being simple, already been answered. Now, fMRI is still a great tool-just as long as you’re applying it to questions that it can actually answer. Their test? Sticking subjects into a magnetic resonance tube while they played Pictionary. A study out of Stanford today-a collaboration between its design school and its brain sciences research center-used the method to search for brain activity associated with visual creativity. But the allure of fMRI still seems to be too much for some scientists to ignore, despite its limitations. The field has largely moved past the follies of its youth. In the years since, fMRI has given neuroscience a bit of a bad reputation, thanks to some shoddy statistical work and an unfortunate study in which Dartmouth scientists put a dead salmon in an MR tube. It watches oxygen in blood flow to different parts of the brain and uses that as a proxy for activity-and generates lovely images of brains at work. About a decade and a half ago, the neuroscience world got super-stoked about a sexy new way to look at living brains: functional magnetic resonance imaging.