Kierkegaard’s book Repetition, along with his descriptions of the book in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, offer a more positive characterization of thought experiments than we find in earlier works. This chapter argues that imaginary construction has a positive aim of identifying underlying continuities. I identify some similarities between Ørsted’s pursuit of invariants and Kierkegaard’s. One new addition in Kierkegaard’s discussions is the role of exceptions. An exception is a case that falls outside a rule without breaking it. Exceptions can neither establish a rule nor refute its necessity, but they can turn attention to the principles and their limits as well as further determine their scope and content. A further similarity between Kierkegaard’s work and Ørsted’s is the fact that variation must be active and free.

This chapter explains why cognition (Erkenntnis) is its own kind of cognitive good, apart from questions of justification. I argue against reducing the work of thought experiments to their epistemological results, such as their potential to provide prima facie justification. As an apparatus for cognition, a thought experiment enacts the three core elements of Ørsted’s Kantian account: (1) it is a tool for variation; (2) it proceeds from concepts, and (3) its goal is the genuine activation or reactivation of mental processes. Cognition has two components: givenness and thought. I will show in this chapter how givenness and thought are both achieved through thought experiments.

Kant’s distinction between different uses of judgments – determining and reflecting – sheds light on two areas of recent debates about thought experiments as a method: (1) the question of bizarre cases and (2) the problem of missing context. On the question of bizarre cases, I show how a Kantian explains why it is sometimes acceptable for thought experiments to be far-fetched. For philosophical problems that call for reflecting judgment (i.e., the creation or discovery of new concepts), bizarre cases can be particularly effective. The problem of bizarre cases is closely related to the problem of missing context, which is another common objection to their use. The problem is that readers are often left to fill in background context that might be relevant for how they evaluate the thought experiment scenario. I will argue that missing context is a problem only if readers evaluate scenarios based on their prior knowledge and familiar experience. If instead, as I claim, the fictional case makes a new presentation possible, the additional context may be irrelevant and might distract from the presentation the thought experiment is designed to recreate.

We introduce basic principles of the statistical analysis of hemodynamic imaging data, including concepts like the General Linear Model, data cleaning, efficiency, parametric hypothesis testing, correction for multiple comparisons, first- and second-level analyses, region of interest analysis, double dipping, and the issue of statistical inference with reference to forward and reverse inferences.

In philosophy of science, Mach’s account of thought experiments is more often described as relevant for contemporary usage than Ørsted’s. In this chapter, I survey recent Kantian accounts of thought experiment, arguing that the leading views inspired by Kant in philosophy of science remain broadly empiricist. This tendency may be due to their focus primarily on the role of thought experiments in the sciences. In later chapters, I will argue – against recent Kantian views – that Kant understood cognition more broadly to include not only sensory perception but also mathematical construction. Acknowledging that cognition does not always require empirical fulfillment opens new ways of understanding how thought experiments work in philosophy, which may rightly differ from their use in the sciences.

Chapter 10 explains how electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) work. EEG and MEG equipment is explained component by component in plain language. EEG and MEG signal acquisition procedures are explained along with the basics of digital signal processing to bridge the conceptual understanding of the signals to practical EEG and MEG data analysis. In addition to traditional methods, dry electrode EEG and optically pumped magnetometer MEG (OPM-MEG) methods are introduced.

In this chapter we discuss how multiple imaging modalities can be conbined and the benefits of such combinations. We illustrate such multi-modal imaging with several examples, including the fusion of fMRI and MEG, simultaneous acquisition of EEG and fMRI, source localization, the combination of analyses of functional connectivity and multi-voxel pattern analyses, and potential benefits of multi-modal imaging for clinical diagnostics.

We discuss how to design a hemodynamic imaging experiment. We present the main designs, including block and event-related designs. We discuss the subtraction method, and consider the relevance of baseline conditions.