Comparison of magnetic and metabolic brain activity during a verb generation task

The magnetic and metabolic activational patterns of the brain during the perception, generation and silent articulation of words overlap to some extent, yet also measure concrete activational patterns. In the present study, auditory evoked magnetic fields (MEG) and changes in regional cerebral blood flow (PET) were examined in healthy subjects during a verb generation task. The aim of the study was to determine whether the advantages of both recording techniques can be combined so as to identify distributed sources of brain activity during particular tasks such as language processing. Given the currently observed disparity of the results from the two types of brain imaging we conclude that PET data will most likely not provide physiologically meaningful constraints for the distributed source analysis of MEG data, and may not necessarily validate results of distributed source analyses.