In a paper published in 2001 Jim Haxby made the important point that a region of the brain can contain information about classes of stimuli that it does not respond to above baseline, if the pattern of response across voxels in that region differ stably for one class versus another. In other words, even if the response of the FFA to cars and shoes is low or zero, it might still be able to distinguish cars versus shoes if the pattern of response across voxels differs for the two stimulus types. This insight constitutes an important challenge to functional specificity, plus leads to the method of multiple voxel pattern analysis.