In this report, a review is made of the mechanism behind the functional MRI (fMRI) signals and the advances made in many different areas of fMRI. Such areas include understanding and compensating for artifacts specific to fMRI, postprocessing of fMRI images, the application of fMRI to areas of interest in neuroscience, some interesting new glimpses on the frontiers of studying hemodynamics and metabolic responses, and the effect to combine fMRI results with magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG).