When a person performs two tasks simultaneously or in overlapping fashion, the BOLD response is expected to add linearly. This is a fundamental assumption of many fMRI studies that is based on the principle that continuously differentiable systems can be expected to behave linearly when perturbations are small; they are linear to first order. Linear addition means the only operation allowed on the individual responses before they are combined (added together) is a separate scaling of each. Since scaling is just multiplication by a constant number, this means an event that evokes, say, twice the neural response as another, can be modeled as the first event presented twice simultaneously. The HDR for the doubled-event is then just double that of the single event.