Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Friday, 1 November 2002

# 1:30 AM

I just spent about an hour stuffed inside a narrow cylinder with my head immobilized, only able to see a blurry projection screen, instructed to imagine carrying out sentences projected on the screen while a giant magnet induced radio frequency absorption in my brain.

Or, in other words, I was asked to be a guinea pig for Shweta's fMRI experiment. The idea is to see which parts of the brain are active when one imagines taking an action, and compare this with the parts of the brain that are active when one actually carries out an action. The theory is that they will be more or less the same.

The experience of being MRI-scanned is not terribly pleasant: you can't move, you're in a coffin-sized space, and the machine makes a horrific noise while it's operating, sort of a buzzing chirp, which is so loud that they give you earplugs to prevent hearing damage. However, it was fun to have done it, and theoretically I will get to print out pictures of my brain and stick them on my wall or something. Also, the setup is thoroughly mad-science: it's a giant magnet, full of liquid helium! With a crazy tangle of hoses to carry various coolants, and big fat copper cables to supply current! You have to walk through a metal detector to get into the room, lest you have some iron on your person that might get yanked around by the field!