The Trouble with Brain Scans - Issue 111: Spotlight

In this special issue we are reprinting our top stories of the past year. This article first appeared online in our "Mind" issue in March, 2021. One autumn afternoon in the bowels of UC Berkeley's Li Ka Shing Center, I was looking at my brain. I had just spent 10 minutes inside the 3 Tesla MRI scanner, the technical name for a very expensive, very high maintenance, very magnetic brain camera. Lying on my back inside the narrow tube, I had swallowed my claustrophobia and let myself be enveloped in darkness and a cacophony of foghorn-like bleats. At the time I was a research intern at UC Berkeley's Neuroeconomics Lab. That was the first time I saw my own brain from an MRI scan. It was a grayscale, 3-D reconstruction floating on the black background of a computer screen. As an undergraduate who studied neuroscience, I was enraptured. There is nothing quite like a young scientist's first encounter with an imaging technology that renders the hitherto invisible visible--magnetic resonance imaging took my breath away.