The Trouble with Brain Scans - Issue 98: Mind

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. I felt that I was looking not just inside my body, but into the biological recesses of my mind. It was a strange self-image, if indeed it was one.