I’m lying down in a white cylinder barely wider than my body, surrounded on all sides by a mass of sophisticated machinery the size of a small camper van. It’s an fMRI machine, one of the technological marvels of modern neuroscience. Two small inflatable cushions squeeze my temples, keeping my head still.
“We are ready to begin the next batch of exercises,” I hear Dr. Horikawa’s gentle voice saying. We’re underground, in one of the laboratories of Tokyo University’s Faculty of Medicine, Hongo Campus. “Do you feel like proceeding?”
“Yes, let’s go,” I answer.
The machine sets in motion again. A powerful current grows inside the cryogenically cooled wires that coil around me, showering my head with radio waves, knocking the hydrogen atoms inside my head off their original spin axis, and measuring the rate at which the axis recovers afterward. To the sensors around me, I’m now as transparent as a glass of water. Every tiny change of blood flow anywhere inside my brain is being watched and recorded in 3-D.
Read Full Article »