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My MRI Mother and Child has become the focus of a controversy this weekend.
Here’s the story.
Thread. 1/14
Here’s the story.
Thread. 1/14
A few years ago, I was doing an fMRI study of infant brains. The scientific questions we were asking (with amazing grad student @bmhdeen) were about the organization of functional activity in infant brains when viewing meaningful visual images, like faces and natural scenes.
Some prior data and theories suggested that infants’ functional organization should be dramatically different from adults’. (I hoped so — when studying development, the most exciting results reveal what changes).
3/14
3/14
Actually, we found that the large scale organization of visual responses was surprising similar in infants and adults; though there were hints of subtler differences.
Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13995
4/14
Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13995
4/14
Amazing grad student @heatherlkos is doing the next round of studies. She has scanned dozens more babies! Stay tuned for new science.
Eventually. This kind of science is really slow.
Anyway, kind of by coincidence and kind of not, the first fMRI study of infant brains, which I had been planning for 6 years, actually got going when… I had a baby.
7/14
7/14
The minute he was born, lying on my chest still warm and goopy, I looked into his black eyes for the first time, and I knew: (i) I was deeply inexplicably in love with him, and (ii) as soon as possible, I wanted to scan his brain.
8/14
8/14
So, I spent many many many hours squashed inside an MRI machine with my infant, while we figured out how to collect these data.
This talk includes some videos:
9/14
This talk includes some videos:
9/14
I had lots of time to think, and I thought: wouldn’t it be amazing to see an MRI of the two of us in here? A Mother and Child, one of the oldest images, made new.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why--captured-MRI-mother-child-180957207/
10/14
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why--captured-MRI-mother-child-180957207/
10/14
It took us a year to figure out how to make it, so the child in this image is my second son.
Thank you @bmhdeen and Atsushi Takahashi!
11/14
Thank you @bmhdeen and Atsushi Takahashi!
11/14
At some point we thought: would it be cool to overlay the activation (from our actual science study on watching face movies) onto this picture? So, we did.
12/14
12/14
In answer to all the controversies and tweeting this weekend: The activations are real fMRI results, of hemodynamic responses while looking at a movies of faces, compared to movies of scenes. They really are from that baby.
13/14
13/14
They have nothing to do with oxytocin, hormones, kissing, or breastfeeding.
Fin.
Fin.
