Week 5: Allison [On Magnetic Resonance Imaging]

               Breathing in, I know that I am alive. Breathing out I smile to life.

The MRI is singing.

Whistling overtones, resonant thrums, frequentual harmonics across the gradient in full magnitude filling the cylindrical space of the solenoid. My body occupying that empty space, three tesla strong; my brain, as the imaging takes place, located at the center.   

         Listen, Listen, the sound of the bell brings me back to my true home.

I had seen Alicia’s brain earlier, and Nada’s too, before my own scan. I could see them now via a little tilted mirror above me, past the mesh-lined window, they were there now hunched over the monitors and computers. Donghyun had explained to us the imaging modalities of the white matter vs gray matter of the brain, how the MRI uses changes in the spin of the protons of water to see through the skull in different ways, T1 and T2, what were the specific meanings again? And where those structures sat my head, or their heads, the cerebellum and the corpus callosum, and where the gray matter molded and meshed in wrinkles upon the white. Apparently all my brain’s computational power and neuronal network is located there on top in gray. Surface area not size. The rest is just transport. It’s strange: first I learned my self is located in my brain, not the body, now it turns out I ,me, am only truly located at the topmost layer of it.