The age-old question “What’s inside shazow’s head?!” has been answered: It is, indeed, a brain. And a vitam E pill taped to the left side of my forehead. No, I don’t have a fragment of my nose growing on the back of my head, it just got a bit cut off in the image. Aren’t my insides sexy? You’d do them. I know you would.

More pictures here: /files/photos/20060125 fMRI/

All of this brainy beauty is under the Creative Commons license — go wild.

So, how was the fMRI? Some was what you’d expect from watching too much TV, other parts were not. For one, it does make those weird sounds when scans are in progress. Not sure why (all those magnetic waves interfering with the atmosphere, making the molecules go berserk, thus producing noise?). Aside from different types of (really loud) noises (presumably depending on the type of scan), there was a faint chirping-like noise in the ambience the entire time.

The scan took just under an hour (I’m guessing 45~50 minutes, I wasn’t timing it). That included an anatomical scan, as well as a bunch of speech-related tests and other scans. That’s almost an hour of being unable to move in a very crampy plastic tunnel with loud noises. Fun (it kind of was).

So, it’s giant magnet, yes. But apparently the magnetism can be localized to different parts of the MRI tunnel (is there a more technical term?), and that was confirmed because my metal pants-zipper didn’t even twitch (while I was asked to remove my hoodie due to its zipper).

What’s more? I had to wear insulated headphones. Not sure if there’s an actual speaker inside the tunnel like we often see in movies, but all the instructions I heard were from the headphones. Don’t know what else to mention, questions are welcome.

The coolest part of this whole ordeal? The Windows-only (turns out there are Linux ports) scan-reading program (MRIcro) ran flawlessly under Wine. Go Linux.