When Bradley Peterson, a psychiatrist and researcher at Columbia University, offered to scan my brain with a magnetic resonance imager the size of a small Airstream trailer, I immediately said yes. I spent 10 minutes filling out a page-long checklist (I lied on the question asking whether I was claustrophobic) and another few minutes emptying my pockets and getting rid of keys, wrist-watch, and pen, which could become missiles inside the MRI's potent magnetic field. I lay down on a narrow pallet that slid into the machine like a drawer in a morgue. The machine groaned and clanged as it peered inside my skull, then fell silent. With a gentle whir, the pallet slid out, and I relaxed. In about the time it takes to burn a few CDs on my laptop, Peterson was leaning over a screen, showing me a detailed black-and-white image of my brain. Brain scans like the one I had are now routine, used for everything from detecting signs of stroke to searching out suspected tumors. But researchers like Peterson are pushing MRI technology further than anyone once thought it could go. In the last decade or so, MRI has been retooled to reveal not only the anatomy of the brain but also the way the brain works.
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