My Brain
I recently took part in a study for McGill University, where among other things they had to do an MRI of my brain. Seeing as this doesn’t happen too often for me, I politely asked me if they could email me a copy of some of the images when they were done. I thought they had forgotten, but a week or so later some amazing images popped into my email inbox - portraits of my brain.
A slice of my brain as taken horizontally straight through my eyeballs.
One of my heroes, the late, great animator Norman McLaren, once decided to turn an x-ray of his head into an art project by drawing on it. McLaren was an animator, and much of his work was stream of consciousness doodles, so this made a lot of sense. I put my images through photoshop, my tool of choice as a designer, in an effort to make the various structures pop out a bit more and add a little colour.
Here is McLaren’s head compared with mine:
August 21st, 2008
at 2:20 pm on August 21st, 2008
It is cool to have brain scans! Awesome. and neat connection with the Nation Film Board star. I just now watched his Neighbors all the way through for the first time.
at 2:25 pm on August 21st, 2008
Neighbors is a classic as well. Actually, I pretty-much recommend everything by McLaren they’ve posted (and much of what they haven’t).
There is a great story about Neighbors. When told he was nominated for an academy award for the film (which he won), he supposedly said “Who’s Oscar?”.
at 5:32 pm on August 27th, 2008
I took part in a similar fMRI study at MIT several years ago and was given a collection of images (as well as a movie) of my brain. Pretty neat.
I’ve also got a partial x-ray of the brain of one of my co-workers (the result of a timing mistake in the radiology suite). I’ve been trying to think of a way to display it as artwork.