MRI (More than Really Interesting)

Although many of my friends have left campus for the summer, I have remained to continue working in a lab on campus.  I've had the opportunity to learn much about different research techniques which I think will be of great use to my future.  But one of the most fascinating methods I've learned about recently is the ever-useful MRI.

For a few years I was addicted to this television series.

If you've ever seen a show like Gray's Anatomy or House, you've probably watched scenes where patients go into the donut scanner on a little cot and instantly the doctor starts looking at the images.  Well, obviously the tv shows are playing up the speed at which a scanner can actually operate.  But when you think about it, an MRI scanner is a seriously amazing piece of technology.

First of all, did you know that modern day scanners aren't hooked up to the power grid?  They are actually, to a degree, self-sustaining.  The magnet is essentially miles of wire all wrapped around a tube like a tesla coil.  And although I don't know the exact composition of the alloy used to make the wire, I do know that below 7 Kelvin, the wire has no resistance. And resistance is like friction, it'll eventually wear down a power source such as a battery, just as a ball will eventually quit rolling across the floor because of the friction.  But if you have no resistance, it means that you can keep the power cycling forever, just like a ball that would never stop rolling.

Of course, for all those chemistry geeks out there, they know 7 Kelvin is approximately -450 fahrenheit.  That's pretty damn cold.  So how did engineers deal with this problem?  Well, they built a vacuum.

Essentially, the coils of wire are kept in a bath of either liquid Helium or Nitrogen.  My university's new scanner (which is way cool!) uses liquid Helium to keep the coils at 3 Kelvin, plenty cold to keep resistance at zero.  And to keep the liquid helium from turning to gas, this whole apparatus is kept inside a vacuum.  Can you believe all this is necessary just to run a single MRI?

This also explains why the magnet is never turned off.  Because technically it's not hooked up to a power source (remember, once it's charged it never looses energy because the wire has no resistance), so there's nothing to unplug it from.  In an emergency, the only thing you can do is hit the emergency kill button.  This releases the liquid Helium (which turns to gas and pours out of the building through a specially designed system) and the wire regains resistance so the stored energy in the system dissipates.

However, this method is only to be used in life-threatening emergencies.  Killing the magnet like this can do untold amounts of damage.  First of all, thousands of liters are needed to keep the coils cold enough and Helium is becoming more pricey every day. Last I checked, I believe it priced somewhere around 9 dollars a liter.  Next, the sudden heating of the coils after the loss of liquid Helium can heat them so badly that they melt, meaning you have to replace the entire spool of miles of wire.  And of course, there's always the possibility of damage to the electronics and computers hooked up to the scanner.

Seriously, it's a huge red button that tempts me every time
I walk into the IRC (imaging research center).

So I think more than ever, whenever I see the huge red button that will kill the magnet- I have to resist all temptation  to push the button.  That's one act of impulse that I simply can't afford.

Humans are still Animals

Ok, so maybe we're dignified animals with greater reasoning capacity, memory, and general cognition.  But I think there's way too much of a tendency to put humans in a different category from animals like we're a whole separate branch on the evolutionary tree.  This tends to be more of a social problem based on religious beliefs, among other things.  Just look at the famous philosopher Rene Descartes.  He believed that animals were biological clockwork creatures with no thought processes or souls.

Do you believe puppies have souls?

But I recently read a fascinating article sent to me by my roommate, Emily Mixon.  Seriously, read it cause you'll learn some pretty amazing facts.  Like, did you know bighorn sheep in Canada will grind their teeth to the gums rubbing off hallucinogenic lichen from rocks?  It's some pretty crazy stuff.

But what really struck me was the bit about cutters.  For me, I remember a lot of people being cutters in middle school.  For those of you who don't know the lingo, it's a person who cut themselves not because they're suicidal but because it somehow helps them deal with stress and relax.   At the time, I thought it was completely crazy and probably just people looking for attention.  But there's actually evidence for this type of behavior in the rest of the animal kingdom.

In fact, some breeds of dogs are prone to similar behavior.  In the article, it describes this as grooming gone wrong because the animals will either lick or bite themselves compulsively until they bleed.  I wont go into the details because the article covers them pretty well but there's significant evidence that animals have had problems with such compulsive activities- from mammals to birds.  And thanks to my neuroscience knowledge, I understand an additional layer of this behavior.  Because what person would purposefully pull their hair out or cut themselves?

A bizarre but explainable phenomena.

Well grooming activities and their habitual nature lead to large doses of serotonin being released in the individual's brain.  So over grooming could almost be like a form of self-medication.  The repetition of the activity keeps serotonin (which is highly involved in regulating mood and depression) flowing.  Also, the end result of self-injury causes the body to release endorphins.  Just like a runner's high, this self-synthesized drug dulls pain and gives you that "spacey" feeling of zoning out.  So maybe animals do have some of the same problems we tend to see as uniquely human.

I know there are still plenty of differences between animals and humans.  Our brains are developed to differing degrees.  The body plans from species to species can have huge variance so we can assume one trait or idea will explain the entire animal kingdom.  But we also can't close ourselves off.  We all have a common denominator that can''t be ignored.  Why else would scientists use animal research?  Just a little food for thought.

A Clockwork Orange

In high school, I managed to read A Clockwork Orange.  For those of you who haven't attempted this, be warned that it's  like reading a foreign language.  The author uses words from Russian, Spanish, English, and Japanese to create a very unique street dialect.  The first few chapters are spent trying to figure out what the hell the main character (whose point of view the reader shares) means.  Pretty soon though, you pick up what's going on and you start to realize how truly creepy this futuristic world is.

But it took me watching the 1971 film to start to wonder about the neurological implications of the movie.

One of the key plot points (*SPOILERS*) is that Alex, the protagonist, is brain-washed to feel sick every time that he sees sex or violence or considers doing either of the two.  In the movie, he's portrayed as gagging and nearly throwing up after his "treatment".  I know that the idea behind his brainwashing is that they give him a drug that activates a particular center in his brain and they correlate this with horrific videos of sex and violence to make Alex associate the two.

I suppose this could be considered a form of classical conditioning.  Like Pavlov with his dogs, Alex is trained to match a physiological response with an external stimulus.  So Pavlov's dogs were trained to salivate when they heard a bell.  Alex was trained to feel sick whenever he witnessed or thought about "evil impulses" of violence (and sex).  They even give an example of generalization where the subject is not trained to differentiate to one particular stimulus.  In Alex's case, he was accidentally also trained against Beethoven's 9th.

Not exactly a hero but definitely the protagonist.

But the question I have, is what part of the brain were they activating for revulsion?  I know the amygdala is activated for fear and that can modulate emotions and memories.  But I don't know where the center of revulsion is.  Anyone have a suggestion on what Alex's doctors were activating?

In any case, I do suggest you read this classic novel.  (Yes, it's 50 years old so it's officially a classic.)  It's disturbing and confusing at times but the political messages it contains shouldn't be ignored.  And if you're too lazy to read the book, the movie is on netflix instant play.