When neuroscientist Rebecca Saxe became a mother for the first time, she decided to create a special image to document the beginning of a new adventure.
What the MIT professor ended up creating was a modern day Mother and Child.
While Saxe spends her days examining MRIs at her job, where she studies cognitive behaviour in children, she decided to do a special scan, just for the resulting image rather than anything that could be learned from it, medically.
Holding her two-month-old baby boy Perry, Saxe curled up inside the tube of a 3 Tesla magnetic resonance imaging scanner and the image was taken.
Writing in The Smithsonian, Saxe said: “No one, to my knowledge, had ever made an MRI image of a mother and child. We made this one because we wanted to see it.”
The resulting image is as awe-inspiring as it is beautiful, a stark reminder of how delicate the human body really is.
“Some people look at it and see mostly the differences: How thin his skull is, how little space there is between the outside world and his brain. It’s just this very fragile, very thin little shell,” Saxe said.
“On the other hand, you can look at it and see how similar it is to his mother’s brain. How close in size — so much closer in size than his hand is.
“As for me, I saw a very old image made new. The Mother and Child is a powerful symbol of love and innocence, beauty and fertility.”
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MRI Image: Facebook/Science Alert
To some people, this image was a disturbing reminder of the fragility of human beings. Others were drawn to the way that the two figures, with their clothes and hair and faces invisible, became universal, and could be any human mother and child, at any time or place in history. Still others were simply captivated by how the baby’s brain is different from his mother’s; it’s smaller, smoother and darker—literally, because there’s less white matter.
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why–captured-MRI-mother-child-180957207/#IxhxGmjuyGUXv5fP.99
Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv
Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on TwitterTo some people, this image was a disturbing reminder of the fragility of human beings. Others were drawn to the way that the two figures, with their clothes and hair and faces invisible, became universal, and could be any human mother and child, at any time or place in history. Still others were simply captivated by how the baby’s brain is different from his mother’s; it’s smaller, smoother and darker—literally, because there’s less white matter.
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why–captured-MRI-mother-child-180957207/#IxhxGmjuyGUXv5fP.99
Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv
Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter”Some people look at it and see mostly the differences: How thin his skull is, how little space there is between the outside world and his brain. It’s just this very fragile, very thin little shell,” Saxe said.
“On the other hand, you can look at it and see how similar it is to his mother’s brain. How close in size — so much closer in size than his hand is.”
“Some people look at it and see mostly the differences: How thin his skull is, how little space there is between the outside world and his brain. It’s just this very fragile, very thin little shell,” Saxe said.
“On the other hand, you can look at it and see how similar it is to his mother’s brain. How close in size — so much closer in size than his hand is.”
