I’m lying on my back in the tunnel of an MRI scanner, my skull immobilized in a head coil, which looks like a cage fighter’s mask. There’s a vitamin E capsule taped to the right side of my forehead. The head coil controls variations in the scanner’s magnetic field and the capsule has to do with scan orientation, in the same way that surgeons will write on your right leg so they don’t mistakenly operate on your left.
I’m sporting headphones and watching a projection of a Tom and Jerry cartoon from the 1950s, and different parts of my brain are presumably paying attention. Meanwhile, the scanner is taking slices — noisy, virtual slices — of my gray and white matter. The purpose is to illuminate the features of my brain that are processing Jerry running from Tom. From that information, the scientists in charge can make a wiring diagram of my brain, flickering in time with the images.
I feel childlike and helpless. I may have seen this cartoon 60 years ago, but I can’t remember. Relax, I remind myself. Just stay still. Cognitive decline at my age is expected.
“How are you doing, Jeff?” Taylor Kuhn asks through the headset. Kuhn, a postdoctoral research fellow in cognitive psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, has a courtly Southern accent, like one of the aristocratic characters in Gone With the Wind. (What was his name? Ashley. Yes, Ashley something. “Oh, Ashley,” Scarlett gushes.)
