Boxed

Last year a researcher from a Japanese lab asked me if he could borrow my aphantasic brain for an experiment. Neuroscientists have been studying the weird capacity most people have of "visualizing", or mentally conjuring pictures of things that aren't there, for a long time. The problem is that the brain is such a wild tangle of interconnections that it's hard to tell which of its parts are involved in visualization and which are unrelated, or downstream of it. Comparing people who visualize with aphantasics who don't is a very convenient way to partially work around that problem.

I agreed to participate in the experiment. That decision led to me spending an inordinate amount of time deep inside an MRI, looking at pictures or trying (and failing) to imagine pictures. The machine, worth half a dozen Lamborghinis, is hidden somewhere in a basement on the University of Tokyo campus.

Essentially, an MRI is a big pipe you climb into, which happens to be capable of seeing right through you. Wrapped around the pipe is a hidden network of metal coils cooled to 9 degrees Celsius above absolute zero, constantly switching very large currents to fill the hollow inside with a strong magnetic field and shooting (harmless) radio waves at some corner of your body—the brain, in this case.

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