Question: What is the coolest experiment you have done when looking at brains?

Rebecca Dewey answered on 15 Jun 2015:

This is really difficult! Every experiment is cool to me – I still can’t quite believe that I’m looking INSIDE SOMEONE’S HEAD!! 🙂 I guess I really enjoy the simple experiments when you can see an immediate, massive change, and it’s really obvious what’s causing it. When we first got the near-infrared spectroscopy machine delivered, I was playing about with it, getting used to how it worked. I put the measurement equipment on my own head and started to measure. I did some simple experiments like tapping my fingers or holding my breath, and as soon as you do something like that the machine just goes crazy! The lines on the screen go everywhere – I could see my own brain working right in front of me! Oh, and I always like a good anatomical picture where I get a very high resolution / high quality picture of the brain with all its pretty lines and shapes. I particularly like seeing the blood flow – with MRI you can get a really great picture of where all the blood vessels are – they show up bright white and everything else is black. You don’t need to have an injection or anything, it just measures how fast things are moving, and only the fast moving things (like blood cells) show up white. I once did an MRI scan on a gentleman who was walking and talking normally and seemed ok, but when I looked at his brain, the blood on one side was travelling really really slowly (or not at all) whereas the other side was ok. I just looked at his images and thought “wow, how are you doing that?!”.