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Boxed – Things I learned after lying in an MRI machine for 30 hours

Things I learned after lying in an MRI machine for 30 hours

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. Now you're seeing a picture of a man blowing smoke from his mouth in the Grand Canyon, next it could be a close-up on a smudged corner of a book, or a group of penguins near an ice cliff, or a pile of broken CRT monitors, or something else altogether. Inside the machine, I have to remain very still with no phone to check, nothing to read, no tossing and turning just for the sake of it, nothing to fiddle with, and—given that the tasks all require a moderate but constant level of attention, no opportunity to get really lost in thought.

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