Thread by @rebecca_saxe

My MRI Mother and Child has become the focus of a controversy this weekend.

Here’s the story.

Thread. 1/14

A few years ago, I was doing an fMRI study of infant brains. The scientific questions we were asking (with amazing grad student @bmhdeen) were about the organization of functional activity in infant brains when viewing meaningful visual images, like faces and natural scenes.

@bmhdeen Some prior data and theories suggested that infants’ functional organization should be dramatically different from adults’. (I hoped so — when studying development, the most exciting results reveal what changes).
3/14

@bmhdeen Actually, we found that the large scale organization of visual responses was surprising similar in infants and adults; though there were hints of subtler differences.
Link: nature.com/articles/ncomm…
4/14

@bmhdeen Amazing grad student @heatherlkos is doing the next round of studies. She has scanned dozens more babies! Stay tuned for new science.

@bmhdeen @heatherlkos Eventually. This kind of science is really slow.

@bmhdeen @heatherlkos Anyway, kind of by coincidence and kind of not, the first fMRI study of infant brains, which I had been planning for 6 years, actually got going when… I had a baby.

7/14

@bmhdeen @heatherlkos The minute he was born, lying on my chest still warm and goopy, I looked into his black eyes for the first time, and I knew: (i) I was deeply inexplicably in love with him, and (ii) as soon as possible, I wanted to scan his brain.

8/14

@bmhdeen @heatherlkos So, I spent many many many hours squashed inside an MRI machine with my infant, while we figured out how to collect these data.

This talk includes some videos:

9/14

@bmhdeen @heatherlkos I had lots of time to think, and I thought: wouldn’t it be amazing to see an MRI of the two of us in here? A Mother and Child, one of the oldest images, made new.
smithsonianmag.com/science-nature…

10/14

@bmhdeen @heatherlkos It took us a year to figure out how to make it, so the child in this image is my second son.

Thank you @bmhdeen and Atsushi Takahashi!

11/14

@bmhdeen @heatherlkos At some point we thought: would it be cool to overlay the activation (from our actual science study on watching face movies) onto this picture? So, we did.

12/14

@bmhdeen @heatherlkos In answer to all the controversies and tweeting this weekend: The activations are real fMRI results, of hemodynamic responses while looking at a movies of faces, compared to movies of scenes. They really are from that baby.

13/14

@bmhdeen @heatherlkos They have nothing to do with oxytocin, hormones, kissing, or breastfeeding.

Fin.