Excited to share our big step towards decoding the brain’s thoughts!
When we were first injecting the microbubbles for the scan, I was surprised by the coldness of the saline flowing through my veins - it was my first IV.
And before you ask: no, the bubbles don’t tickle. (1/n)
We scanned the blood flow inside the brain using microbubbles+ultrasound.
What is really striking to me about the imaging is how interpretable and physical the data feels. You can just see the actual microbubbles flowing through the brain in the ultrasound acquisitions!
Nov 21, 2025 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Can ultrasound make you smell things that aren’t there?
Turns out, yes! We reliably triggered distinct scents like a campfire burn or a garbage truck by targeting our brains with ultrasound. To our knowledge, this has never been done before, even in animals.
This may be a promising modality for writing to the brain non-invasively:
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We built this in just a couple days, using:
- a hacked-together ultrasound headset (held together with a plastic knife taped to it)
- Lev’s skull MRI to calculate the ideal location
- safety testing with a hydrophone (water tank test setup) - notably, the power was incredibly low!
Our target for stimulation was the olfactory bulb, our brain’s region for processing smell.
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