I was tortured in an MRI machine. Worse, I actually volunteered for it.
Many years ago, I did some work for a neurobiologist who was studying how the body processes pain. Mostly I designed machines for various types of lab tests. When people asked me what I did for a living, I told them that I designed torture devices for cats. I used to get a few strange looks.
I would usually test out these machines and devices on myself before subjecting any other person or animal to the machine. The machines were all designed to cause some sort of pain without causing any actual damage to the person (or animal).
One day we got the bright idea to do brain scans on an MRI machine while receiving pain stimuli. The theory was that the new MRI machines were just barely able to detect changes in blood flow in the brain and that any area of the brain that received an increase in blood flow was probably doing some work.
The big challenge was to come up with torture devices (er, I mean research equipment) that would give a controlled stimulus and would also work next to an MRI machine, which meant that the normal electronic controls we used wouldn’t work. For example, in order to test the heat pain threshold, I came up with the idea of using brass tubes filled with water and sealed at both ends which were left in a hot water bath for an extended period of time. The tubes had enough mass that they would hold their temperature over the length of the test and had good enough thermal conductivity that they would transfer the temperature to skin easily enough. Heat the tubes up to 45 deg C, and you’ve got your hot pain stimulator.
Now to see if this idea would even work or would provide any useful data, some idiot had to climb into the MRI machine and get tortured. Since I helped design a lot of the tests, I volunteered to go in first. Now, keep in mind that we’re trying to measure changes in blood flow in a particular area of the brain, which means the brain needs to be in exactly the same place in every scan. How do you keep someone’s head in exactly the same place for an hour straight? Simple. Strap something that looks like a hockey mask to their face and strap that and the rest of their head to the table.
So, not only was I tortured, but I was held down and tortured.
We did baseline scans in between each test then did about a dozen tests. If you are at all claustrophobic (which I’m not) then I don’t recommend ever volunteering for something like this. MRI machines are LOUD. This particular machine had a tendency to go wocka wocka wocka wocka and bzzzzt bzzzzt a lot.
After about an hour of testing, I got unstrapped from the table and went back to see the scans. The researcher I worked for pointed to one of the images and said “We have good news. We found a brain.” Uh, thanks.
I got to keep some images of my brain as a souvenir, which I thought was nice.