[olsen]

MRI scanners change brain activity
Changing what is observed: it has long been assumed that MRI scans do not affect the brain, but a new study shows glucose metabolism decreases proportionally with field strength.
Volkow et al. 2010 Neuroimage.

"Changes Clinical Practice: One should no longer assume that the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner does not directly change brain activity while imaging.
This is a massively important paper as the authors have asked the most simple question: does the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner itself and the gradient switching cause changes in brain activity? It is amazing that there are hundreds of thousands of papers using MRI to image and investigate the brain and none has bothered to ask whether the imaging tool (MRI) changes what is being imaged. It turns out that it does. This has enormous implications for safety and for potentially creating a new generation of combined stimulators/scanners..."

http://f1000medicine.com/article/lrq...39h/id/3202958

[paula_w]

The horse goes first! Not the cart! Repeat - it's the horse before the cart.

[Bob Dawson]

Curses! I figured as much. " In terms of safety, we can no longer assume that MRI does not affect the brain."
I have spent more time in them-there fancy MRI machines than anybody that anybody knows; says in my waiver that the hours I spend in the tube are beyond the manufacturers testing for safety. Which i don't see how they could measure anyway.
It tires me out and makes me reasonably crazy for a few hours, but other than that it is cool. In the MRI tube, face covered by plexiglass helmet, video-game / card game projected onto the face guard of the helmet, inches in front of my face; i lie there on my back, unable to move, with a joy stick in each hand, and i play against the computer. I learn the rules of the game and get really good and start beating the computer.
Then, without warning me, the computer changes the rules of the game. Red no longer goes on blue, square black can no longer be matched up with round white; the weapons i had to survive no longer work, the computer is speeding up the game, I am losing on every move; everything that i knew 5 minutes ago is no longer true; my winning moves cause me to lose; everything I relied on has turned against me... then gradually i start to see the patterns and i start winning again and then without warning the computer changes all the rules again. I come out drenched in sweat.

The MRI takes "pictures" of the activity in my brain, especially in those crucial seconds when all that i knew turns out to no longer be of any help; when everything that allowed me to win has turned against me.
I am the MRI king !
But i have been in 3 clinical trials - joined only after they agreed or pretended to agree with me that the Amgen GDNF experiments conducted on the living brains of the 48 Parkinson's volunteers were fundamentally criminal and members of my Parkinson's group will not join any PD experiments unless the managers of the clinical trial agree that manslaughter is not the best corporate policy, not even in the Bio-Pharma empire, or in the Parkinson's Cartel, and Amgen made a permanent strategic error in treating the Parkinson's volunteers as low-cost monkeys.
But i have also told some of the groups that i cannot do it any more. at least not all of that. Does hours of having reality changed in a computerized projection in an MRI affect my brain? Temporarily for sure. Well duh. One day i was in the MRI system getting zapped, then i started a new experiment that takes me 2 hours a day and as they wanted to test me when I was "off", i had taken no drugs so i took them as i left the hospital.
To summarize eventful afternoon:
- MRI video - card - games, gambling with cards and shapes and weapons, against computer that changes the rules whenever i am winning. MRI blasts my brain everytime i react to all the truth being wrong and all I knew 5 minutes ago has now disappeared
- New 2 hour per day training experiment, (not in MRI), trying to go very deep inside, non-verbal, to re-connect mind and muscle
- On leaving the hospital, swallowed sinemet, mirapex and selegilene; 3 brain-altering chemicals poured into the part of my brain where 85 - 90% of my brain cells are already dead....
and
- then i went to the office. Duh.

Did not stay long. They had changed the meaning of all the words. The words were all in English, but the meanings had all been changed, scrambled. "Chair" no longer meant "chair". A "Chair" was now an apple, or something like that - i don't remember all their vocabulary. Apple meant fish.
Someone in the office said to me something like "Fiscal grasslands, open area Tuesdays, gone asphalt and provision." At first it sounded like a clever joke. They had changed all the rules, just like the disease can do, just like the games in the MRI space-age tube. But it was very sinister. Brilliant but sinister. They took the time and effort to re-do the entire English language. To keep me out. They could speak and i could never understand them and i could not get through to them because i spoke English the old way, which they had already thrown away. They had changed the language so that only they could communicate.
.... So i told the MRI folks enough is enough. I already gave. I can't do that anymore. Let the new wave of diagnosed Parkies take up the fight. I will continue my 2 hour a day peaceful experiment, but the computer wars inside the space machine and getting my brain constantly zapped... i stopped all that. And it was not long before the people in the office abandoned their project to turn English into a nightmare maze of changed definitions. Turns out that wasn't true either. Unless they change the rules again.
MRI games were fun, and like the Matrix or Star Trek movies. Mind-blowing for sure. But blowing my mind was not exactly what i was needing at the time. Anyway, I hear they got a great bunch of pictures of my brain under siege. I did as much as i could. But i had to back away. Take note: I did not turn and run. But i backed away, quietly.
Next! Next!