Patricia Churchland’s Brain

Hanna Damasio at the Dornsife NeuroImaging Center at University of Southern California took images of Pat’s brain in the Magnetic Resonance scanner for her research, using fast and slow time scales. The surface hills and valleys (grey scale) are the result of fast images, but it takes longer to amass the data for the underlying pathways (colors), so they are the result of the longer imaging time. By interleaving the two kinds images, Dr. Damasio faded the grey little by little and intensified little by little the colors of the major underlying pathways. Thus looking at the sequence, it as though you were gradually seeing more and more through an increasingly transparent cortex. Red signifies fibers running between right and left hemispheres, blue means fibre are ascending or descending, and green represents front-to-back or back-to-front.