Scan Image Quotes

Studies have found that the same areas in the brain that light up in imaging scans when we break a leg are activated when we split up with our mate. As part of a reaction to a breakup, our brain experiences the departure of an attachment figure in a similar way to that in which it registers physical pain.

The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers.[…]They scrutinize the small print on packages, wary of a second level of betrayal. The men scan for stamped dates, the women for ingredients. Many have trouble making out the words. Smeared print, ghost images. In the altered shelves, the ambient roar, in the plain and heartless fact of their decline, they try to work their way through confusion. But in the end it doesn’t matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of our age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.

There is a strange emptiness to life without myths. I am African American — by which I mean, a descendant of slaves, rather than a descendant of immigrants who came here willingly and with lives more or less intact. My ancestors were the unwilling, unintact ones: children torn from parents, parents torn from elders, people torn from roots, stories torn from language. Past a certain point, my family’s history just… stops. As if there was nothing there. I could do what others have done, and attempt to reconstruct this lost past. I could research genealogy and genetics, search for the traces of myself in moldering old sale documents and scanned images on microfiche. I could also do what members of other cultures lacking myths have done: steal. A little BS about Atlantis here, some appropriation of other cultures’ intellectual property there, and bam! Instant historically-justified superiority. Worked great for the Nazis, new and old. Even today, white people in my neck of the woods call themselves “Caucasian”, most of them little realizing that the term and its history are as constructed as anything sold in the fantasy section of a bookstore. These are proven strategies, but I have no interest in them. They’ll tell me where I came from, but not what I really want to know: where I’m going. To figure that out, I make shit up.

I'd like to pay your palms the same favor that you pay these pages, searching them for grooves and images and the secret signs of hunger, as you may scan these words for hidden messages. The lines of your hand might be a guide to your gifts for pleasure, or a clue to where you'll take me, or a map of where I might take you.

A Princeton University scholar, Susan Fiske, has used scans to show that the brains of high-achieving people see images of poor people and process them as if they were not humans but things.

A KING WHO PLACED MIRRORS IN HIS PALACE There lived a king; his comeliness was such The world could not acclaim his charm too much. The world's wealth seemed a portion of his grace; It was a miracle to view his face. If he had rivals,then I know of none; The earth resounded with this paragon. When riding through his streets he did not fail To hide his features with a scarlet veil. Whoever scanned the veil would lose his head; Whoever spoke his name was left for dead, The tongue ripped from his mouth; whoever thrilled With passion for this king was quickly killed. A thousand for his love expired each day, And those who saw his face, in blank dismay Would rave and grieve and mourn their lives away- To die for love of that bewitching sight Was worth a hundred lives without his light. None could survive his absence patiently, None could endure this king's proximity- How strange it was that man could neither brook The presence nor the absence of his look! Since few could bear his sight, they were content To hear the king in sober argument, But while they listened they endure such pain As made them long to see their king again. The king commanded mirrors to be placed About the palace walls, and when he faced Their polished surfaces his image shone With mitigated splendour to the throne. If you would glimpse the beauty we revere Look in your heart-its image will appear. Make of your heart a looking-glass and see Reflected there the Friend's nobility; Your sovereign's glory will illuminate The palace where he reigns in proper state. Search for this king within your heart; His soul Reveals itself in atoms of the Whole. The multitude of forms that masquerade Throughout the world spring from the Simorgh's shade. If you catch sight of His magnificence It is His shadow that beguiles your glance; The Simorgh's shadow and Himself are one; Seek them together, twinned in unison. But you are lost in vague uncertainty... Pass beyond shadows to Reality. How can you reach the Simorgh's splendid court? First find its gateway, and the sun, long-sought, Erupts through clouds; when victory is won, Your sight knows nothing but the blinding sun.

The surface of my “slow art” is prismatic, so at first glance the malachite surface looks green. But if the eye is allowed to linger on the surface—it usually takes ten minutes for the eye to adjust—the observer can begin to see the rainbow created by layer upon layer of broken shards of minerals. Such a contemplative experience can be a deep sensory journey toward wisdom. Willingness to spend time truly seeing can change how we view the world, moving us away from our fast-food culture of superficially scanning what we see and becoming surfeited with images that do not delve below the surface.

Our linguistic and cultural environments don’t determine only which brain systems are involved in language processing but also how facial expressions are interpreted and how we scan images and their surroundings. Japanese and New Guineans, for instance, find it difficult to distinguish between a face expressing fear and a face expressing surprise.

A structure located in the left and right sides of the brain, called the amygdala—a key hot spot for triggering strong emotions such as anger and rage, and linked to the fight-or-flight response—showed well over a 60 percent amplification in emotional reactivity in the participants who were sleep-deprived. In contrast, the brain scans of those individuals who were given a full night’s sleep evinced a controlled, modest degree of reactivity in the amygdala, despite viewing the very same images. It was as though, without sleep, our brain reverts to a primitive pattern of uncontrolled reactivity. We produce unmetered, inappropriate emotional reactions, and are unable to place events into a broader or considered context.

The individual, floating, but held on a leash like a dog, like an eye popping out of its socket, hanging on the end of its optic nerve, scanning the horizon through 180 degrees but not sending back any images—a disembodied panoptical terminal, runaway organ of a species of mutants.

Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen, to name one such example, used an fMRI scanner to study the brain behavior of subjects presented with both positive and negative imagery. She found that for young people, their amygdala (a center of emotion) fired with activity at both types of imagery. When she instead scanned the elderly, the amygdala fired only for the positive images. Carstensen hypothesizes that the elderly subjects had trained the prefrontal cortex to inhibit the amygdala in the presence of negative stimuli. These elderly subjects were not happier because their life circumstances were better than those of the young subjects; they were instead happier because they had rewired their brains to ignore the negative and savor the positive. By skillfully managing their attention, they improved their world without changing anything concrete about it.

The impulse to form group identities and favor in-group members has a neurological basis. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), scientists have scanned people’s brains while conducting experiments similar to the one just described. Their findings, as one writer puts it, suggest that: “group identification is both innate and almost immediate.

Back in the early nineties I had heard that some people had begun to divide the world between left-brainers (rational, logical people) and right-brainers (the intuitive, artistic ones), but I hadn’t paid much attention to this idea. However, our scans clearly showed that images of past trauma activate the right hemisphere of the brain and deactivate the left.

For all the tantalizing and provocative character of the Viking results, I know a hundred places on Mars which are far more interesting than our landing sites. The ideal tool is a roving vehicle carrying on advanced experiments, particularly in imaging, chemistry and biology. Prototypes of such rovers are under development by NASA. They know on their own how to go over rocks, how not to fall down ravines, how to get out of tight spots. It is within our capability to land a rover on Mars that could scan its surroundings, see the most interesting place in its field of view and, by the same time tomorrow, be there. Every day a new place, a complex, winding traverse over the varied topography of this appealing planet.

I believe that social media has become a treacherous platform for love interests. Before the Internet invaded our lives, I’m sure that each single person liked a lot of people at one time. Before falling into a committed relationship, there are steps taken to get there. Often, this involves talking to and even dating a few people at once. That’s logical. But with Facebook, your competition is suddenly splattered in your face. All I had to do was click onto Number 23’s profile and scan one after another wall post from ladies who may or may not be his mating potentials or mating pasts. I see their names and faces. When I click onto their photos, I open a Pandora’s box into their lives. I see their friends, professions, achievements, hobbies, and bodies. I evaluate, I compare, and when I’m insecure, I tear apart. I copy, paste, email, and text the images to my friends, so that they can assure me that I’m prettier, smarter, have bigger breasts, clearer skin, have something that would make him a fool to want her over me. Suddenly, I am stalking, letting fits of rage overcome me with violent hatred for these women who I’ve never met.

In one recent experiment, Damasio and his colleagues had subjects listen to stories describing people experiencing physical or psychological pain. The subjects were then put into a magnetic resonance imaging machine and their brains were scanned as they were asked to remember the stories. The experiment revealed that while the human brain reacts very quickly to demonstrations of physical pain-when you see someone injured, the primitive pain centers in your own brain activate almost instantaneously- the more sophisticated mental process of empathizing with psychological suffering unfolds much more slowly. It takes time, the researchers discovered, for the brain "to transcend immediate involvement of the body" and begin to understand and to feel "the psychological and moral dimensions of a situation." (p220)

A film presents images; a book creates them inside the reader, with the reader's active participation. Books are good for your brain. Neurologists have found that, when watching television or film, the viewer's eyes remain idle, straight ahead, but when reading, the actual physical movement of scanning the page from left to right (or right to left, or up and down, depending) stimulates and conditions the brain, a Stairmaster of the mind.

Paul closed his eyes and turned his face to the sun. In spite of everything, it was hard not to take solace from the warmth flooding onto his skin. He stretched the muscles in his arms, his shoulders, his back -- and it felt like he was reaching out from the "self" in his virtual skull to all his mathematical flesh, imprinting the nebulous data with meaning; binding it all together, staking some kind of claim. He felt the stirrings of an erection. Existence was beginning to seduce him. He let himself surrender for a moment to a visceral sense of identity which drowned out all his pale mental images of optical processors, all his abstract reflections on the software's approximations and short-cuts. This body didn't want to evaporate. This body didn't want to bale out. It didn't much care that there was another -- "more real" -- version of itself elsewhere. It wanted to retain its wholeness. It wanted to endure.

advances in AI are poised to drive dramatic productivity increases and perhaps eventually full automation. Radiologists, for example, are trained to interpret the images that result from various medical scans. Image processing and recognition technology is advancing rapidly and may soon be able to usurp the radiologist’s traditional role. Software can already recognize people in photos posted on Facebook and even help identify potential terrorists in airports.

Marius glowered at the long cone-shaped ship with its stupid curving tailfins. His field scan swept out. It was an illusion, produced by a small module on the airlock floor. He smashed a disruptor pulse into the solido projector, and the starship image shivered, shrinking down to a beautiful, naked young girl with blonde hair that hung halfway down her back. ‘Oh, Howard,’ she moaned sensually, running her hands up her body, ‘do that again.’ Marius let out an incoherent cry, and shot the projector again.

They must have been the Supreme Court, or something," Eddie said, uneasily scanning all those thin lips and cracked, empty eyes. "Only judges can look so smart and so completely pissed off at the same time--you're talking to a guy who knows. There isn't one of them who looks like he'd give a crippled crab a crutch." "'A heap of broken images, where the sun beats and the dead tree gives no shelter,'" Susannah murmured, and at these words Eddie felt gooseflesh waltz across the skin of his arms and chest and legs.

The peach was soft and firm, and when I finally succeeded in tearing it apart with my cock, I saw that its reddened core reminded me not just of an anus but of a vagina, so that holding each half in either hand firmly against my cock, I began to rub myself, thinking of no one and of everyone, including the poor peach, which had no idea what was being done to it except that it had to play along and probably in the end took some pleasure in the act as well, till I thought I heard it say to me, Fuck me, Elio, fuck me harder, and after a moment, Harder, I said! while I scanned my mind for images from Ovid—wasn’t there a character who had turned into a peach

The eyes have been used to signify a perverse capacity - honed to perfection in the history of science tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and male supremacy - to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything in the interests of unfettered power. The instruments of visualization in multinationalist, postmodernist culture have compounded these meanings of dis-embodiment. The visualizing technologies are without apparent limit; the eye of any ordinary primate like us can be endlessly enhanced by sonography systems, magnetic resonance imaging, artificial intelligence-linked graphic manipulation systems, scanning electron microscopes, computer-aided tomography scanners, colour enhancement techniques, satellite surveillance systems, home and office VDTs, cameras for every purpose from filming the mucous membrane lining the gut cavity of a marine worm living in the vent gases on a fault between continental plates to mapping a planetary hemisphere elsewhere in the solar system. Vision in this technological feast becomes unregulated gluttony; all perspective gives way to infinitely mobile vision, which no longer seems just mythically about the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere, but to have put the myth into ordinary practice. And like the god-trick, this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters. Zoe Sofoulis (1988) calls this the cannibal-eye of masculinist extra-terrestrial projects for excremental second birthing.

This kind of pragmatism has become a hallmark of our psychological culture. In the mid-1990s, I described how it was commonplace for people to “cycle through” different ideas of the human mind as (to name only a few images) mechanism, spirit, chemistry, and vessel for the soul.14 These days, the cycling through intensifies. We are in much more direct contact with the machine side of mind. People are fitted with a computer chip to help with Parkinson’s. They learn to see their minds as program and hardware. They take antidepressants prescribed by their psychotherapists, confident that the biochemical and oedipal self can be treated in one room. They look for signs of emotion in a brain scan. Old jokes about couples needing “chemistry” turn out not to be jokes at all.

As if all the stories of the contamination of the scientific literature, the waste, the corrosive effect on trust and even the deaths aren’t bad enough, here’s that terrifying thought again: these are just the ones we know about. Could it be that the fraudsters we haven’t caught are smarter, more cunning and more dangerous than any of those covered in this chapter? Many scientific fraudsters, after all, are exposed not by data sleuths or by scanning papers for faked images, but by whistleblowers who just happened to be in the right place at the right time to spot something suspect. It’s overwhelmingly likely that some fraudsters exist who have evaded such detection, who have concealed their misdeeds more effectively and produced fake science that doesn’t raise any questions. It’s entirely possible that we’ll never find them.

Adults can distinguish race from very minimal clues. Stanford researchers showed subjects just the front slices of plain, black profiles—the face from forehead to chin, without the hair. Subjects could tell the race of the profile (80 percent of the time) more often than they could tell the sex (70 percent), or the age within 10 years (68 percent). Race is commonly equated with skin color, but all the profiles were black. It is obviously important for adults to tell the sexes apart, but they were even better at telling races apart. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been used to determine that what is called the fusiform region of the brain may be associated with the other-race effect. The fusiform region is involved in expert appraisal. In a bird-watcher’s brain, for example, the region lights up at the sight of a bird. All people have considerable expertise in recognizing human faces, but MRI scans show greater fusiform activity—expert appraisal activity—when they are looking at faces of their own race.

Although there are no set methods to test for psychiatric disorders like psychopathy, we can determine some facets of a patient’s mental state by studying his brain with imaging techniques like PET (positron emission tomography) and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scanning, as well as genetics, behavioral and psychometric testing, and other pieces of information gathered from a full medical and psychiatric workup. Taken together, these tests can reveal symptoms that might indicate a psychiatric disorder. Since psychiatric disorders are often characterized by more than one symptom, a patient will be diagnosed based on the number and severity of various symptoms. For most disorders, a diagnosis is also classified on a sliding scale—more often called a spectrum—that indicates whether the patient’s case is mild, moderate, or severe. The most common spectrum associated with such disorders is the autism spectrum. At the low end are delayed language learning and narrow interests, and at the high end are strongly repetitive behaviors and an inability to communicate.

Benjamin Munro was his name. She mouthed the syllables silently, Benjamin James Munro, twenty-six years old, late of London. He had no dependents, was a hard worker, a man not given to baseless talk. He'd been born in Sussex and grown up in the Far East, the son of archaeologists. He liked green tea, the scent of jasmine, and hot days that built towards rain. He hadn't told her all of that. He wasn't one of those pompous men who bassooned on about himself and his achievements as if a girl were just a pretty-enough face between a pair of willing ears. Instead, she'd listened and observed and gleaned, and, when the opportunity presented, crept inside the storehouse to check the head gardener's employment book. Alice had always fancied herself a sleuth, and sure enough, pinned behind a page of Mr. Harris's careful planting notes, she'd found Benjamin Munro's application. The letter itself had been brief, written in a hand Mother would have deplored, and Alice had scanned the whole, memorizing the bits, thrilling at the way the words gave depth and color to the image she'd created and been keeping for herself, like a flower pressed between pages. Like the flower he'd given her just last month. "Look, Alice"- the stem had been green and fragile in his broad, strong hand- "the first gardenia of the season.

I wish I didn’t know, absolutely, you sign papers of ours without the reading of them.” “I give them a scan.” Sometimes. “If you fucked me over, I’m a cop. I know how to make you pay without letting it show. Like, the one where I tranq your wine, dress you in a diaper and pasties, get you in your office and transmit the image globally.” “You’ve given this some thought.” “Just in my free time.” She gave his hands a squeeze before drawing hers away and laying them on his cheeks. “Bottom line? She wasn’t wrong to trust a man she loves—because it had to be love. He’s not rich or good-looking or powerful. She just loves the wrong man. I don’t.” “Well now,” he murmured, then leaned in to take her mouth in a soft, slow, sweet kiss. “There’s the one where I coat the inside of all your boxers with a biological that causes your works to develop festering boils.” It made him wince. “Christ Jesus, you obviously have far too much free time.” “I’ve got a whole list,” she said as he opened the front door. “For him, too,” she added, shooting a finger at Summerset. Summerset merely cocked his eyebrows. “No visible injuries once again. We appear to be on a streak.” “For him I have the stick up his ass surgically removed, and without it, his whole body collapses into a puddle of ghoul.” She tossed her coat over the newel post. “You’ll be too busy with festering boils to have him reanimated.

The last refuge of the Self, perhaps, is “physical continuity.” Despite the body’s mercurial nature, it feels like a badge of identity we have carried since the time of our earliest childhood memories. A thought experiment dreamed up in the 1980s by British philosopher Derek Parfit illustrates how important—yet deceiving—this sense of physical continuity is to us.15 He invites us to imagine a future in which the limitations of conventional space travel—of transporting the frail human body to another planet at relatively slow speeds—have been solved by beaming radio waves encoding all the data needed to assemble the passenger to their chosen destination. You step into a machine resembling a photo booth, called a teletransporter, which logs every atom in your body then sends the information at the speed of light to a replicator on Mars, say. This rebuilds your body atom by atom using local stocks of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and so on. Unfortunately, the high energies needed to scan your body with the required precision vaporize it—but that’s okay because the replicator on Mars faithfully reproduces the structure of your brain nerve by nerve, synapse by synapse. You step into the teletransporter, press the green button, and an instant later materialize on Mars and can continue your existence where you left off. The person who steps out of the machine at the other end not only looks just like you, but etched into his or her brain are all your personality traits and memories, right down to the memory of eating breakfast that morning and your last thought before you pressed the green button. If you are a fan of Star Trek, you may be perfectly happy to use this new mode of space travel, since this is more or less what the USS Enterprise’s transporter does when it beams its crew down to alien planets and back up again. But now Parfit asks us to imagine that a few years after you first use the teletransporter comes the announcement that it has been upgraded in such a way that your original body can be scanned without destroying it. You decide to give it a go. You pay the fare, step into the booth, and press the button. Nothing seems to happen, apart from a slight tingling sensation, but you wait patiently and sure enough, forty-five minutes later, an image of your new self pops up on the video link and you spend the next few minutes having a surreal conversation with yourself on Mars. Then comes some bad news. A technician cheerfully informs you that there have been some teething problems with the upgraded teletransporter. The scanning process has irreparably damaged your internal organs, so whereas your replica on Mars is absolutely fine and will carry on your life where you left off, this body here on Earth will die within a few hours. Would you care to accompany her to the mortuary? Now how do you feel? There is no difference in outcome between this scenario and what happened in the old scanner—there will still be one surviving “you”—but now it somehow feels as though it’s the real you facing the horror of imminent annihilation. Parfit nevertheless uses this thought experiment to argue that the only criterion that can rationally be used to judge whether a person has survived is not the physical continuity of a body but “psychological continuity”—having the same memories and personality traits as the most recent version of yourself. Buddhists

We believe that the caregiver’s capacity to observe the moment-to-moment changes in the child’s mental state is critical in the development of mentalizing capacity. The caregiver’s perception of the child as an intentional being lies at the root of sensitive caregiving, which attachment theorists view as the cornerstone of secure attachment (Ainsworth et al. 1978; Bates, Maslin, and Frankel 1985; Belsky and Isabella 1988; Egeland and Farber 1984; Grossmann, Grossmann, Spangler, Suess, and Unzner 1985; Isabella 1993; Isabella and Belsky 1991). Secure attachment, in its turn, provides the psychosocial basis for acquiring an understanding of mind. The secure infant feels safe in making attributions of mental states to account for the behavior of the caregiver. In contrast the avoidant child shuns to some degree the mental state of the other, while the resistant child focuses on its own state of distress, to the exclusion of close intersubjective exchanges. Disorganized infants may represent a special category: hypervigilant of the caregiver’s behavior, they use all cues available for prediction; they may be acutely sensitized to intentional states and thus may be more ready to construct a mentalized account of the caregiver’s behavior. We would argue (see below) that in such children mentalization may be evident, but it does not have the central role in self-organization that characterizes securely attached children. We believe that what is most important for the development of mentalizing self-organization is the exploration of the mental state of the sensitive caregiver, which enables the child to find in the caregiver’s mind (that is, in the hypothetical representation of her mind that he constructs to explain her behavior toward him) an image of himself as motivated by beliefs, feelings, and intentions. In contrast, what the disorganized child is scanning for so intently is not the representation of his own mental states in the mind of the other, but the mental states of that other that threaten to undermine his own self.

Jamie guessed he wasn’t sure if calling it a homeless shelter when it was filled with homeless people was somehow offensive. He’d had two complaints lodged against him in the last twelve months alone for the use of ‘inappropriate’ language. Roper was a fossil, stuck in a by-gone age, struggling to stay afloat. He of course wouldn’t have this problem if he bothered to read any of the sensitivity emails HR pinged out. But he didn’t. And now he was on his final warning. Jamie left him to flounder and scanned the crowd and the room for anything amiss.  People were watching them. But not maliciously. Mostly out of a lack of anything else to do. They’d been there overnight by the look of it. Places like this popped up all over the city to let them stay inside on cold nights. The problem was finding a space that would house them. ‘No, not the owner,’ Mary said, sighing. ‘I just rent the space from the council. The ceiling is asbestos, and they can’t use it for anything, won’t get it replaced.’ She shrugged her shoulders so high that they touched the earrings. ‘But these people don’t mind. We’re not eating the stuff, so…’ She laughed a little. Jamie thought it sounded sad. It sort of was. The council wouldn’t let children play in there, wouldn’t let groups rent it, but they were happy to take payment and let the homeless in. It was safe enough for them. She pushed her teeth together and started studying the faded posters on the walls that encouraged conversations about domestic abuse, about drug addiction. From when this place was used. They looked like they were at least a decade old, maybe two. Bits of tape clung to the paint around them, scraps of coloured paper frozen in time, preserving images of long-past birthday parties. There was a meagre stage behind the coffee dispenser, and to the right, a door led into another room. ‘Do you know this boy?’ Roper asked, holding up his phone, showing Mary a photo of Oliver Hammond taken that morning. The officers who arrived on scene had taken it and attached it to the central case file. Roper was just accessing it from there. It showed Oliver’s face at an angle, greyed and bloated from the water.  ‘My God,’ Mary said, throwing a weathered hand to her mouth. It wasn’t easy for people who weren’t exposed to death regularly to stomach seeing something like that.  ‘Ms Cartwright,’ Roper said, leaning a little to his left to look in her eyes as she turned away. ‘Can you identify this person? I know it’s hard—’ ‘Oliver — Ollie, he preferred. Hammond, I think. I can check my files…’ She turned and pointed towards the back room Jamie had spotted. ‘If you want—’ Roper put the phone away.

Recently, brain scans of schizophrenics taken while they were having auditory hallucinations have helped explain this ancient disorder. For example, when we silently talk to ourselves, certain parts of the brain light up on an MRI scan, especially in the temporal lobe (such as in Wernicke’s area). When a schizophrenic hears voices, the very same areas of the brain light up. The brain works hard to construct a consistent narrative, so schizophrenics try to make sense of these unauthorized voices, believing they originate from strange sources, such as Martians secretly beaming thoughts into their brains. Dr. Michael Sweeney of Ohio State writes, “Neurons wired for the sensation of sound fire on their own, like gas-soaked rags igniting spontaneously in a hot, dark garage. In the absence of sights and sounds in the surrounding environment, the schizophrenic’s brain creates a powerful illusion of reality.” Notably, these voices seem to be coming from a third party, who often gives the subject commands, which are mostly mundane but sometimes violent. Meanwhile, the simulation centers in the prefrontal cortex seem to be on automatic pilot, so in a way it’s as though the consciousness of a schizophrenic is running the same sort of simulations we all do, except they’re done without his permission. The person is literally talking to himself without his knowledge. HALLUCINATIONS The mind constantly generates hallucinations of its own, but for the most part they are easily controlled. We see images that don’t exist or hear spurious sounds, for example, so the anterior cingulate cortex is vital to distinguish the real from the manufactured. This part of the brain helps us distinguish between stimuli that are external and those that are internally generated by the mind itself. However, in schizophrenics, it is believed that this system is damaged, so that the person cannot distinguish real from imaginary voices. (The anterior cingulate cortex is vital because it lies in a strategic place, between the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system. The link between these two areas is one of the most important in the brain, since one area governs rational thinking, and the other emotions.) Hallucinations, to some extent, can be created on demand. Hallucinations occur naturally if you place someone in a pitch-black room, an isolation chamber, or a creepy environment with strange noises. These are examples of “our eyes playing tricks on us.” Actually, the brain is tricking itself, internally creating false images, trying to make sense of the world and identify threats. This effect is called “pareidolia.” Every time we look at clouds in the sky, we see images of animals, people, or our favorite cartoon characters. We have no choice. It is hardwired into our brains. In a sense, all images we see, both real and virtual, are hallucinations, because the brain is constantly creating false images to “fill in the gaps.” As we’ve seen, even real images are partly manufactured. But in the mentally ill, regions of the brain such as the anterior cingulate cortex are perhaps damaged, so the brain confuses reality and fantasy.

For all brain tumors, definitive diagnosis can only be made by surgery with pathological examination of tissue. MRI or CT scans or other images may suggest the tumor type, but they are not definitive.

Supermarkets in Denmark have experimented with adding a second bar code to packages of meat that when scanned at a kiosk in the store brings up on a monitor images of the farm where the meat was raised, as well as detailed information on the particular animal’s genetics, feed, medications, slaughter date, etc. Most of the meat in our supermarkets simply couldn’t withstand that degree of transparency; if the bar code on the typical package of pork chops summoned images of the CAFO it came from, and information on the pig’s diet and drug regimen, who could bring themselves to buy it? Our food system depends on consumers’ not knowing much about it beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner. Cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing.

It’s ironic that our nearly three trillion dollar medical system actually has some of the most sophisticated diagnostic equipment available in the world, which detects and measures energies and frequencies in the body. This diagnostic equipment includes devices you probably heard of like MRIs (Magnetic Resonance Imaging), PET scans (Positron Emission Tomography), CAT scans (Computed Axial Tomography), EEGs (Electro encephalograms), EKGs (Electrocardiography), ultrasound devices and more. Our medical system diagnoses the body energetically with modern physics (Quantum Field Theory), and then treats with drugs and surgery (Newtonian Science). What is wrong with this picture? The Book Of Science is Constantly Being Rewritten Nothing is so fatal to the progress of the human mind as to suppose our views of science are ultimate; that there are no new mysteries in nature; that our triumphs are complete; and that there are no new worlds to conquer. —Humphry Davy (from a public lecture given in 1810)

the most sophisticated diagnostic equipment available in the world, which detects and measures energies and frequencies in the body. This diagnostic equipment includes devices you probably heard of like MRIs (Magnetic Resonance Imaging), PET scans (Positron Emission Tomography), CAT scans (Computed Axial Tomography), EEGs (Electro encephalograms), EKGs (Electrocardiography), ultrasound devices and more. Our medical system diagnoses the body energetically with modern physics (Quantum Field Theory), and then treats with drugs and surgery (Newtonian Science). What is wrong with this picture?

a 2007 study attempted to measure if price had any influence on the taste of wine.10 The researchers had study participants sample wine while in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. As the fMRI machine scanned the blood flow in the various regions of their brains, the tasters were informed of the cost of each wine sampled. The sample started with a $5 wine and progressed to a $90 bottle. Interestingly, as the price of the wine increased, so did the participants’ enjoyment of the wine. Not only did they say they enjoyed the wine more but their brain corroborated their feelings, showing higher spikes in the regions associated with pleasure. Little did the study participants realize that they were tasting the same wine each time.

A soft growl echoed in the darkness. Sarah snatched the thermal imaging camera from the row of equipment by the fire. Turning in a slow circle, she scanned the dark trees beyond. Nothing moved. Just as she was taking a few tentative steps through the ferns and thick brush, a branch snapped, making her jump. Another growl pierced the silence.

What the brain is really good at is toggling between mind-absorbing tasks—shifting focus rather than dividing it, then picking up where it left off when it toggles back. So when drivers are messing with cell phones or car stereos or dropped baby bottles, they are not driving. They have toggled, shifting focus and attention from one task to another, sometimes quite rapidly, but never simultaneously. This is the essence of distraction and it’s not limited to staring down at a phone instead of out through the windshield. Brain scans of drivers talking on the phone while staring straight ahead show that activity in the area of the brain that processes moving images decreases by one third or more—hard evidence of a distracted brain. There have been many fatal crashes attributed to this “inattention blindness,” commonly called “tunnel vision.” Drivers talking on cell phones or performing other non-driving tasks can become so focused on the non-driving activity that their brains fail to perceive half the information their eyeballs are receiving from the driving environment. They can appear to be paying attention—the drivers may even think they are paying attention—but they are distracted drivers. This is not a matter of skill or practice or experience. It’s biology. The

Piles of brain imaging studies have shown that volitional processes are associated with increases in energy use in the frontal lobes: "right here," you can say while pointing to the bright spots on the PET scan, volition originates. But the research is mute on the chicken-and-egg question of what's causing what. Does activity in the frontal lobes cause volition, or does volition trigger activity in the frontal lobes? If the former, does the activity occur unbidden, as a mere mechanical resultant, or is it in any sense free? Generally, neuroscientists assume that the brain causes everything in the mind, period-further inquiry into causality is most unwelcome.

Brain scans have shown that high-end brands evoke the same neural response as religious images; that, shocking and lamentable though it may be, an iPod has the same effect as Mother Teresa. Also, the windows displaying these material icons extend from floor to ceiling, completely exposing the bright interiors, and the entrances are wide and doorless, so the instinctive fear of entering an unfamiliar enclosed space is overcome. Inside, young, attractive sales staff approach, seeking eye contact with friendly encouraging smiles, creating the illusion of youth and attractiveness in the shopper. The loud soul music suggests a bar or club where mutual attraction can blossom but, unlike the brutally competitive bars and clubs, here there is no possibility of rejection. Spending money is the easiest orgasm. Open the wallet and flash the bright card.

The digital image is not a physical trace: it’s a conversion of light into data. Unlike a polaroid or carte de visite, a digital photograph can never be an object in and of itself. It dwells inside the screen, only appearing when that screen is “on.” While it seems static to our eyes, it hovers in a state of constant scanning in order to remain perceivable. Within the screen, a boundless, deathless ever-present. But the light is real.

its parent planet. “Well, here we are,” Leira said. “Now what?” Dash curled his lip. “Not really sure. I know this is the right place.” “Yeah. Except there’s nothing here.” “Can you detect anything at all?” Dash asked Sentinel. “I am engaging an active scan, to determine—” Silence. Huh. That was unlike Sentinel, to not finish a thought. Dash opened his mouth to ask if everything was okay, but Sentinel resumed speaking. “The moon is starting to undergo change,” she said. Dash peered at the image. He didn’t see anything—and then he did. “What’s going on?” he asked. “The moon is starting to break apart,” Sentinel replied. Sure enough, fragments spalled away from the central zone, while far larger chunks of rock began to separate. Something else was being revealed—something massive and apparently mechanical, more of which became visible as the moon continued

Controlling images were never just about the object of study—popular culture memes or characters from movies and television shows—but about the process of reproducing structural inequalities in our everyday lives. Social psychologists study how we acknowledge and reproduce status groups like “man,” “woman,” “black,” “white,” “Asian,” “poor,” “rich,” “novice,” and “expert” in routine interactions. These are statuses of people that we recognize as meaningful categories. When we interact with someone, a few things happen. We size up the person we are engaging with, scanning for any risks to our own social status. You don’t want to be the person who mistakes the company president for the janitor, for example. We also scan others’ perception of us. This is how all kinds of impromptu moments of cooperation make our day go smoothly. It’s the guy who sees you struggling to get something on the bus and coordinates the four people around you to help you get on. Or it’s the three women in a fast food line who all grab for a baby’s bottle just before it hits the floor. We cooperate in micromoments and in longer settings like the waiting room of a doctor’s office. And, when we are cooperating with strangers or near strangers, we are using all kinds of ideas about status to make the interaction work to our benefit.

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Stars are completely comprehensible. I could image, map, and analyze one for you within seconds regardless of its astrophysical anomalies. No. Haruspices have a reason and they provide a different state, a way of being that AIs couldn’t before experience, and the human halves are as human as you are. Not that you’d concede the point even if I show you the brain scans to prove it, you quantify the human soul in frankincense and sacrifice. You’re a most infuriating woman.

In 2011, there were over eighty-five million computerized tomography (CT) scans and nineteen million nuclear imaging tests performed in the United States.42 How many of these millions of patients do you think had their radiation dose measured or discussed with them before the scan was performed? The

I blinked, and the world exploded with data. Images, scanned documents and photographs, a whirlwind of numbers, under-the-table deals, and whispered words.

donated skeletal collection; one more skull was just a final drop in the bucket. Megan and Todd Malone, a CT technician in the Radiology Department at UT Medical Center, ran skull 05-01 through the scanner, faceup, in a box that was packed with foam peanuts to hold it steady. Megan FedExed the scans to Quantico, where Diana and Phil Williams ran them through the experimental software. It was with high hopes, shortly after the scan, that I studied the computer screen showing the features ReFace had overlaid, with mathematical precision, atop the CT scan of Maybe-Leoma’s skull. Surely this image, I thought—the fruit of several years of collaboration by computer scientists, forensic artists, and anthropologists—would clearly settle the question of 05-01’s identity: Was she Leoma or was she Not-Leoma? Instead, the image merely amplified the question. The flesh-toned image on the screen—eyes closed, the features impassive—could have been a department-store mannequin, or a sphinx. There was nothing in the image, no matter how I rotated it in three dimensions, that said, “I am Leoma.” Nor was there anything that said, “I am not Leoma.” To borrow Winston Churchill’s famous description of Russia, the masklike face on the screen was “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Between the scan, the software, and the tissue-depth data that the software merged with the

When deeply religious subjects view sacred iconography or reflect on their notion of God, brain scans reveal hyperactivity in the caudate nucleus, a part of the pleasure system that correlates with feelings of joy, love, and serenity. But Lindstrom and Calvert found that this same brain region lights up when subjects view images associated with strong brands like Ferrari or Apple.

study the brain behavior of subjects presented with both positive and negative imagery. She found that for young people, their amygdala (a center of emotion) fired with activity at both types of imagery. When she instead scanned the elderly, the amygdala fired only for the positive images. Carstensen hypothesizes that the elderly subjects had trained the prefrontal cortex to inhibit the amygdala in the presence of negative stimuli. These elderly subjects were not happier because their life circumstances were better than those of the young subjects; they were instead happier because they had rewired their brains to ignore the negative and savor the positive. By skillfully managing their attention, they improved their world without changing anything concrete about

This is, in fact, exactly how electrical engineers go about understanding and debugging circuits such as computer boards (to reverse engineer a competitor’s product, for example), using logic analyzers that visualize computer signals. Neuroscience has not yet had access to sensor technology that would achieve this type of analysis, but that situation is about to change. Our tools for peering into our brains are improving at an exponential pace. The resolution of noninvasive brain-scanning devices is doubling about every twelve months (per unit volume).31 We see comparable improvements in the speed of brain scanning image reconstruction:

Day 2 Dear Jesus, My heart delights in Your invitation to live this day as a sacred adventure. You are my King of kings, and I long to live in a manner that displays my adoption into Your royal family. You are also my Lord of lords, so anything shared with You is sacred. I admit, though, that my mind is often preoccupied with ordinary matters and concerns. When a new day stands open before me, I scan it for difficulties that may occur, wondering if I’ll be able to cope. This is the natural bent of my mind: an earth-bound focus. BELOVED, IT IS NATURAL FOR YOUR MIND TO BE DRAWN toward mundane matters. But you are capable of so much more than that! I created you in My own image, with incredible abilities given only to mankind. When you became a believer, I infused My Spirit into your innermost being. The combination of My image and My Spirit in you is powerful—making you fit for greatness. I want you to begin each day viewing yourself as a chosen warrior, ready to go into battle. Of course, there will be difficulties, but they need not be your focus. Put on the full armor I have provided, and you will be ready for whatever battles you have to fight. When you are engaged in combat, keep looking to Me for strength and guidance. Remember that you and I together can handle whatever difficulties come your way. Abandon yourself to the challenges I have chosen for you. Then you will find your days increasingly devoted to sacred adventures shared with Me—your King! God, the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see. To him be honor and might forever. Amen. 1 Timothy 6:15–16 And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you. Romans 8:11 Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Ephesians 6:13 —from Dear Jesus

However, our scans clearly showed that images of past trauma activate the right hemisphere of the brain and deactivate the left.

From its earliest days, scanning EM proved to be a source of images that everybody could relate to, regardless of a microscopic or indeed even a scientific background. From early images showing great detail of everyday objects and animals, for example the edge of a scalpel or razor blade or the multiple compound eyes of a spider, the extra information provided by the high magnification was instantly apparent, grasping the attention of the general public in a way that transmission EM images did not (Figure 19). Today, images of bacteria, stem cells, and tumour cells are a regular sight in TV news, documentaries, newspapers, and magazines, usually brightly coloured. False or pseudo-colouring of scanning EM images is useful for highlighting specific features, as well as increasing the overall impact, which can sometimes be a little on the garish side.

The Bale Doneen method allows for a complete genetic and blood serum testing package that will look at markers of inflammation, glucose, insulin, lipo protein, cholesterol particle size paired with genetic propensities. Check for arterial plaque. A coronary calcium scan, is a non-invasive, low-radiation imaging test, identifies calcified plaque buildup in the arteries of the heart. A blood test for C-reactive protein indicates inflammation. A blood test for the hormone NT-proBNP indicates stress on the heart. A blood test for high-sensitivity troponin T indicates damage to heart muscle. Troponin testing is regularly used by hospitals to diagnose heart attacks, but high-sensitivity troponin fine-tunes that measure, pointing to small amounts of damage that can be detected in individuals without any symptoms or warning signs.

For instance, brain scans using fMRI technology have shown that people who are more mindful are less reactive to scary or threatening images, as measured by amygdala activation (the reptilian part of our brain responsible for the fight-or-flight response).

the world between left-brainers (rational, logical people) and right-brainers (the intuitive, artistic ones), but I hadn’t paid much attention to this idea. However, our scans clearly showed that images of past trauma activate the right hemisphere of the brain and deactivate the left. We now know that the two halves of the brain do speak different languages. The right is intuitive, emotional, visual, spatial, and tactual, and the left is linguistic, sequential, and analytical. While the left half of the brain does all the talking, the right half of the brain carries the music of experience. It communicates through facial expressions and body language and by making the sounds of love and sorrow: by singing, swearing, crying, dancing, or mimicking. The right brain is the first to develop in the womb, and it carries the nonverbal

Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) solution that uses machine learning to find and extract insights and relationships from documents. •​Amazon Forecast combines your historical data with other variables, such as weather, to forecast outcomes. •​Amazon Kendra is an intelligent search service powered by machine learning. •​Amazon Lex is a solution for building conversational interfaces that can understand user intent and enable humanlike interactions. •​Amazon Lookout for Metrics detects and diagnoses anomalies in business and marketing data, such as unexpected drops in sales or unusual spikes in customer churn rates. •​Amazon Personalize powers personalized recommendations using the same machine-learning technology as Amazon.com. •​Amazon Polly converts text into natural-sounding speech, enabling you to create applications that talk. •​Amazon Rekognition makes it possible to identify objects, people, text, scenes, and activities in images and videos. •​Amazon Textract automatically reads and processes scanned documents to extract text, handwriting, tables, and data. •​Amazon Transcribe converts speech to text. •​Amazon Translate uses deep-learning models to deliver accurate, natural-sounding translation.

Welcome to Semwal Diagnostics! It is your professional radiography centre, and our mission is to deliver quality service in a convenient location. As a result, we established Semwal Diagnostics, a one-stop centre for CT Scans, Ultrasounds, OPG, Colour Doppler imaging, ECG and digital X-rays, as well as added value services.

The long view of motherhood sees far beyond the third trimester, potty training, and even high school graduation. The long view of motherhood scans the horizon of eternity. We understand that our child may one day be our brother or sister in Christ. We mothers always need to have the long view of life in our minds as we go about our days. God is about his work of creating people who are created and recreated in the image of his Son. We are part of the new humanity, a people whose pattern of life is being transformed by God so that we no longer walk in ways that enslave us in death and futility. The world will one day be filled with the glory of the Lord the way the waters cover the sea! In all our mothering, we look toward that day.

Excess cholesterol in the blood can lead to excess cholesterol in the brain, which may then help trigger the clumping of amyloid seen in Alzheimer’s brains. Under an electron microscope, we can see the clustering of amyloid fibers on and around tiny crystals of cholesterol.85 And indeed, advanced brain imaging techniques, such as PET scans, have shown a direct correlation between the amount of LDL (“bad”) cholesterol in the blood and amyloid buildup in the brain.

For many men, just seeing a woman in a sexually objectifying pose, such as in a bikini, deactivates the part of the brain’s prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain where thinking about people and their intentions, feelings, and actions happens. Instead, the region of the brain that lights up on imaging scans, for example positron emission tomography (PET), is the one that reacts to looking at inanimate objects, such as a pen or a ball. In what researcher Susan Fiske described as a “shocking finding,” in some of the men studied the part of the brain that is activated when thinking of another person’s intentions did not light up at all. It should come as no surprise that the more prone a man is to seeing women in these ways, the higher his measures of hostile sexism.

Laura Carstensen, to name one such example, used an fMRI scanner to study the brain behavior of subjects presented with both positive and negative imagery. She found that for young people, their amygdala (a center of emotion) fired with activity at both types of imagery. When she instead scanned the elderly, the amygdala fired only for the positive images. Carstensen hypothesizes that the elderly subjects had trained the prefrontal cortex to inhibit the amygdala in the presence of negative stimuli. These elderly subjects were not happier because their life circumstances were better than those of the young subjects; they were instead happier because they had rewired their brains to ignore the negative and savor the positive. By skillfully managing their attention, they improved their world without changing anything concrete about it.

At several hundred dollars instead of a few thousand, retinal imaging is much less expensive than amyloid PET scans of the brain. It also identifies much smaller plaques, which may be more accurate sentinels of treatment effects, and also has the potential to reveal whether the amyloid affects the retina’s blood vessels (and by extension, likely the brain’s as well) in addition to the neurons and synapses themselves. This

Researchers looked at magnetic resonance images of the brains of people who described themselves as newly in love. They were shown a photograph of their beloveds while their brains were scanned for activity. The scan showed the same reward systems being activated as in the brains of addicts given a drug

After the shoplifting incident, the Shinola store gave a copy of its surveillance video to the Detroit police. Five months later, a digital image examiner for the Michigan State Police looked at the grainy, poorly lit surveillance video on her computer and took a screen shot.2 She uploaded it to the facial recognition software the police used: a $5.5 million program supplied by DataWorks Plus, a South Carolina firm founded in 2000 that began selling facial recognition software developed by outside vendors in 2005. The system accepted the photo; scanned the image for shapes, indicating eyes, nose, and mouth; and set markers at the edges of each shape. Then, it measured the distance between the markers and stored that information. Next, it checked the measurements against the State Network of Agency Photos (SNAP) database, which includes mug shots, sex offender registry photographs, driver’s license photos, and state ID photos. To give an idea of the scale, in 2017, this database had 8 million criminal photos and 32 million DMV photos. Almost every Michigan adult was represented in the database.

was exploring something called Decoded Neurofeedback. It resembled old-fashioned biofeedback, but with neural imaging for real-time, AI-mediated feedback. A first group of subjects—the “targets”—entered emotional states in response to external prompts, while researchers scanned relevant regions of their brains using fMRI. The researchers then scanned the same brain regions of a second group of subjects—the “trainees”—in real time. AI monitored the neural activity and sent auditory and visual cues to steer the trainees toward the targets’ prerecorded neural states. In this way, the trainees learned to approximate the patterns of excitation in the targets’ brains, and, remarkably, began to report having similar emotions. The technique dated back to 2011, and it claimed some impressive early results. Teams in Boston and Japan taught trainees to solve visual puzzles faster, simply by training them on the visual cortex patterns of targets who’d learned the puzzles by trial and error. Other experimenters recorded the visual fields of target subjects exposed to the color red. Trainees who learned, through feedback, to approximate that same neural activity reported seeing red in their mind’s eye. Since those days, the field had shifted from visual learning to emotional conditioning. The big grant money was going to desensitizing people with PTSD. DecNef and Connectivity Feedback were being touted as treatments to all kinds of psychiatric disorders. Marty Currier worked on clinical applications. But he was also pursuing

Archer handed me his phone by way of explanation. It took me a minute to work out what I was looking at, then I recognized it as an assortment of trash all laid out on a table. I flipped to the next image and found a close-up of a crumpled receipt. My eyes scanned the details, then I swallowed heavily. "Is this..." My voice cracked, my fear getting the better of me. "Where was this found?

When it comes to medical diagnostics, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) plays a vital role in helping doctors detect and treat various health conditions. However, the cost of an MRI scan can often be a concern for many individuals. In this article, we will explore the MRI cost in Gurgaon and how Sanar Care offers affordable imaging solutions without compromising on quality.

Brain experts have recently found a way to capture 3-D images of a vision, like a hologram. The procedure, called PET (positron-emission tomography), is performed by injecting glucose into the bloodstream whose carbon molecules have been tagged with radioisotopes. Glucose is the only food in the brain that it uses much more quickly than ordinary tissues. Consequently, when the injected glucose reaches the brain, its carbon marker molecules can be picked out as the brain uses them, and thus pictured on a monitor in three dimensions, much the same way a CAT scan is made. Watching these marker molecules change as the brain thinks, scientists saw that each distinct experience in the mind universe — such as a sense of discomfort or a clear memory — triggers a new chemical pattern in the brain, not just at one location, but at many locations. For every thought, the image looks different, and if one could extend the portrait to be full-length, there's no doubt that the entire body changes at the same time, thanks to the cascades of neurotransmitters and related messenger molecules.

Our minds have a vast capacity for healing through images. Whether we’re imagining a scene of forgiveness, comfort, or letting go, or simply visualizing a loved one, images can profoundly settle into our bodies and sink into our minds. In my work, I’ve found that helping people to unearth the image that most resonates with them is the cornerstone of healing. The notion of the healing power of images was valid long before brain scans could prove it. More than a hundred years ago, the poet William Butler Yeats wrote that “wisdom first speaks through images,” and that if we just allow ourselves to be guided by the image that lives inside us, our souls will become “simple as flame” and our bodies will become “quiet as an agate lamp.” In 1913, Carl Jung coined the term active imagination, a technique that uses images (often from a dream) to enter into a dialogue with the unconscious mind, bringing to light what has been shrouded in darkness. Recently, the idea of visualization for healing has gained widespread traction, with guided imagery programs readily available to lower stress, reduce anxiety, boost athletic performance, and help with specific fears and phobias.

leave people vulnerable to mental illness later in life. Recent studies have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), or brain scans, to discover specific changes in certain areas of what’s called the hippocampus in the brains of young adults who have experienced abuse.

Images began scrolling. Crime scene photos. Scanned newspaper clippings. Pictures of flipped cars and fire-gutted buildings. Obituaries. Autopsy reports. Each item related to an accident or crime. I paused the slideshow to scan several articles. Detected the theme. Every crime was unsolved. Every accident was freakish and unexplained. Many incidents had numerous victims. Some were grisly. All were terrible. One after another the entries flashed on-screen. A few settings were identifiable. Seattle. New York City. Las Vegas. The majority were unrecognizable. Shelton turned to me. “So what, he’s into police reports? Disaster stories?” “They’re his work.” My stomach churned with revulsion. “Everything on here. This must be the Gamemaster’s private archive. A diary of his twisted games.” “Trophies.” Hi’s voice was hushed. “His collection. Every serial killer has one.” Ben’s fist slammed the coffee table. “I’ll kill this sick freak!” Suddenly the screen went blank. There were sounds like a videogame, then a new program opened. The Gamemaster’s face appeared. “Hello, Tory.” He smiled. “Welcome to my humble home.

Flegr told me he himself had just completed a study on the same topic that exploited brain-imaging technology not available in Jírovec’s day. When we were seated again in his office, he handed me a copy of the newly published paper. Only forty-four people with schizophrenia participated in the trial, but small as it was, there was nothing ambiguous about the results. Based on MRI scans, twelve of them had missing gray matter in parts of their cerebral cortex—a puzzling but not uncommon feature of the disease—and they alone had the parasite. I shot him a raised-eyebrow look that said Yikes! and he replied, “Jiří had the same response.

Studies have found that the same areas in the brain that light up in imaging scans when we break a leg are activated when we split up with our mate.

I was born to an unwed female in a settlement that makes Windhaven look like a tolerant, welcoming paradise. She was shunned for bearing a child out of wedlock, and forced to give birth to me alone in a tent in the dead of winter.' Horror lurched through her. She'd known Cassian was low-born, but that level of cruelty because of it... 'What of your father?' 'You mean the piece of shit who forced himself on her and then went back to his wife and family?' Cassian let out a cold laugh that she rarely heard. 'There were no consequences for him.' 'There never are,' Nesta said coolly. She blocked out the image of Tomas's face. 'There are here,' Cassian growled, as if he sensed the direction of her thoughts. Cassian gestured to the city below, hidden by the mountain and the House blocking the view. 'Rhys changed the laws here in the Night Court, and in Illyria.' His face hardened further. 'But it still requires the survivor to come forward. And in places like Illyria, they make life a living hell for any female who does. They seem it a betrayal.' 'That's outrageous.' 'We're all Fae. Forget the High Fae or Lesser Fae bullshit. We're all immortal or close to it. Change comes slowly for us. What humans accomplish in decades takes us centuries. Longer, if you live in Illyria.' 'Then why do you bother with the Illyrians?' 'Because I fought like hell to prove my worth to them.' His eyes glittered. 'To prove that my mother brought some good into this world.' 'Where is she now?' He'd never spoken of her. His eyes shuttered in a way she had not witnessed before. 'I was taken away from her when I was three. Thrown out into the snow. And in her so-called disgraced state, she became prey to other monsters.' Nesta's stomach twisted with each word. 'She did their backbreaking labour until she died, alone and...' His throat worked. 'I was at Windhaven by then. I wasn't strong enough to return to help her. To bring her somewhere safe. Rhys wasn't yet High Lord, and none of us could do anything.' ... 'It's a story for another time. But what I meant to try to explain is that through it all, through every awful thing, the training centred me. Guided me. When I had a shit day, when I was spat on or pummelled or shunned, when I led armies and lost good warriors, when Rhys was taken by Amarantha- through all of that, the training remained. You said the other day the breathing helped you. It helps me, too. It helped Feyre.' She watched the wall rise in his eyes, word after word. As if he waited for her to rip it down. Rip him down. 'Make of that what you will, but it's true.' Oily shame slithered through her. She'd done that- brought this level of defensiveness in him. Heaviness weighed on her. Started gnawing on her insides. So Nesta said, 'Show me another set of movements.' Cassian scanned her face for a heartbeat, his gaze still shuttered, and began his next demonstration.

Neurotic guilt scans the horizons of the past relentlessly seeking out the most deplorable, hideous, and culpable acts which are least consistent with one's self image. This process is similar to the infinite passion of intensified anxiety for seeking the worst conceivable possibilities in order to alert the whole organism to potential danger.

Suggestions were given on how to promote mental flexibility. Included were the following: Try to identify with the central person, object, or process in the center of the problem. See how the problem looks from this vantage point. Try to “see” the solution—to visualize how various parts might work together, how a certain situation will work out. Scan rapidly through a large number of possible solutions, ideas, and data. The “right” solution will often appear with a sort of intuitive “knowing” that it is the answer. You will also find that you can be simultaneously aware of an uncommonly large number of ideas or pieces of data processes simultaneously. You will be able to step back from the problem and see it in a new perspective, in more basic terms. Since there is much less of yourself invested than in your prior trials, you will be able to abandon previously tried approaches and start afresh. Above all, don’t be timid about asking for answers. If you want to see the solution in a three-dimensional image, or to project yourself forward in time, or to view some microscopic physical process or something not visible to the physical eye, or to reexperience some event out of the past, by all means do so. Ask. Don’t let your questions be limited by your notion of what can or cannot be done.

A brief look at the role of tested building blocks in technical innovations will help us understand the role of building blocks in the specific case of rule innovation. A scan of history shows that technical innovations almost always arise as a particular combination of well-known building blocks. Take two technological innovations that have revolutionized twentieth-century society, the internal combustion engine and the digital computer. The internal combustion engine combines Volta's sparking device, Venturi's (perfume) sprayer, a water pump's pistons, a mill's gear wheels, and so on. The first digital computers combined Geiger's particle counter, the persistence (slow fade) of cathode ray tube images, the use of wires to direct electrical currents, and so on. In both cases most of the building blocks were already in use, in different contexts, in the nineteenth century. It was the specific combination, among the great number possible, that provided the innovation. When a new building block is discovered, the result is usually a range of innovations. The transistor revolutionized devices ranging from major appliances to portable radios and computers. Even new building blocks are often derived, at least in part, by combining more elementary building blocks. Transistors were founded on knowledge of selenium rectifiers and semiconductors.

neurochemically, obsessive-compulsive disorder bears a conspicuous resemblance to falling in love. Scientists have scanned the brains of the pathologically obsessive and held them up next to brain scans of the love-struck, and the images turned colors in the same places. Doctors drew blood and found the same chemical imbalances—namely, a serotonin deficit.

The anesthesiologist had a point. Magnetic resonance imaging equipment surrounding the patient’s head provided three hundred and sixty degree visibility of the entire lower brain cavity. The delicate depression known as Turk’s Saddle, which housed the pituitary gland, was clearly visible on a bank of monitors mere inches from Rick’s keenly scanning eyes. And the tiny flexible penlight snaked carefully up the boy’s left nostril into the sphenoidal sinus gave an unmistakable close-up view of the organ in question.

Superconductivity, since it was quantized, meaning that only discrete bundles of energy exist as opposed to a continuous flow, has not waned in importance. Once Cooper, Bardeen, and Schrieffer figured out how superconductivity worked, others were able to find useful applications for it. Superconductivity is at the heart of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-medical scans used to probe anatomical form and function. Some situations, such as tests for tumors, require far more precision than an X-ray scan. Strong and uniform magnetic fields are needed. The efficient electric currents in a superconductor generate the large magnetic fields, which optimize the MRI scanning operation.

Vertebral Fracture Assessment (VFA) This assessment is not typically ordered unless you have had a fracture or you have been diagnosed with osteoporosis. There are additional pages that are included with the VFA report and you can request a full copy of those pages as well. The most important scan page is the one you see here with the full spine images. The densitometrist will assess the images and check to see if you have any fractures in your spine. More information on this study can be found in Chapter 3.

The role of endorphins in human feelings was illustrated by an imaging study of fourteen healthy women volunteers. Their brains were scanned while they were in a neutral emotional state and then again when they were asked to think of an unhappy event in their lives. Ten of them recalled the death of a loved one, three remembered breakups with boyfriends and one focused on a recent argument with a close friend. Using a special tracer chemical, the scan highlighted the activity of opioid receptors in the emotional centres of each participant’s brain. While the women were under the spell of sad memories, these receptors were much less active.6 On the other hand, positive expectations turn on the endorphin system. Scientists have observed, for example, that when people expect relief from pain, the activity of opioid receptors will increase. Even the administration of inert medications—substances that do not have direct physical activity—will light up opioid receptors, leading to decreased pain perception.7 This is the so-called “placebo effect,” which, far from being imaginary, is a genuine physiological event. The medication may be inert, but the brain is soothed by its own painkillers, the endorphins.

And it’s in the cortex—the ACC and elsewhere—that opiates help us endure pain by reducing not its physical but its emotional impact. A recent imaging study showed that the ACC also “lights up” when people feel the pain of social rejection.11 The brains of healthy adult volunteers were scanned as they were mentally participating in a game and then suddenly “excluded.” Even this mild and obviously artificial “rejection” lit up the ACC and caused feelings of hurt. In other words, we “feel” physical and emotional pain in the same part of the brain—and that, in turn, is crucial to our bonding with others who are important to us.

This was the first study ever to show that cognitive-behavior therapy—or, indeed, any psychiatric treatment that did not rely on drugs—has the power to change faulty brain chemistry in a well-identified brain circuit. What’s more, the therapy had been self-directed, something that was and to a great extent remains anathema to psychology and psychiatry. The changes we detected on PET scans were the kind that neuropsychiatrists might see in patients being treated with powerful mind-altering drugs. We had demonstrated such changes in patients who had, not to put too fine a point on it, changed the way they thought about their thoughts. Self-directed therapy had dramatically and significantly altered brain function. There are now a wealth of brain imaging data supporting the notion that the sort of willful cognitive shift achieved during Refocusing through mindful awareness brings about important changes in brain circuitry as we will see in later chapters.

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Next identify the key trigger words, that is, words that jump out at you as you scan the book. The author uses them again and again because they represent key facets of the book’s theme. In The Einstein Factor, such terms as “Image Streaming,” “Squelcher,” and “Feedback Loop” will have jumped out at you. Find out precisely what the trigger words mean, and you will understand the book.

I’m not seeing any kids lurking around the Black Dock, either,” Ithan muttered, scanning the results. He twisted to Bryce. “No sign of Emile at all.” Ruhn asked, “Possible the kid took another way over? Maybe Danika found some sort of back door into the Bone Quarter.” “Not possible,” Athalar said. “Only one way in, one way out.” Ruhn bristled. “That’s what we’ve been taught, but has anyone ever tried to get in some other way?” Athalar snorted. “Why would they want to?” Ruhn glared at the angel but said, “Fair enough.” Ithan stopped on an image. “What about this one? He didn’t take a boat over, just appeared from within the city—” “That’s the one,” Bryce hissed, her face paling. They all studied the still—the Reaper was half-turned to the camera as it entered the frame from a street near the Black Dock.

A coaching session can be compared to the creative process of freestyle rap. Neuroscientists at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders scanned the brains of twelve professional rappers with an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) machine. The scientists discovered that although the brain’s executive functions were active at the start and end of a song, during freestyle, the parts of the brain responsible for self-monitoring, critiquing, and editing were deactivated. In this context, the researchers explained that the rappers were “freed from the conventional constraints of supervisory attention and executive control,” so sudden insights could easily emerge.1 In other words, the rappers used the executive functions of their cognitive brains as they started rapping to deliberately set the intention of the composition up front. Once they had a sense of where they were going, they switched off their inner critic and analyzer. This allowed for more activity in the inner brain, where the eruption of new ideas—creativity—takes place. As they moved to closing out the song, their cognitive brains came back online to provide a consciously designed ending to the composition.

I said, what if instead of scanning the image in, as is done in office xerography, I actually just created the data on the computer? If I could modulate the beam to match the digital bits, I could actually print with this thing. I did some test experiments in Rochester, which my immediate management felt was probably the most lunatic project they’d ever seen in their lives. That’s when my section manager said, ‘Stop, or I’m going to take your people away.