When parents want to capture a special image of themselves and their child, they usually go to a professional photographer; a mother and neuroscientist in the States had something completely different in mind recently, though.
With the help of a colleague, Rebecca Saxe has captured the beautiful bond between a mother and her child, with an MRI image featuring her two-year-old son Percy.
Rebeeca and Atushi Takahashi, who work at the department of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, said that the image they created together may just be the very first of its kind.
“What’s captivating about that image is the relationship that it depicts,” Saxe told Today, admitting that the MRI wasn’t taken to diagnose any problems.
Explaining the intricacies and interesting features of the image, Saxe pointed out that many people have been struck by how fragile a baby’s brain is in comparison to its mother’s.
“Some people look at it and see mostly the differences: how thin his skull is, how little space there is between the outside world and his brain. It’s just this very fragile, very thin little shell,” she said.
Rebecca admitted that the idea came to her after she spent hours lying inside her lab’s MRI machine watching her little boy’s brain develop.
“Like any mother, I fell madly in love with my baby. But I also got to watch his brain grow right in front of me. It felt like my experience of being his mother and my experience of being a neuroscientist got suddenly and deeply intertwined,” she added.
What do you think of the image?
