1 THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON AHMADINEJAD Or What Is Brain Imaging? n the spring of 2008, the folks at FKF Applied Research—the Ipo liti cal con sul tants and neuroscientists behind the aforementioned swing- voter study— were at it again. This time they took journalist Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic on a guided tour of his brain. The idea had been hatched at a family Passover seder at which Goldberg had spent the eve ning “issuing a series of ideologically contradictory, Manischewitz- fueled po liti cal pronouncements.” Fortunately for sci- ence, Bill Knapp, a po liti cal consul tant and cofound er of FKF, was one of the seder guests. He suggested that if Goldberg wanted to get to the bottom of his confusion, he should submit to a brain scan to learn whether he was “neurologically wired for liberalism or conser- vatism.” As Goldberg understood the pro cess, researchers would mea sure his brain’s responses to a series of images of famous politi- cians to uncover the truth about his “actual inclinations and predis- positions by sidestepping the usual inhibition controls that can make focus- group testing unreliable.”1 When Goldberg arrived at the facility, he was slid faceup into the mouth of a sleek MRI machine and asked to lie as still as a ca- daver lest movement disrupt the readings. Despite noise-dampening 1 2 BRAINWASHED headphones, Goldberg could still hear the magnet in the state- of- the- art fMRI machine as it scanned his brain, a racket that’s been likened to the sound of metal- cleated golf shoes tumbling in a clothes dryer followed by a long period of high- pitched pinging.2 The re- searchers had fi tted him with video goggles through which they fl ashed scores of photographs and fi lm clips of cultural and po liti cal celebrities, including John McCain, Edie Falco, Golda Meir, Barack Obama, Yasser Arafat, Bruce Springsteen, George W. Bush, and Ira- ni an president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. A lesser man might have been daunted by the fusillade of images, but Goldberg’s trials as a war correspondent in the Middle East seemed to have prepared him for a full hour inside the machine. Goldberg emerged with a clanging headache, but with his sense of humor intact. “If you haven’t lain supine in a claustrophobia- inducing magnetized tunnel while watch- ing Hillary Clinton talk about health care one inch from your eye- balls, well, you just haven’t lived,” he quipped. Goldberg’s brain, which the fMRI declared to be nonpartisan, displayed the same ambivalent reaction to Hillary Clinton as did the swing voters.’ The team’s neuroscientist, Marco Iacoboni, speculated that enhanced activity in Goldberg’s dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, an area linked to inhibition of ones spontaneous responses, indi- cated that he might be trying to “suppress unwanted emotions” about Clinton. Scanning also revealed that Goldberg loved Edie Falco by virtue of a strong response in the ventral striatum, an area of the brain that revs up at the prospect of reward. “I didn’t need a million- dollar machine to tell me that,” wrote Goldberg, an avowed fan of The Sopranos. Goldberg’s reaction to Ahmadinejad, however, took him by sur- prise. The sight of the Ira ni an leader also stimulated Goldberg’s ven- tral striatum. “Reward!” Iacoboni exclaimed. “You’ll have to explain this one.” Although Goldberg couldn’t fathom why Ahmadinejad would stimulate pleasur able thoughts, Joshua Freedman, a psychia- trist working with Iacoboni, offered a conjecture: “You seem to This Is Your Brain on Ahmadinejad 3 believe that the Jewish people endure [and] that people who try to hurt the Jewish people ultimately fail. Therefore, you derive pleasure from believing that Ahmadinejad will also eventually fail.” Freedman paused. “Or it means that you’re a Shiite.” Goldberg refl ected on his adventure in “vanity scanning,” as he called it, and questioned the analytic rigor of the procedure. “I won- dered to what degree this was truly scientifi c and to what degree it was 21st- century phrenology.” Goldberg isn’t the fi rst to express such doubts. Frustrated experts have also dubbed overeager readings of fMRI images “neophrenology” in reference to the long-discredited method of revealing a person’s personality traits and talents by “read- ing” his or her skull’s bumps and depressions.3 Yet in many respects this analogy is unfair. Unlike phrenology, brain imaging is a techno- logical marvel that does reveal something about the relationship be- tween brain and mind. But exactly what can a “lit” brain region really tell us about an individual’s thoughts and feelings? This question sits at the leading edge of a large and time- honored body of inquiry: What can the workings of the brain tell us about the mind? Approaching this project through fMRI, one of the most up- to- the- minute and surely most mediagenic of neurotechnologies, hinges on scientists’ ability to translate brain activity (mechanism) into accounts of what a person is thinking or feeling (meaning). Sci- entists, of course, cannot “read” specifi c thoughts with fMRI; they can only tell that brain regions already known to be associated with certain thoughts or feelings have demonstrated an increase in activity— hence the proper term “neural correlates” for the colorful dabs on brain scans. The value of brain scans in the courtroom and other venues rests on how accurately scientists can infer thoughts and feelings from these correlates. This challenging task began over a century ago, using far more primitive technologies. Neuroimaging has come a long way from its earliest ancestor, the X-ray technique, invented in 1895 by German physicist William 4 BRAINWASHED Conrad Roentgen. His now- famous fi rst X-ray showed the fi ve bones of his wife’s left hand, with the fourth bone encircled by a thick wedding ring. Roentgen’s transformation of the previously hid- den into the visible triggered a craze on both sides of the Atlantic. Department stores in Chicago, New York, and Paris installed X-ray slot machines so customers could view the skeletal anatomy of their hands, with the occasional customer fainting at the sight of his or her bones. A Pa ri sian physician, Hippolyte- Ferdinand Baraduc, even claimed that he could use X-rays to photograph his own ideas and feelings. He called the resulting pictures “psychicons,” or images of the mind. The X-ray, of course, is mute when it comes to the brain, let alone the mind, because the rays cannot pass readily through the skull’s thick walls.4 At the turn of the twentieth century, scientists developed ven- triculography, a method of pumping air into the brain’s ventricles— hollow spaces that drain fl uid from the brain—to increase the pressure inside and exaggerate density differentials across regions. In the early 1970s, computerized axial tomography (CT or CAT) scans enabled neuroradiologists to distinguish the white and gray matter of the brain from the ventricles that run through it. The technique uses high- density X-rays to capture images in slices and produce a three- dimensional model of the brain. A de cade later, structural MRIs (magnetic resonance images) came on the radiographic scene, yield- ing an increasingly precise repre sen ta tion of brain anatomy. Struc- tural MRI can detect static problems, such as tumors, blood clots, and deformed blood vessels. Taken together, MRIs and CT scans provide valuable information about fi xed anatomy but leave us largely in the dark about the brain’s functioning.5 That limitation began to change with the development of posi- tron emission tomography (PET), one of the earliest three- dimensional functional imaging techniques. In contrast to structural techniques, PET and other functional methods allow neuroscientists to image the brain in action. Introduced in the 1980s, PET mea sures This Is Your Brain on Ahmadinejad 5 brain metabolism or brain blood fl ow by deploying radioactive tracer molecules. The underlying principle is that when brain cells are active, they need more energy in the form of glucose or oxygen. The tracer, typically low- dose glucose labeled with a radioisotope, is either injected directly into a vein or inhaled. The glucose travels to the most active brain cells, where it emits energy (positrons) that are detected and displayed as a glowing “hot spot” on a PET scan. Al- though PET can also be used to examine the brain while subjects respond to stimuli or perform tasks, neuroscientists tend to prefer fMRI for that purpose because it has higher spatial and temporal resolution and does not involve radioactive material.6 Functional MRI leverages the fact that everything the brain en- ables us to do—feel, think, perceive, and act—is linked, or correlated, with changes in oxygen consumption and regional blood fl ow in the brain. When a person responds to a task, such as looking at photos or solving a math problem, specifi c regions of the brain are typically engaged and receive more oxygen- laden, or oxygenized, blood. The increased blood fl ow and the boost in oxygen associated with it are proxies for increased activation of neurons. We say “increased” be- cause the entire living brain is always on; blood is always circulating and oxygen is always being consumed. The only truly silent brain is a dead brain. Mea sur ing the concentration of oxygen dissolved in the blood, therefore, is the key to detecting brain activity. The large and im- mensely powerful magnet within the fMRI machine can measure the infl ux of blood to areas of the brain because blood that is carry ing more oxygen has different magnetic properties than blood that has already given up its oxygen to supply neurons.