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Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is, in the words of the Mayo Clinic, a technique used in radiology that employs a magnetic field and computer-generated radio waves to create detailed images of the organs and tissues in your body. We typically associate MRI scans with detection of various unpleasant medical maladies, such as tumors, blocked blood vessels, torn ligaments, and spinal injuries. However, one MRI scan featured in a popular meme is said to have captured a heart-warming image — the physical manifestations of feelings of affection and attachment appearing in the brains of a mother and her child: The meme is indeed based on an MRI image of a mother and her child, specifically Dr. Rebecca Saxe, a professor of cognitive neuroscience and associate department head at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and her son. As Saxe explained to Smithsonian Magazine, she undertook this MRI of herself and her infant son not for any diagnostic or scientific purpose, but simply because she believed no one had yet ever made an MR image of a mother and child: However, that original MR image looked like this: ' Saxe later, as she explained in a lengthy Twitter thread, overlaid the MR image of herself and her son with information gleaned from a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study. That study involved a comparison of the activity produced in infants' brains when they were shown different types of visual images: This was the resulting image after the overlay was applied: However, someone else then created the meme seen at the head of this page by grafting text onto the overlaid MR image asserting that the colored regions captured the results of a mother's kiss, which caused a chemical reaction in her baby's brain that released a burst of oxytocin (a hormone that produces feelings of affection and attachment). But that explanation was inaccurate, Saxe noted, stating that the pictured brain activations have nothing to do with oxytocin, hormones, kissing, or breastfeeding: As described by Live Science, what the enhanced image actually represented was that even in infants, different types of visual images appear to trigger activity in different parts of their brains, in a pattern consistent with that observed in adults: What this image provides us is not visual confirmation of brain activity produced by the emotion of affection, but data useful in the debate of how much of the structure of the brain is specified at birth and how much of that structure arises from experience.
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