A map of your mind
MANILA, Philippines -Many people’s holiday wish lists contain one gadget or another: New-model cellphone, iPod, digital camera, laptop and so on. I would not refuse any of the above, but the gadget I really want is an MRI machine. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) produces images of internal organs by placing the body within a strong magnetic field, then measuring the responses of the nuclei of the body’s tissues to radio waves. Basically you get in the machine, it scans your insides, and produces a map.
In the last few years there’s been a lot of MRI-based research.
Scientists have taken MRI scans of people listening to music, for instance, and of subjects tasting two different brands of cola and deciding which taste they prefer.
Imagine all the fun you could have with your very own MRI machine. If you could get your pets to lie still inside the tube, you could see what goes on in their brains as they eat different flavors of pet food. Then you would know which flavor is their real favorite. You could even determine exactly how different people feel about you by scanning their brains as they watch a video of you singing and dancing to the ubiquitous Korean pop hit, Nobody. Well, maybe not Nobody. Surely not all our friends want to murder you.
In her brilliant book Bonk, the science writer Mary Roach goes above and beyond the call of duty by volunteering for an experiment “to reveal more information on how various body parts work during various activities.” She and her husband Ed — who had his reservations but thankfully understood what it means to be married to a writer — have an ultrasound while having sex. This would help scientists map what goes on inside the body during the act.
“Though they no doubt have their uses,” Roach writes, “ultrasound movies are a superficial rendering of the complex and varied body-mind meld that we call sex. Sex is far more than the sum of its moving parts.” She notes that the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize — a parody of the Nobel Prize — in medicine went to the team which did MRIs of male and female subjects involved in said activity. That same year the Ig Nobel Prize in public health went to Scottish emergency room doctors who wrote a paper on toilet-inflicted buttock injuries.
Roach’s sense of humor, refusal to be embarrassed, and keen insights into the behavior of humans in very trying situations makes Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex one of the funniest non-fiction books about sex ever written. (There are many hilarious fictional works on sex, emphasis on “fictional,” most of them unintentionally funny.)
It is certainly one of the laugh-out-loud funniest books of recent years. Roach covers a wide range of topics beginning with the pioneers in human sexual behavior research like John B. Watson (1913), Alfred Kinsey (the 1940s and 50s), and Leonardo Da Vinci (1493). Leonardo drew a series of sketches of commingled body parts, including cross-sectional cutaways that revealed the arrangement of the reproductive organs when they were in use. Not for nothing is he called Renaissance man. The pages containing these sketches were filled with mechanical drawings of levers and pulleys: “It was as though Leonardo set out to work on sex but got distracted by engineering — a scenario that no doubt plays itself out in reverse in the notebooks of countless college engineering students.”
Other chapters deal with transplants, implants, hormones, porcupines, and why Viagra doesn’t help pandas. Chapter 13 covers the unusual career of Dr. Ahmed Shafik, a wealthy Egyptian hospital owner who claims to have been nominated for a Nobel Prize. (Roach found out that Nobel Prize nominations are kept secret for 50 years. This means you can claim to be a Nobel nominee and no one can verify it for decades!)
It was Dr. Shafik who proved conclusively that polyester pants are not sexy. He did this by making lab rats wear them.
“There were 75 rats,” Roach writes. “They wore their pants for one year. Shafik found that over time the ones dressed in polyester…had sex significantly less often than the rats whose slacks wore cotton or wool.
“Shafik thinks the reason is that polyester sets up troublesome electrostatic fields in and around the genitals. Having seen an illustration of a rat wearing the pants, I would say there’s an equal possibility that it’s simply harder to get a date when you dress funny.”
If we could just get those rats to lie still for an MRI, imagine what we may find.
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If you’re shopping for gadgets, check out the annual COMDDAP Expo which runs until today at the SMX Convention Center. I’m not sure they sell MRIs, but the exhibit features the latest in gadgetry with special bundles, slashed rates, big discounts and freebies. Doors open from 10:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.; visit www.comddap.org for details.
