Brain activity in dead salmon
On the train from Utrecht to Frankfurt, I sat at a table with Max, a German man in his thirties on the way to Koln. He was wearing a t-shirt from a physics meeting. He runs a lab studying cardiac MRI techniques. He said they study the tiny magnetic fields that surround charge pulses within the heart. We talked for a while about his work. Then I asked if he had heard about the Ig Nobel Prizes. I mentioned that a physicist, Andre Geim, is the only person with a Nobel Prize and an Ig Nobel Prize.
Max was aware of Geim and very aware of an Ig Nobel neuroscience Prize in 2012 won by a team that studied brain activity in dead salmon using fMRI.
Max said the paper caused a big reaction in the MRI community because there were real problems with false readings. Here is the Ig Nobel follow up.
After a couple of minutes, Max took out his phone and showed me the fMRI images of brain activity in the now-famous dead salmon. He had the images on his phone.
Dead salmon were reported as reacting to human faces. Dead salmon don’t react to human faces as it turns out. Here is the report on the Scicurious blog at Scientific American.
We shared the four-person table with a couple in their 20s who were playing cards with actual cards while the older people at the table were sharing pictures on their iPhones.
