An educational entertainment

Nowadays, if you want to do some brain scanning you might have to stump up £250,000 or more for an MRI scanner, a device which can be used, inter alia, to measure the changes of blood flow in the brain.

So I was intrigued this morning, while turning the pages of reference 1, a teaching resource from London, Ontario, to read about an Italian physiologist who came up with a rather cheaper contraption more than a hundred years ago. A contraption which took the form of a tilting table. The subject lies on the table. You get him or her into roughly the right position and you then bring the table into balance using weights. Leave the subject there for a bit to settle down. Perhaps the experimenter takes a fag break.

You then ask the subject to think about something complicated, perhaps Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism, then not long published. Lo and behold, the head end of the table sinks down because of all the blood rushing into the head to do the necessary brain work.

All this and more is described at reference 2 and summarised at reference 3. I would think that you could build a useful university lecture - or perhaps even a series of lectures - about this contraption and what you might be measuring with it. Perhaps they do in Canada.

PS: I was reminded of the contraption, possibly of a similar age, noticed at reference 4. Intended for something quite different.

Reference 1: http://www.fmri4newbies.com/.

Reference 2: Weighing brain activity with the balance: Angelo Mosso’s original manuscripts come to light - Stefano Sandrone, Marco Bacigaluppi, Marco R. Galloni, Stefano F. Cappa, Andrea Moro, Marco Catani, Massimo Filippi, Martin M. Monti, Daniela Perani and Gianvito Martino – 2014. Open access.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelo_Mosso.

Reference 4: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2012/07/church-visits-in-norfolk.html.