Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently Read Online Free PDF Page B

atom it is and the strength of the magnetic field. If you put enough atoms in a magnetic field, they will all vibrate in synchrony, and you can actually listen to this vibration with a radio antenna. Until the 1970s, this was all standard technology for chemists, who used NMR as part of their toolkit to analyze chemicals, at least until Paul Lauterbur’s revolutionary insight. Lauterbur was a chemist by training who had specialized in the study of NMR spectra of naturally occurring proteins. Because of his expertise, he had maintained informal consulting roles with some of the companies that manufactured NMR equipment. While Lauterbur was consulting with one of these companies, based in a Pittsburgh warehouse, a visiting researcher from Johns Hopkins University was experimenting with the NMR spectra of cancer tissue. He wanted to see whether NMR could distinguish normal tissues from cancerous ones.
    Indeed, NMR could tell the difference between healthy and cancerous tissue, but there was a big problem. It couldn’t tell you where the differences were. Because NMR came out of chemistry, which had traditionally focused on the analysis of test-tube samples, no one had really thought about using NMR to locate differences inside the samples themselves. Conventional wisdom said it shouldn’t matter, reasoning that you could always put a tissue sample into the NMR spectrometer.
    Lauterbur thought differently and believed that NMR could be used to find the locations of differences in a tissue sample. One of the big limitations with the technology was constructing a magnet that had a uniform magnetic field. These magnetic nonuniformities resulted in“blurry” chemical signals. Most chemists dismissed this as noise. But Lauterbur started to wonder whether the noise actually couldn’t be turned to an advantage. His insight came at a Big Boy restaurant and was scribbled on the back of a napkin. Lauterbur later recalled that “on the second bite of a Big Boy hamburger,” he was struck by an idea. Maybe that “blurring” contained embedded information that he could decipher. “Heck,” he said, “you could make pictures with this thing!” 7
    Lauterbur’s epiphany led him to the idea of purposely making the magnetic field nonuniform. In NMR, this was heretical. But Lauterbur realized that if this inhomogeneity was applied in a predictable way, such as left to right, then the atoms in those different locations would vibrate at slightly different frequencies. These frequency differences could then be assembled into a crude image. Lauterbur tested his idea in the simplest way possible. He embedded a test tube filled with one kind of water inside a test tube filled with another kind of water. Applying an altered magnetic field, he produced the first cross-sectional magnetic resonance image.
    He wrote up the results and submitted them to the top scientific journal, which promptly rejected it. As Lauterbur recalled, “Many said it couldn’t be done, even when I was doing it!” Of course, the scientific establishment eventually came around, and Lauterbur’s insight changed medicine forever. He received the Noble Prize in Medicine in 2003, thirty years after his discovery.
    What is interesting about Lauterbur’s discovery is that we can trace the moment at which he broke out of conventional thinking. There are striking similarities to Chihuly’s story, and the visual nature of their insights is remarkable. What others had written off as noise in the NMR signal, Lauterbur saw as something else. He saw the potential of hidden information.
    Over and over again, iconoclasts like Lauterbur and Chihuly point to the visual nature of their insights. And so visual perception is where the hunt for the iconoclastic brain begins.
    Persons, Places, and Things
     
    After V1, the visual information splits into the high road and the low road, to meet up eventually in the frontal cortex. Along these two roads, the brain transitions from local