"Bruce Sterling - Magnetic Vision" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

Bruce Sterling

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Literary Freeware -- Not for Commercial Use



From THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, April 1993.

F&SF, Box 56, Cornwall CT 06753 $26/yr USA $31/yr other

F&SF Science Column #6:



"Magnetic Vision"



Here on my desk I have something that can only be described as
miraculous. It's a big cardboard envelope with nine thick sheets of
black plastic inside, and on these sheets are pictures of my own brain.

These images are "MRI scans" -- magnetic resonance imagery from
a medical scanner.

These are magnetic windows into the lightless realm inside my
skull. The meat, bone, and various gristles within my head glow gently
in crisp black-and-white detail. There's little of the foggy ghostliness
one sees with, say, dental x-rays. Held up against a bright light, or
placed on a diagnostic light table, the dark plastic sheets reveal veins,
arteries, various odd fluid-stuffed ventricles, and the spongey wrinkles
of my cerebellum. In various shots, I can see the pulp within my own
teeth, the roots of my tongue, the boney caverns of my sinuses, and the
nicely spherical jellies that are my two eyeballs. I can see that the
human brain really does come in two lobes and in three sections, and
that it has gray matter and white matter. The brain is a big whopping
gland, basically, and it fills my skull just like the meat of a walnut.

It's an odd experience to look long and hard at one's own brain.
Though it's quite a privilege to witness this, it's also a form of
narcissism without much historical parallel. Frankly, I don't think I
ever really believed in my own brain until I saw these images. At least,
I never truly comprehended my brain as a tangible physical organ, like
a knuckle or a kneecap. And yet here is the evidence, laid out
irrefutably before me, pixel by monochrome pixel, in a large variety of
angles and in exquisite detail. And I'm told that my brain is quite