“Boxed: Things I Learned After Lying in an MRI Machine for 30 Hours”, Marco Giancotti2024-08-29 (, , ; similar)⁠:

…My brain craves novelty: side from the problem of sleepiness, I was shocked at how the lack of new stimuli can strain my grasp on my mental faculties.

Some experiments consist of seeing the same images hundreds of times, or repeating the same task over and over with only minor variations. Since an MRI pipe is essentially an isolation chamber, those tasks and images (and the noise) are the only sensory input you’re going to get. After a while, my brain started rejecting them.

At first, it wasn’t a big deal, but after a few weeks of those repetitive tasks, even the simple act of paying attention to what was in front of my eyes began to take a tremendous effort of concentration. I came out in shambles every time, depleted of life force, and I even thought of the word torture once or twice. But hey, someone’s gotta do this.

Luckily that repetitive series of experiments ended just before I reached my breaking point. I wonder if this is something that can be trained, but I’m not sure I’d want to do that either.

Novel, random images are great for creativity: Most of the experiments involve looking at non-repeating images, meaning that I see each one only once and never again. My brain is apparently fine with this and, with a good infusion of caffeine, it’s actually happy to go on the ride.

This is an experience you don’t usually have in your daily life. Normally you know, more or less, what to expect to see next. Even when you can’t predict what’s coming—when you’re watching a movie, for example—things have some kind of connection to each other, some theme or context that ties them together. With random images in a lab, none of that exists. Now you’re seeing a picture of a man blowing smoke from his mouth in the Grand Canyon, next it could be a close-up on a smudged corner of a book, or a group of penguins near an ice cliff, or a pile of broken CRT monitors, or something else altogether.

Every 4 seconds or so, you see something new that you would never have guessed from the previous pictures. Each time it’s a different cascade of activations in your brain, evoking random memories, creating unexpected connections, and stimulating thoughts that would never have occurred to you.

Something strange happens: even though it’s all purely random, the brain tries to make sense of it all, tries to find patterns and associations. With no time to establish conventional framings, it has to improvise, take in the images in a partly-unconscious way, without thorough processing. This, I think, is a great way to stimulate creativity.

A few times during those experiments, I came up with so many ideas—things to write about, better ways to explain things, new intriguing questions about the world, etc.—that my biggest worry was trying to remember them all for the 20–30 minutes left until the end of the session. In the short pauses between bursts of images, I tried to rehearse the list of ideas with shortened mnemonics, but found that I could only keep around 5 in my head before I forgot some of them.

This is an amazing state to have my brain in, and I wish I could induce it at will. Social media feeds look similar on the surface, but they don’t give you truly random stimuli. Their contents are highly edited to appeal to the viewer, and come with lots of cultural baggage and trend-following. They don’t work to unhinge my creativity—rather, they trap it.

What I need is an app that does nothing but show you truly random pictures, with no curation and no memetic aspirations. If you know of one, please let me know. [Tricky, as ‘random’ images online will be tilted heavily towards porn etc, so while these services do exist, they may not work out of the box like he hopes.]

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Boxed: Things I Learned After Lying in an MRI Machine for 30 Hours