‘Human SOUL’ to be scanned with most powerful brain scanner EVER
Sophie Jones
CHINESE scientists are planning to build the world’s most powerful brain scanner — which they said could reveal the human “soul”.
The billion-yuan MRI machine “will revolutionise brain studies”, a senior scientist working on the project told Chinese media.
The facility which will house the super-scanner is still being built in the city of Shenzhen in southern China’s Guangdong province.
Current MRI scanners can only visualise objects larger than 1mm, but the new device is aimed to visualise objects 1,000 times smaller.
“…The information we obtain will increase like ‘boom, boom, boom’,” said a Beijing-based physicist also involved in the project.
“We may for the first time capture a full picture of human consciousness or even the essence of life itself.
“Then we can define them and explain how they work in precise physical terms – just like Newton and Einstein defined and explained the universe,” he said.
Hospital MRI scanners have a magnetic strength up to three tesla — but the new one is aimed to be as strong as 14 tesla.
No humans would enter the groundbreaking scanner until it had been thoroughly tested on other animals, the researchers added.
Consciousness — or having a sense of selfhood or a “soul” — is still a controversial topic in the scientific community.
Professor He Rongqiao, a researcher at the Institute of Biophysics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, was skeptical about the new MRI.
He said: “What is consciousness? There is not even a scientific definition.
“If you can’t even define it, how do you know what you see is what you are looking for?”
The human body as seen through an MRI machine
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