Did Beatles’ music fund the development of brain scans?
EMI (Electric & Musical Industries) was a British company best known for producing and selling Beatles records. Fortunately, the company channeled some of the profits earned from its musical endeavors into the development of electrical equipment. Among the types of electronics the company was interested in researching was equipment to image the brain.
Godfrey Hounsfield, an engineer working at EMI, was one of the principal creators of CT scan technology. His contribution was crowned in 1979 when he shared a Noble Prize.
One day around 2015, a man walked into my office for a consultation. Originally from Britain, he had also worked at EMI, on a project to develop magnetic resonance (MR) imaging. Pulling a picture of the scan from his pocket as proof, he told me that his was the first brain ever imaged by MR technology. The photograph is displayed here. On the back of the photo the man wrote, “The first NMR (MRI) image of a human head (mine) to show soft tissue contrast.”
This landmark accomplishment took place at an EMI laboratory in 1978. In a sense, then, it can be said that Beatles’ music helped to fund the development of brain scans. What a fabulous partnership between music and the brain!