Perhaps you have seen this image before. Maybe not the image, but the gesture. A mother giving her little kiss while accompanying him in that magical moment in which he is letting go, prisoner of sleep and rest.
The baby falls asleep while she puts her lips on her forehead because he feels the need to kiss her, smell her little head and feel her warmth in her mouth.
And you probably have never seen it this way, in an instant image that, hiding a lot, shows so much. We do not know who they are when we see them, we cannot recognize more than their silhouettes, but we do see their interior, and we do see love, in an image that may generate this doubt: What is the story behind this magnetic resonance?
Several minutes to get this moment
Rebecca Saxe and Atsushi Takahashi are two researchers from the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. As Rebecca explains in Smithsonian, they are necessary several minutes to get this picture, because a slight movement can cause blurry areas to be seen and then you cannot see what you are looking for.
And how to get a baby to be calm inside a resonance device? Because it is a scanner that whistles, vibrates, with little space, and in which the subjects have to be still; And babies hate being immobilized.
Mother. The answer is Mother. His presence, his hug, was what the baby needed to stop crying, calm down, be able to be inside the device and finally be carried away, fall asleep, and make that magical and universal moment remain for posterity as it had never happened before: a mother's love for her son, and vice versa, on an MRI.
She is Rebecca
The secret is this: the mother is her. She is Rebecca. He works in the MIT laboratory and uses magnetic resonance imaging, together with his team, to study brain function and development.
There, they resonate with children of different ages while reading stories with different plots, and so they discover how the brain behaves according to the passage of the story they are listening to. With these experiments they are discovering how children think about other people's thoughts, the characters that star in those stories.
One day he thought that nobody had done something like that before. No one had ever gone out with her baby in her arms in a resonance. No one had ever immortalized love in that way, and decided that he would do it with his little boy.
The machine was adapted so that the two could enter, and stay together, and although at first the little one said that he did not want to be there, being with mom served so that soon he will calm down and end up falling asleep.
What do you see in the picture?
And here is the grace, that each person sees something different by observing it. Some will see the most scientific part, the differences between the brains of an adult and mature person and a baby whose development is yet to come; others will stay with the universal gesture of love of a mother and her baby, apparently anonymous.
And then there is what Rebecca, the mother, suggests that she sees an old image made new. A mother and her child in a powerful symbol of love and innocence, beauty and fertility, which intermingles with values that are also their own, for being scientific, but that in society seem to be opposed: research and intellect, progress and power.
And to you, What do you suggest?
