"So here's your brain," the doctor says, as the center of my mental life pirouettes before me, rendered in electric blues and reds. Daniel Amen, MD, manipulates the screen image with a few taps on his keyboard.
"It looks good, pretty symmetrical. Red means more activity, blue means less."
We're peering at a Spect scan taken a half hour ago. He takes a closer look. Spect scans are a type of brain-imaging technology that measures neural activity by looking at blood flow. "The only question I'd ask you is whether you've ever had a brain injury, because there is low activity in your occipital cortex and your parietal lobe, all on the left side."
I admit to the occasional fall while snowboarding, but I've always worn a helmet. Amen shakes his head. "Your brain is 80 percent water and the consistency of tofu, and your skull is hard, so your brain was not meant to snowboard, even with a helmet. I recommend tennis or Ping-Pong."
He calls up a different view, this one from below, as though looking up from the spinal cord. I see a spot on one side that is conspicuously ... empty. "What's that?" I ask.
"That's a left temporal lobe ding. It's in a fairly innocuous area, but I'd still ask your wife how your temper is."
I'm in Newport Beach, California, undergoing the $3,300 Amen Clinic evaluation. The price includes two Spect scans and a series of clinical interviews. At the end I'll get a report on my mental health, along with recommendations about lifestyle changes, supplements, and medications — a prescription for a "better brain." It's an alluring prospect, but the approach is still viewed with some suspicion by mainstream psychiatrists. Not that serious scientists aren't interested in taking pictures of the brain — in fact, journals churn out hundreds of brain-imaging articles each month. It's just that we haven't quite figured out what these pictures mean. Are we really seeing the mind in action, or are we allowing ourselves to be seduced by images that may actually tell us very little?
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