1. omnibrain
  2. The Big Smoking Bong of Harvard Neuroscientists

The Big Smoking Bong of Harvard Neuroscientists

By omnibrain on September 28, 2007.

i-5152819edc125a536cdb5c49e79a4b74-wired_waterpipe.jpgMind Hacks has alerted us to some amazing engineering from Harvard University:

A team from Harvard Medical School are interested in how smoked marijuana affects the brain, but have come to the inevitable conclusion that it's actually quite hard smoking a joint when you're lying on your back being brain scanned.

So the research team put their heads together (!), and realised they needed to design a bong - a water pipe for smoking marijuana - safe to use in an MRI scanner.

This isn't a trivial task. Apart from being free of metal parts that could be affected by the MRI scanner's strong magnet, the device had to be installed and removed within one booked session and also needed to control the smoke.

As well as allowing the person take hits from the bong, the device also had to capture the smoke that was exhaled. Otherwise, the scanner room would get filled with smoke which could interfere with the equipment and affect any participants who took part in other studies that happened afterwards.

But that's not the only excitement this evening in the world of Bongs...

i-c406b9e9e12e58f28c99e10e26188b87-nintendobong.jpg

This enterprising kid created a pipe out of a Nintendo Controller.
Tags
Drugs
neuroart
neuroscience
Neurotech & Robotics
Vice

More like this

A Caveat About My Support for Marijuana Legalization
Simply put: it's very stinky. We read with interest this post by Jon Walker about the possibility of legalization of marijuana use in Massachusetts (and the near passage in California). While I think the pros of legalization outweigh the cons (although I have no respect for those who pretend…
Quantifying the Unconscious: New Methods in fMRI Pattern Classification
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has captured the popular imagination since its introduction in the early 1990s, at least partially because of the stunningly beautiful images it generates. Although it has mostly used to identify brain regions involved in specific cognitive operations,…
After an absence, I return with my head on a platter
That's my head, scanned by Joy Hirsch and Steven Thomas at Columbia University's and then digitized, burned onto a CD and mailed to me. I mashed it through the lovely, open-source Mac program Osirix, which allows me to imagize my brain, which I'm finding much different than imagining it, though…
Fantastical Fridays: Are You Cool, Man?
This post from the archives describes a recent research finding that may be welcome news for some.... (24 May 2006) If you know what I'm talking about, and if you are in fact "cool", then you might also be interested in the findings presented Tuesday by Dr. Donald Tashkin and his coauthors at an…

The vaporizer is full of metal parts that would be attracted to the large magnet in the MRI.

Sure, but they can be used with inhaler tubes of arbitrary length, and the tube itself is... plastic of some sort.

"Sure, but they can be used with inhaler tubes of arbitrary length, and the tube itself is... plastic of some sort."

So can a bong.

Or an incredibly long pipe. I think that the solution was chosen mainly to convince other, perkier Harvard Medical School students of the preferred gender to 'Come up to their room, honey, and try out this bong I designed for school...'