Lucy was having an fMRI today to find out if her tumour was operable. When Olivia had spoken to her on the phone yesterday, there had been a pace and compulsiveness to her description of what she was going through that made Olivia sense the traumatic grip of the experience. She had never heard Lucy sound so frightened. It was hardly surprising, but the effect was strong enough to constitute a new layer of personality, entirely devoted to managing fear. Olivia had embarked on reading Brainwashed, at Ash’s recommendation, partly to give more authority to whatever reassurance she could offer Lucy, but also because she had been intrigued by neuroscience for some time, not least because its flamboyant imagery seemed to have usurped DNA’s double helix as the popular emblem of the irresistible power of hard science to penetrate nature’s secrets. And yet, there were crucial differences between the status of these two scientific icons: whereas the actual structure of DNA consisted of two helices running in opposite directions and laterally bonded by base pairs, no brain surgeon, without a high dose of psilocybin, had yet opened a skull and been treated to the multicoloured light show fabricated by neuroimaging, and so often reproduced on magazine covers, and deployed in the slide shows that accompanied lectures on every subject from oncology to impulse shopping. Pop Art brains made talks about violence or advertising, unconscious processing or political preferences, Alzheimer’s or sexual arousal, look thoroughly scientific. The pictures had become so ubiquitous that students might soon demand them at a Jane Austen lecture, just as they might feel entitled to ketchup, mustard and mayonnaise at a hot dog stand. What part of the brain lights up when the reader first encounters Mr Darcy and his odious pride? Can literary criticism afford to ignore what is happening to the reader’s amygdala when Elizabeth Bennet rejects his first proposal? It is a truth universally acknowledged that any topic in search of a reputation for seriousness must be in want of neuroimaging.