But what was the real status of those vibrant snapshots? Apart from valuable information about its fixed anatomy, much of the excitement that came from making the brain visible had led to exaggerated inferences about what was going on in the mind, and indeed about what was going on in the brain beyond a certain level of complexity. Dynamically, they measured the blood-oxygen-level-dependent response (BOLD). The scans represented local activation based on statistical differences in BOLD signals. That was it; and the level of resolution of these computational artefacts depended on voxels – the 3-D equivalent of pixels. A voxel was minuscule from a human perspective, but from a neuron’s point of view, it was a vast forest in which to remain undetected, nowhere near the level at which synapses, dendrites, axons and electro-chemical activity could be represented, let alone proved to be the cause of complex psychological states. In Lucy’s situation, it was clearly beneficial to see the location and size of a tumour. Images of the brain revealed something about the brain, that much was clear, but to what extent they could reveal anything about the mind and the personality was much less clear. Not only was the brain not the mind, but an image of the brain was not the brain.

At the same time as her concern about neuroimaging had been stirred up by the way it had suddenly crashed into Lucy’s life, Olivia was also hearing about it from her father, who had remained obsessed with the inadequacy of the Very Short Introduction to schizophrenia that he had been reading from on the day that Lucy told the Carrs about her tumour.

‘It’s full of claims about brain scans,’ he complained, ‘showing that the areas “associated” with hallucination light up when people are hallucinating or concluding that patients with schizophrenia “tend” to have a hippocampus and an amygdala that is “slightly” smaller than normal. People who believe this sort of high-tech phrenology are truly mad, but unlike the patients whose brains they scan, they don’t seem to want to recover. There may be some justified scepticism about women suffering from Penis Envy, but Physics Envy is all too real: trying to build a machine big enough to remove psychological experience from mental illness. It’s absurd!’

‘The genetic correlations with schizophrenia are not convincing either,’ said Olivia.

‘It’s open season when it comes to correlations,’ said Martin. ‘There’s a parasite carried by cats, Toxoplasma gondii, which is more prevalent in people with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia than in control groups. Some people even think that Blake may have written “The Tyger” under the influence of his cat’s toxoplasma.’

‘Really?’ said Olivia. ‘It’s amazing there isn’t more visionary poetry, given the number of people who own cats.’