That sounds like a flippant answer, but it's quite the truth. I can't remember a time when I didn't experience sounds (music, in particular) in a deep, visceral way that involved more than just my sense of hearing. For the longest time I thought everybody's experience of life was like mine. I thought everybody cried when they heard violin music. I thought everybody felt waves of cold and prickles when they heard sounds made up of square waves (yeah, I'm dating myself, aren't I?) Didn't everybody shiver and see starbursts of pink and purple …
This was the last part of the imaging procedure that I remember before deciding that I should probably take a nap. I didn't get a lot of sleep the night before, and let's be honest, being stuffed into the core of a superconducting magnet for a couple of hours gets boring after a while. I can only entertain myself so much... I can best characterize this part of the imaging procedure as "Shit got real."
Something cranked up deep inside the core of the machine and my vision went red, and then it started to bleed in and out. At …
