Saclay

The social forces are enormous.

The previous day, I visited him at his brain imaging lab, NeuroSpin, in the Parisian suburb of Saclay, where he took me down a hallway known as Magnet Street to the facility's massive MRI equipment.

He paused outside the control room of the newest MRI magnet, an 11.7 Tesla scanner, one of the strongest human-rated machines in the world, which displays the brain in finer anatomical detail than ever seen before.

A loud, mechanical buzz pulsed in the hallway.