The activations in this MRI ‘have nothing to do with oxytocin, hormones, kissing, or breastfeeding’ - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
February 15, 2021
A photo is being shared on social media with a claim that it shows MRI (Magnetic resonance imaging) capturing a burst of oxytocin generated in the baby’s brain out of a chemical reaction when the mother kissed the baby. Let’s fact-check the claim made in the post.
Claim: MRI shows a burst of oxytocin generated in the baby’s brain when kissed by the mother.
Fact: The mother in the posted photo is Rebecca Saxe, a Cognitive Neuroscientist at MIT. She clarified that “the activations are real fMRI results, of hemodynamic responses while looking at movies of faces, compared to movies of scenes……They have nothing to do with oxytocin, hormones, kissing, or breastfeeding.” Hence the claim made in the post is FALSE.
When the image was run through Google Reverse Image Search, an article with a similar photo was found in the search results. The article was published by ‘Smithsonian Magazine’ in 2015 and the author is Rebecca Saxe, a Cognitive Neuroscientist at MIT. In the article, Rebecca Saxe writes – “This particular MR image, though, was not made for diagnostic purposes, nor even really for science. No one, to my knowledge, had ever made an MR image of a mother and child. We made this one because we wanted to see it…… I worked to create this image; and I am also the mother in it, curled up inside the tube with my infant son.” The MRI in the article does not have colour spots as shown in the posted image.
In a series of tweets, Rebecca Saxe has explained about the posted image in 2019. She tweeted – “At some point, we thought: would it be cool to overlay the activation (from our actual science study on watching face movies) onto this picture?  So, we did.”, “In answer to all the controversies and tweeting this weekend: The activations are real fMRI results, of hemodynamic responses while looking at a movies of faces, compared to movies of scenes. They really are from that baby.” She concluded by saying – “They have nothing to do with oxytocin, hormones, kissing, or breastfeeding.”
My MRI Mother and Child has become the focus of a controversy this weekend.
Here’s the story.
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More information regarding Rebecca Saxe’s research can be found here, here, and here.
To sum it up, the activations in the posted MRI ‘have nothing to do with oxytocin, hormones, kissing, or breastfeeding’.