• It's a photo circulating on social networks: an "x-ray" of a mother and her child with orange areas that materialize the reactions of the brain during a kiss.

  • It's actually a retouched MRI: the orange areas have been added based on real scientific data on babies' brain responses when watching face videos.

  • “Nothing to do with kissing,” comments neuroscientist Rebecca Saxe, the originator of MRI.

“Wow”, “exceptional”, “how important it is to be close to your baby to kiss him, cuddle him, talk to him”… On social networks, a recurring publication, supposedly shows an “X-ray captured when a mother kisses her 2-month-old son”, arouses many reactions from amazed internet users.

“Neurologist Rebecca Saxe presented the most beautiful “photo” of the year”, specifies the text which accompanies the image massively relayed.

During the kiss, "dopamine is released, which provides a feeling of well-being, but also oxytocin, called the hormone of love, because it is responsible for affection and attachment".

" Anything.

An x-ray doesn't look like that and an MRI can't be done that way, notes a skeptical internet user.

Either way, it's not realistic.

"It's a distorted image," said another.

So, is this image authentic?

FAKE OFF

As our AFP colleagues spotted in July 2020, Canadian Rebecca Saxe, behind the image in which we see her with her second child, explained her approach in the American scientific journal

Smithsonian Magazine

in December 2015. The neuroscientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology specifies that this is an MRI, which was not originally carried out for a medical diagnosis or even for science, but because "we wanted to see MRI of a mother and her child", a "symbol of human love".

The original image, which is therefore not the photo of an x-ray, must have been taken while the researcher and her child were motionless for several minutes, explains the scientist.

Otherwise, “moving a single millimeter leaves a mark on the result.

“So Rebecca Saxe waited until the baby was asleep to take the shot, which the researcher also uses as a profile picture on her Twitter account.

Important precision: the original image, in black and white, does not present orange zones supposed to represent the secretions of hormones in the brain of the mother and her child.

A “cool” assembly

In reality, the controversy over the scientific nature of these orange zones is not new.

In September 2019, Rebecca Saxe herself explained her origin on Twitter.

The colored elements were added a posteriori to the original MRI.

They correspond to real data, which are the result of examinations aimed at studying the "hemodynamic responses" of baby's brains when they watch face videos.

The researcher simply found it “cool to superimpose” these results on the MRI.

And the neuroscientist concludes: these results “have nothing to do with oxytocin, hormones, kissing or breastfeeding”.

Despite these explanations, the image has since resurfaced regularly on social networks, accompanied by texts suggesting that the orange areas represent a secretion of hormones linked to the kiss that the mother gives her child.

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