"This is Logan Fry of Richfield, Ohio, a small town between Akron and Cleveland. I am an intellectual tinkerer - farmer, lawyer, weaver, internet museum director and film actor.

"I've been interested in the brain for most of my life. I recall that my father took me to a psych research lab at Western Reserve University in the early 1960s, and I saw an experiment where the behavior of a rat was modified by the introduction of an electrical impulse to his brain, achieved through electrical wires inserted through his skull.

"I wanted to study the brain, but there was no neuroscience program at Oberlin College at the time, and I did rather poorly in chemistry and calculas. I became a lawyer, instead, like my father and uncle, not a brain researcher.

"After 20 years or so of practice, I gave it up to be a weaver. It was in the family, and my great-grandfather was a weaver as well. But I wanted to weave design - like microchip design, bar codes, machine language, cosmic code to communicate with extraterrestrials. (You can see some of those designs HERE).

"In 1999, I started weaving patterns of brain cross-sections that I found on the Internet. And I read books on psychology, creativity and networks: Gardner and Czikszentmihaly, Steve Pinker, Ray Kurzweil, Albert-Lázlo Barabási. And I read biographies of artists, architects and scientists who had strange and unique ways of interacting with the world. Strangely woven brains.

"In 2005, I had the opportunity to have my own brain scanned as part of a drug study at the University of Wisconsin, where I was a volunteer. I couldn't leave my 94-year-old mother on the farm so we packed up the car and made the 500 mile trip from just outside Akron, Ohio to Madison, Wisconsin. We made the trip 4 times - more than 4,000 miles total. She loved it. It kept her brain active.

"I wanted my scans for weaving, but I got a bonanza. Because I had travelled so far, Wisconsin gave me a 120 image sequence on disc in QuickTime digital format. Enough to make a movie. All I needed was music. Jeremy Hight and Cezary Ostrowski supplied that. The brain scan movies were born.

"I want to participate in more brain scan research. Something interactive, like fMRI scans during visual stimulation; or studies of the elasticity of the aging brain. And hopefully, I will find a university research group to work with."

W. Logan Fry
August 29, 2007