Multilingual Kids Wanted!

Maarten is fluent in both parents' languages. He still speaks pretty good English and since we have been living in Belgium he gets French classes at school.

It wasn't our intention. That's just happened to us.

Despite all skeptic remarks we occasionally get, Maarten is doing very well so far.

Compared to Czechoslovakia, where I grew up, in Belgium being bilingual is nothing extraordinary.
Also in California most of the children in Maarten's class spoke a second language at home.

I was already informed by his teacher that Maarten and his best friend are speaking English together while playing at school.
For them it comes naturally.

Our society has still many perceptions and prejudices about raising multilingual children. Advantages and disadvantages, various methods, approaches and ideas are permanently discussed not only by the concerned parents but also by the scientists.

This morning we received a message from our school principal promoting a recent study which explores the effects of multilingualism on children's brain development.
This research intends to investigate whether there are significant differences in the brains between one- and bilingual children.
The tested children need to perform three tasks while under a brain scanner. This way the scientists will localize and compare the children's brain activity between one- and bilinguals.

My first reaction was, of course! Maarten will participate!
Till Rob expressed his doubts about the scan's harmlessness.
The tested child will undergo two MRI brain scans over a period of 3 years.

I did a little research on the internet. According to the most Dutch websites the MRI scanning is completely harmless. Nevertheless I got deeper information in English.
I'm usually interested in the actual experiences of involved people. I found this discussion about the safety of MRI scans and I was quite shocked reading their experiences.

Most of the patients were tired, nauseous and got migraine headaches afterwards. Many were complaining about discomfort, pressures inside their head, hearing bad noises, dizziness and some even had affected balance and memory and bad dreams!

Hmmm. No fun! It even doesn't sound harmless to me!
I'm not sure Maarten would appreciate his participating in this experiment.

Believe me, I'm still a big fan of multilingualism and I want to support the scientific research regarding this matter, but not at any price!

Or am i exaggerating?