The Brain Scan Live offenders line up

Behind the Scenes at Cheltenham is a daily blog from the UCL CABI team at Cheltenham Science Festival. Every day, a member of the team will be talking about their experiences of running a stand.

Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6 |

Orchestrating and conducting a live MRI scan for an audience of more than 600 people is very hard. Very, very hard.

On the penultimate day, our boss and director of the Festival, Mark Lythgoe, phoned me. He was due to present a show the following day titled Brain Scan Live: Lies and Deception, and he wanted me to take an integral role behind the scenes.

The idea of the show was to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to demonstrate that your brain doesn’t lie when presented with images that evoke a memorable response.

I was primarily tasked with constructing a crime scene where a volunteer from the audience would commit theft. The participant would then be taken to the nearby Cobalt Imaging Centre where they would be presented with pictures of the crime scene while undergoing an fMRI scan. In theory, photos from the crime scene would evoke a strong ‘lighting-up’ of the brain in the scans whereas photos of unfamiliar rooms would have little effect.

The first challenge was finding a room for the crime scene: we located a small office in the Cheltenham Town Hall. There was a distinct sense of irony when I had to explain to a stranger that I was rearranging her office and sifting through her desk drawers for a science experiment.

Despite her raised eyebrows, I convinced her I was telling the truth. Quickly I set about rearranging the room and planting some visual cues designed to evoke the volunteer’s recognition response during the scan. These included some crates of Coke cans, a mask replete with glowing green hair, some deliberately placed indoor plants, a dirty plate and a giant foam thumb pointing at the bounty. Furiously I photographed the office along with another four different control rooms before bed.

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The festival has been incredible and informative for the whole week, but this has did not stop the weekend from being better.

Myself and Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock

I kickstarted the weekend with Barry Marshall – a Nobel Prize winner in recognition of his 1982 experiment on himself, which showed that the bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, causes stomach ulcers.

Hearing how he grew these bacteria and then swallowed a potentially lethal dosage of them was fascinating! There was no easy or correct cure for these ulcers at the time and so, unlike in most scientific situations, his hypothesis had to work.

My favourite talk for the day had to be Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, who has inspired me since I decided to study science, so I was really happy to finally meet her.

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Come on, isn’t that yesterday’s news? Most people mildly interested in particle physics will have heard by now that the data indicating neutrinos had travelled faster than the speed of light late last year was the result of a faulty cable in the OPERA experiment. Einstein’s relativity theory still seems to hold and time travel once again is relegated to science fiction movies and novels.

What new could this event then bring us? A lot indeed, because Jim Al-Khalili and his fellow physicists on the panel are doing a brilliant job in explaining not so much the OPERA experiment or neutrino travel, but how the quality of scientific results can be assured and what the consequences of publishing data which has not been checked thoroughly enough are. Actually, in explaining the actual relativity theory they are maybe doing the least convincing job here.

“Extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof and extraordinary proof needs extraordinary care.” This is how Jon Butterworth, professor of physics at UCL, puts it and consequently argues that is was a mistake to release the data before all eventualities had been checked.

Giles Barr from the department of physics at Oxford counters: in his opinion, the publication of the data combined with the request to independently check the OPERA results was the right thing to do, because only in hindsight can it be known what the cause of the results were.
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Agriculture: a game-changer

The man outside the venue at first looked unassuming. “Let me give you a free handout,” he said. I began to reach out for the photocopied leaflet before noticing the title: Evolution – a lethal antiscience. “Do you know what antiscience is?” I had encountered a lot of different people at Cheltenham Science Festival, but not yet the evangelical campaigner.

Sadly, I didn’t have the time to get into a debate about whether his quotes from the Bible counted as evidence from a peer-reviewed publication, but the talk, Evolution out of Africa, proved to be a suitably enjoyable alternative. Mark Thomas, Angela Clow and Jonathan Rees told us about the adaptations humans migrating out of Africa picked up, and what they mean for us today.

Mark began by telling us about adaptations resulting from changes in the human diet. Advances in food culture greatly change how we work: tools for hunting, first used about two and a half million years ago, caused our diet to change from largely vegetable- to meat-based, providing us more energy for the expansion of that energetically-expensive organ, the brain.

One of the most significant dietary changes was a very recent one: the advent of farming. About 10,000 years ago humans began to cultivate crops, bringing radical changes to our diet. With small numbers of grains dominating instead of a wide variety of foraged plants, the breadth of the diet decreased, while the relative amounts of carbohydrates rocketed.

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