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Mapping the Mind

By Frances-Catherine Quevenco, on 14 June 2011

Optical illusion

Can a person’s neuroanatomy tell them about who they are? This was one of the most intriguing questions asked at a talk with Prof. Robert Turner, director of Neurophysics at the Max-Planck Institute, and Geraint Rees, director of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL.

Unlike the other talks I had been to, I had decided to bring two guests sans science-background along for the ride, hoping that after the lecture they too would share my enthusiasm for neuroscience. Professor Robert Turner began with an introduction to the realm of neuroscience, covering the birth of phrenology by Franz Joseph Gall to Maguire’s study on increased hippocampi in taxi drivers in 2000. Geraint Rees then proceeded to address the question of whether an individual’s brain structure played a role in determining how they saw the world. Rees pointed out that in fact the visual cortices of different individuals differ two- or three-fold, so does this affect how we see?

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Can we read minds?

By Frances-Catherine Quevenco, on 13 June 2011

Can we read minds using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)? With a queue spanning from the doors of the Pillar Room to the entrance of Cheltenham’s Town Hall, I could tell I was not the only one eager to find out. UCL’s Mark Lythgoe, along with Professor Derek Jones and Peter Sharpe from the Cobalt Imaging Centre, would attempt to answer this question by conducting a live brain scan and using their knowledge of the brain to read a volunteer’s mind.

Functional MRI monitors the activity of the brain by observing which areas of the brain contain statistically significant Blood Oxygenation Level Dependent (BOLD) responses. When one area of the brain is more activated than another, it requires more energy to process information, which is provided by haemoglobin in the blood that carries oxygen. Thus more haemoglobin and oxygen implicate higher activation. This is the basis of BOLD responses.

Although this technology holds promise for future use in medicine and research, there are still confounds that need to be taken into consideration and using fMRI without considering these can have incredible social implications. One incident retold in the talk considered the case of Amiti Sharma, who was prosecuted for murdering her husband based on images of her brain. Is fMRI technology indeed advanced enough to read minds? Are these grounds enough for prosecution?

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Why do YOUNG MINDS think the way they do?

By Andrea Pochylova, on 13 June 2011

Recently, there has been a negative vibe in society about teenagers supported by David Cameron’s comment on the broken society and its youth. For the question why do young people think the way they do, answers Sarah-Jayne Blakemore from  the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, who explained the changes in behaviour at Cheltenham Science Festival.

During the teenage years, the adolescent brain undergoes enormous development, particularly changes in white matter. White matter largely increases, while grey matter decreases. Sarah-Jane explains that during the adjustments (of proportion between the white and grey matter) the way an individual handles information changes, and with it perception of risk changes too.

She has done an experiment, where she measured how much risk people would take while playing videogames (car racing). The research has shown that teenagers chose to undertake risk much more than the other two studied groups (20–24 and 25–28 year olds). This phenomenon was especially visible in an environment where a couple of friends were watching; under peer pressure the youngest group (13–17) would choose to undertake the most risky situations.

Sarah-Jane and other speakers suggest that in our adult-oriented society, we should be less judgemental about the challenges of today’s Young Minds and rather support them and help them to achieve their true potentials.