In The Field

World Science Festival: See through brain

The title for the session Transparent Brain: Visible Thoughts was inevitably misleading: each speaker fully acknowledged that their research has made only a small step towards the ambitious goal of understanding the thoughts brewing in the crevices of the brain.


John-Dylan Haynes said it best when he described his work as not quite mind reading. The take home message: the brain is not transparent yet (nor will it ever be), and we need to learn the rules that neurons use to communicate. What was apparent though is that neuroscientists have made leaps in this endeavor.

The four scientists gave brief presentations, frequently prodded by the moderator Brooke Gladstone, and this was followed by a free form discussion. Sadly, there was no time allocated to questions from the audience. With such a good opportunity to bring scientists and the interested public into one setting, it’s a wonder why the folks at WSF did not consider opening the floor to the audience.

The star of the night, in my humble opinion, was John Donoghue whose research bridges neuroscience and technology. Donoghue and colleagues recently inserted a small chip containing 100 electrodes into the motor cortex of a quadriplegic woman. After much training, she is able to move a cursor on a computer screen by “thinking” about how her arm and hand would move if she was in actuality moving the computer mouse. You could sense the audience’s awe and respect.

The immediate application of Donoghue’s research was contrasted with that of Haynes and Frank Tong who use fMRI technologies to try and understand how and when we make simple decisions. But real-world applications of fMRI are not too far off, according to the discussion, in lie detectors, airport scanners or interrogation tools.

And finally, bringing it all together, was the neuroethicist Paul Root Wolpe who aptly asked: shouldn’t your brain and all the thoughts it holds be absolutely private? If imaging technologies really do render the brain and its thoughts transparent, then this brings up all kinds of troubling questions about whether we would want our thoughts to be read, and whether they could be used against us in court. For instance, could you be prosecuted for simply thinking about committing a crime?

Last words: Gladstone won points for all the geeky comments (there may have been a reference to Star Trek: TNG as well as the X-Files). And as cerebrally scintillating as the talk was, it was equally impressive to see who showed up: a packed room filled with no apparent demographic, just as many college kids as senior citizens. And a testament to the diversity: I shamelessly did a not-so-subtle quintuple-take when I spotted Cameron Diaz in the audience!

Posted on behalf of Neda Afsarmanesh.

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