The good, the bad and the interesting in brain research

I foresee a new field of political consultation opening in the next decade, bringing neuroscientists together with political scientists to create "neuropolls," a new kind of polling that relies on brain scans rather than "yes" or "no" answers to polls:

A team of American researchers attracted national attention last year when they announced results of a study that, they said, reveal key factors that will influence how swing voters cast their ballots in the upcoming presidential election. The researchers didn’t gain these miraculous insights by polling their subjects. They scanned their brains. Theirs was just the latest in a lengthening skein of studies that use new brain-scan technology to plumb the mysteries of the American political mind. But politics is just the beginning. It’s hard to pick up a newspaper without reading some newly minted neuroscientific explanation for complex human phenomena, from schizophrenia to substance abuse to ­homosexuality.

Can you imagine the impacts on consumer marketing alone? Forget about the fears that insurance companies can use our DNA in determining whether or not to issue coverage to us. What happens if the local Wal-Mart can do a quick scan of your brain? I don't doubt they've thought of it!

The history of American psychiatry can be divided into three overlapping eras: Asylum Psychiatry, Community Psychiatry, and today’s Corporate Psychiatry. In its improbable odyssey, psychiatry has gone from the back wards of hospitals to the boardrooms of corporations, from invisible to virtually omnipresent. As the psychiatrist and author Jonathan Metzl has pointed out, for its first century at least, psychiatry dealt with what were considered obscure mental processes and was conducted in the shadows. Now it is ­everywhere—­in the movies, in advertisements, on television shows, and, most significantly, in our ­bloodstreams.
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Two developments were at the heart of the revolution that has brought us the biologically based Corporate ­Psychiatry—­the discovery of drugs that actually work, at least for some people, and the rise of brain ­imaging.
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The most spectacular technology of all, ­fMRI—­or functional magnetic resonance imaging—­burst on the scene in the early 1990s. Unique in that it is able to provide images of both structure and function, fMRI produces not just slices of the brain but what are, in effect, extremely ­high-­resolution movies of what the brain looks like when it is working. By measuring blood flow, which is an indicator of brain activity, fMRI reveals which parts of the brain are being used most actively during a given task. That permits observation of the brain while it is actually functioning as a ­mind—­thinking, remembering, seeing, hearing, imagining, experiencing pleasure or ­pain.

Unlike earlier technologies, fMRI requires a very short total scan time (one to two minutes), and it is entirely noninvasive and extraordinarily comprehensive: It can measure brain responses at 100,000 locations. Of the wonders of brain imaging, and in particular fMRI, the leading neuropsychologist Steven Pinker has written exuberantly, “Every facet of mind, from mental images to the moral sense, from mundane memories to acts of genius, has been tied to tracts of neural real estate. Using fMRI . . . scientists can tell whether the owner of the brain is imagining a face or a place. They can knock out a gene and prevent a mouse from learning, or insert extra copies and make it learn better.”

Wow. Does that mean these "maps" can show me the memory of my concussion from playing dodgeball in the fourth grade? Or the memory of when my truck was totaled -- with me in it -- on an interstate off-ramp?

I can think of other places to re-explore in the real estate of my brain, too.