Links for Keyword: Brain imaging

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by Carl Zimmer If I didn’t know Sebastian Seung was a neuroscientist, I would have pegged him as a computer game designer. His onyx-black hair seems frozen in a windstorm. He wears black sneakers, jeans, and a frayed bomber jacket over an untucked shirt covered in fluorescent blobs. If someone had blindfolded me on Vassar Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, led me into Building 46 on the campus of MIT, past the sign that says Department of Brain and Cognitive Science, taken me up in the elevator to the fifth floor and whisked off the blindfold in Seung’s lab, I still wouldn’t have guessed he had anything to do with brains. There are no specimens floating in jars on the shelves. There are no electrodes plugged into the heads of sea slugs. Instead, I see a dozen young men gazing at monitors, some pushing their computer mice, others drawing tethered pens across digital tablets to manipulate 3-D images, each packed with more megabytes than a feature film on a Blu-ray Disc. And there is Seung himself, gazing over the shoulder of postdoc Daniel Berger, whose monitor looks like a science fiction forest, with branches and trunks colored turquoise and cherry, floating unrooted in space. I almost find myself wondering when Seung’s next game will hit the stores. But appearances to the contrary, Seung is an expert on the web of neurons that make up the brain. And the images he’s creating are part of an ambitious attempt to understand how the connections between those brain cells give rise to the mind. “How do you put together dumb cells and get something smart?” he asks. © 2012, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System
Link ID: 16552 - Posted: 03.22.2012

Neuroscience: Making connections

Jon Bardin A building that once housed a Second World War torpedo factory seems an unlikely location for a project aiming to map the human brain. But the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging — an outpost of the Massachusetts General Hospital in an industrialized stretch of Boston's riverfront — is home to an impressive collection of magnetic resonance imaging machines. In January, I slid into the newest of these, head first. The operator ran a few test sequences to see whether I experienced any side effects from the unusually rapid changes in this machine's magnetic field. And, when I didn't — no involuntary muscle twitches or illusory flashes of light in my peripheral vision — we began. The machine hummed, then started to vibrate. For 90 minutes, I held still as it scanned my brain. That scan would be one of the first carried out by the Human Connectome Project (HCP), a five-year, US$40-million initiative funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, to map the brain's long-distance communications network. The network, dubbed the 'connectome', is a web of nerve-fibre bundles that criss-cross the brain in their thousands and form the bulk of the brain's white matter. It relays signals between specialized regions devoted to functions such as sight, hearing, motion and memory, and ties them together into a system that perceives, decides and acts as a unified whole. The connectome is bewilderingly complex and poorly understood. The HCP proposes to resolve this by using new-generation magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines, like that used to scan my brain, to trace the connectomes of more than 1,000 individuals. The hope is that this survey will establish a baseline for what is normal, shed light on what the variations might mean for qualities such as intelligence or sociability, and possibly reveal what happens if the network goes awry. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

A mania for dumbing down

It's not always clever to use brain science as an explanation for the most complex human problems. In the vast literature documenting the possible causes of the financial crises, from tepid governments to loose monetary policy to greedy bankers, there was the more lucid theme of a belief in the infallible nature of modern economic models, those mathematical pieces of wonder that tried to incorporate everything from the weather to political power-plays into the all-encompassing term that is risk. At the heart of this flawed world-view was the idea that economics had become a science much like physics and biochemistry - quantifiable, measurable and able to be modelled. In the wreckage thereafter, the reductionism inherent in such hubris was there for all to see. But the scientism that had inebriated the world of economics is part of a broader trend of viewing our very natures in a stripped back to the biological bones caricature. It is best epitomised by the ubiquity of musings about the brain from those attempting to bolster their authority, which includes everyone from leadership gurus to astrologers. The word is out that human consciousness - from the most elementary tingle of sensation to the most sophisticated sense of self - is identical with neural activity in the human brain and that this extraordinary metaphysical discovery is underpinned by the latest findings in neuroscience. The republic of letters is in thrall to the idea of neuroplasticity, imagining in wonder their brains modifying cells in parallel with their daily meanderings. © 2012 Fairfax Media

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior; Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System; Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness
Link ID: 16527 - Posted: 03.17.2012

Brain 'X-ray' exposes broken connections after injury

Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV Just like an X-ray reveals fractured bones, a new imaging technique can now pinpoint broken connections in the brain resulting from injuries for the first time. Developed by Walter Schneider and a team from the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, the technology, called high definition fibre tracking (HDFT), allows doctors to visualise breaks in bundles of fibres, called fibre tracts, that connect different parts of the brain and control functions like language and limb movement. "Until now, there was no objective way of identifying how the injury damaged the patient's brain tissue, predicting how the patient would fare or planning rehabilitation to maximise the recovery," says neurosurgeon David Okonkwo, a member of the team. To generate the vivid brain images, computer algorithms process data captured from a sophisticated MRI scan. The pictures reveal forty major cables in the brain which can be dissected virtually to pinpoint a damaged area. The injured region can then be compared to the healthy side of the brain to quantify the proportion of severed fibres and thus the degree of connection that has been lost. This detail can help predict how a patient will recover from an injury. The technique is already being used to supplement conventional imaging, helping to plan the removal of tumours or vascular abnormalities in the brain. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior; Chapter 19: Language and Hemispheric Asymmetry
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System; Chapter 15: Language and Our Divided Brain
Link ID: 16477 - Posted: 03.06.2012

First brain movie captures a mouse thinking

Andy Coghlan, reporter Ever wondered what's going on in the brain of a mouse? Now brain cells have been captured sending and receiving signals in high resolution for the first time, essentially showing its brain in action. To make the tiniest anatomical details of neurons visible, Katrin Willig and her team at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany, gave mice an extra gene that generates a yellow glow. When their brains were viewed with a special microscope through a glass-sealed window in the skull, the signal junctions in neurons lit up. At these intersections, tiny spines sprout from longer branching fibers, called dendrites, and exchange signals by linking up with spines on neighbouring cells. The movie spans a 20 to 30 minute period, during which a live mouse was anaesthetised. The spines physically move and wobble at the top and base as they form and break connections with neighbouring spines. "There are always connections breaking and forming and it's the natural movement of the spine," says Willig. "It may be the mouse thinking". Brain cells have been imaged in live animals before, but the latest movie is the first to reveal parts of neurons in such fine detail - down to a resolution of 70 nanometers. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

MR Spectroscopy Helps Measure Brain Tumor Mutation

Using MR spectroscopy, a team of researchers has developed a way to measure whether brain tumors have a mutation in a gene called IDH. The tissue being analyzed is inside the red boxes. The tumor on the left has the mutation, while the tumor on the right does not. A team of researchers from MIT, Harvard University, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Agios Pharmaceuticals are using MR spectroscopy to measure whether brain tumors have a mutation in the IDH gene. Scientists are now targeting isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH) in a hope to slow tumor growth and find new ways to treat gliomas. Gliomas, the most common types of brain tumor, are also among the deadliest cancers: Their mortality rate is nearly 100 percent, in part because there are very few treatments available. A team of researchers from MIT, Harvard University, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Agios Pharmaceuticals has now developed a way to identify a particular subset of brain tumors, which may help doctors choose treatments and create new drugs that target the disease’s underlying genetic mutation. Scientists have known for several years that many brain tumors involve a mutation in the gene for an enzyme called isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH). This enzyme is involved in cell metabolism — the process of breaking down sugar molecules to extract energy from them. IDH mutations are found in up to 86 percent of low-grade gliomas, which have a better prognosis than high-grade gliomas, also called glioblastomas. Patients with low-grade gliomas can survive for years, though the tumors almost always prove fatal. SciTechDaily Copyright © 1998 - 2012

Will future tech read your mind?

By Alan Boyle Nothing focuses your attention on the future like a forecast, especially when it comes to the technologies that will be changing daily life in the years to come. Five years, to be exact. That's why forecasts like IBM's annual "Five in Five" are so thought-provoking, even if they're occasionally wrong. Actually, IBM's record is pretty good: This month marks the five-year anniversary of IBM's first list of five technologies that were expected to make the most impact in five years' time. The company nailed 2006's predictions on the rise of telemedicine, location-aware mobile devices, real-time speech translation and nanotechnology. But the fifth prediction, which focused on the rise of virtual 3-D environments, hasn't worked out the way IBM expected. Sure, Second Life is still around — in fact, I'll be hosting my next "Virtually Speaking Science" show in Second Life on Jan. 4. But such virtual worlds haven't become the principal vehicle for real-world commerce ... yet. "It's not perfect," admitted Bernie Meyerson, IBM's vice president of innovation. Sometimes the company's researchers latch onto a idea whose time has not yet come, and perhaps never will. But for the most part, "this stuff has actually panned out a lot," Meyerson said. Is technological progress always a good thing? Not necessarily, if you're talking about key-logging software on mobile devices, or government-supported spyware. The latest predictions from IBM, issued today, have lots of potential for a dreams-vs.-nightmares debate. © 2011 msnbc.com

Courtroom Neuroscience Not Ready for Prime Time

by Sara Reardon LONDON—The tantalizing prospect of using a brain scanner to determine whether a witness is lying, or a genetic analysis to determine whether a murder suspect is predisposed to commit violent crimes, are premature and unrealistic, according to a new report on neuroscience and the law presented today by the U.K. Royal Society. But neuroscientists might be able to provide evidence for determining whether head injuries are accidental, and whether a violent offender is likely to strike again. As neuroscience advances, it's easy to see why lawyers are tempted to bring its tools into play on their clients' behalf, the report's authors say. "Neuroscience is engaged in understanding behavior and the law is engaged in regulating behavior," experimental psychologist Nicholas Mackintosh of the University of Cambridge, who headed the Royal Society's working group on neuroscience and the law, said at a press briefing last week. Although it's not known whether lawyers have brought mental health reports or brain imaging into U.K. courtrooms as evidence, mental health is used as a defence about 200 times per year in the United States, the report noted, especially in murder trials where the defendant may receive the death penalty. One useful application of neuroscience in the courtroom would be the ability to detect lies by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). But at best, Mackintosh said, such imaging might be able to detect deliberate lies; it would be useless if a witness truly believed that he was telling the truth. That limitation hasn't stopped at least two U.S.-based companies from marketing such lie detectors, however, and "we take a singularly skeptical view of that," Mackintosh said. "Neuroscience, although very promising, is very young." © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 16146 - Posted: 12.13.2011

Getting the picture of how someone died

By Nathan Seppa By screening people who have died with full-body computed tomography or magnetic resonance imaging, doctors can often determine the cause of death without an autopsy, British researchers report November 22 in the Lancet. Further combining a CT scan with a quick heart test might result in a solid determination of cause of death in up to half of cases referred for autopsy, says study coauthor Ian Roberts, a pathologist at the University of Oxford. Autopsies are invasive and sometimes inconclusive, and some people object to the procedure on cultural or religions grounds. The new data suggest that imaging may provide an alternative in some cases, adding to post-mortem accuracy and easing the burden of grieving survivors, says Roberts. Whether imaging would save money is unknown, he says. At their essence, autopsies have changed little in the past century but remain the gold standard post-mortem exam. In recent years, some coroners and medical examiners have considered the use of medical imaging with MRI or CT scans, but few labs or hospitals have adopted the technologies because little research data existed to document their utility in this setting. For the new study, Roberts and his colleagues examined 182 deceased people whose cause of death wasn’t known. All underwent a CT scan and MRI. Radiologists analyzed those results separately and combined, arriving at a cause of death from each set of images. The radiologists also ranked how much confidence they had in each cause-of-death conclusion — definite, probable, possible or uncertain. Pathologists then performed autopsies on all of the bodies. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Mind-goggling

IF YOU think the art of mind-reading is a conjuring trick, think again. Over the past few years, the ability to connect first monkeys and then men to machines in ways that allow brain signals to tell those machines what to do has improved by leaps and bounds. In the latest demonstration of this, just published in the Public Library of Science, Bin He and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota report that their volunteers can successfully fly a helicopter (admittedly a virtual one, on a computer screen) through a three-dimensional digital sky, merely by thinking about it. Signals from electrodes taped to the scalp of such pilots provide enough information for a computer to work out exactly what the pilot wants to do. That is interesting and useful. Mind-reading of this sort will allow the disabled to lead more normal lives, and the able-bodied to extend their range of possibilities still further. But there is another kind of mind-reading, too: determining, by scanning the brain, what someone is actually thinking about. This sort of mind-reading is less advanced than the machine-controlling type, but it is coming, as three recently published papers make clear. One is an attempt to study dreaming. A second can reconstruct a moving image of what an observer is looking at. And a third can tell what someone is thinking about. First, dreams. To study them, Martin Dresler, of the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, in Munich, and his colleagues recruited a group of what are known as lucid dreamers. They report their results in this week’s Current Biology. © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2011

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior; Chapter 10: Vision: From Eye to Brain
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System; Chapter 7: Vision: From Eye to Brain
Link ID: 15962 - Posted: 10.29.2011

Those Scan Results Are Just an App Away

By ANNE EISENBERG EVEN in the vast world of apps, Dr. Patrick J. Gagnon has one with an unusual distinction: it had to be cleared for use by the Food and Drug Administration. Dr. Gagnon, a radiation oncologist, uses the app when he sees patients in his Fairhaven, Mass., office. He pulls his iPhone out of his pocket, and then he and a patient, side by side, can view images on it and discuss treatment. “It’s a nice way to go through a scan with a patient,” he said. The app he uses, called Mobile MIM, made by MIM Software, can turn an iPhone or an iPad into a diagnostic medical instrument. It allows physicians to examine scans and to make diagnoses based on magnetic resonance imaging, computed tomography and other technologies if they are away from their workstations. Dr. Gagnon says the app will also prove useful when he wants to give physicians at other hospitals rapid access to images for immediate decisions. Mobile MIM is among a handful of medical apps that the F.D.A. has cleared for diagnostic use. Many others will probably appear as more smartphones and tablets make their way into the pockets of doctors’ white coats or onto their office desks. In preparation, the F.D.A. is working on guidelines for such apps, and in September it conducted a two-day public workshop for feedback. Only a small subset of the myriad health apps coming to the market will actually need the agency’s regulatory attention, said Bakul Patel, a policy adviser at the Center for Devices and Radiological Health, an F.D.A. unit in Silver Spring, Md. © 2011 The New York Times Company

New Way to Gain a Clear View of the Brain

By RITCHIE S. KING A group of Japanese neuroscientists is trying to peer into the mind — literally. They have devised a way to turn the brain’s opaque gray matter into a glassy, see-through substance. The group, based at the government-financed Riken Brain Science Institute in Wako, Japan, has created an inexpensive chemical cocktail that transforms dead biological tissue from a colored mass into what looks like translucent jelly. Soaking brain tissue in the solution makes it easier for neuroscientists to see what’s inside, a step they hope will uncover the physical basis of personality traits, memories and even consciousness. “I’m very excited about the potential,” said Dr. Atsushi Miyawaki, a researcher on the team, which published its discovery in the journal Nature Neuroscience. The chemical solution — patented under the name Scale, a phonetic approximation of the Japanese word for “transparent” — could help neuroscientists map the brain’s underlying architecture, though that goal is still a distant one. At the moment, researchers are working to build such a map, called a “connectome,” of mouse brains, which are far less complex than human ones. Ultimately, this mapping could be conducted on brains of different ages, Dr. Miyawaki said, providing a glimpse into how the organ develops and even how genetic differences might affect that development. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Imaging of traumatic brain injury patients swifter and safer with new technology at NIH

Researchers have a new weapon in their arsenal to diagnose and treat traumatic brain injury (TBI) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among military service members and civilians. The National Institutes of Health Clinical Center began imaging patients last week on a first-of-its-kind, whole-body simultaneous positron emission topography (PET) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) device. The Biograph mMR offers a more complete picture of abnormal metabolic activity in a shorter time frame than separate MRI and PET scans, two tests many patients undergo. The purchase of the Biograph mMR was made possible through the Center for Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine (CNRM), a Department of Defense-funded collaboration between the NIH and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. The CNRM carries out research in TBI and PTSD that would benefit servicemen and women at Walter Reed National Navy Medical Center, near the NIH campus in Bethesda, Md. Researchers at the NIH Clinical Center will also use the Biograph mMR in studies with patients with other brain disorders, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. "This scanner combines the two most powerful imaging tools," said David Bluemke, M.D., Ph.D., director of NIH Clinical Center Radiology and Imaging Sciences. "The MRI points us to abnormalities in the body, and the PET tells us the metabolic activity of that abnormality, be it a damaged part of the brain or a tumor. This will be a major change for many patients." The new device makes patient care swifter and safer. The faster turnaround time and more comprehensive results will help diagnose patients at an earlier stage of disease, leading to better outcomes, Bluemke said.

Miniature microscopes capture neurons in action

Zoë Corbyn Scientists have developed a miniature fluorescence microscope small enough to implant in the head of a living mouse and gather images from its brain without hindering its movement. The 1.9-gram, 2.4-cubic-centimetre device is described today in Nature Methods1. The device has already yielded results. The authors, led by applied physicist Mark Schnitzer and electrical engineer Abbas El Gamal of Stanford University in Stanford, California, report findings regarding both the dilation of capillaries in mouse brains and the firing of motor-activity-related Purkinje neurons, as well as some potential in vitro applications for the device, such as counting cells or spotting bacteria in samples. With a maximum resolution of 2.5 microns, the microscope is not as powerful as conventional bench-top models, which have resolutions as fine as 0.5 microns. But it does have a "very good" field of view which is larger than some bench-top models, notes Schnitzer. "For neuroscientists, [this method] is going to enable some experiments that we couldn't do before – indeed it already has", he says. Schnitzer and three of his colleagues have already founded a company, called Inscopix, in hopes of capitalizing on their device. While miniature versions of fluorescence microscopes have been produced before, including one by the Stanford group in 2008 that was lighter, none have been self contained or made using mass produced components. This microscope "contains all the optical parts within a single, small and easily-transportable housing, and we use mass-fabricated components, which opens up the possibility of mass-producing the entire microscope," says Schnitzer. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Brain scans reduce murder sentence in Italian court

Jessica Hamzelou, reporter An Italian woman is the latest person to have a murder sentence reduced on the grounds that abnormalities in her brain, and genes, could explain her behaviour. Neuroimaging is being used more and more in courtrooms across the globe, but is it really possible to judge how responsible a person is for their actions by looking at a picture of their brain? Two years ago, Stefania Albertani was convicted of murdering her own sister. Albertani is widely reported as having killed her sibling by force-feeding her psychotropic drugs, before setting fire to her corpse. Months later, she went after her parents. After being found guilty of the killing, Albertani was initially sentenced to lifetime imprisonment. Appeals by neuroscientists and geneticists, however, have controversially succeeded in reducing the sentence to 20 years - a first for the Italian courts. The scientists involved pointed out that a scan of Albertani's brain looked different to those of ten healthy women. According to the journal Nature, the team claimed that her behaviour could be explained by alterations in the grey matter of two key brain regions: the anterior cingulate gyrus - involved in inhibiting behaviour - and the insula, which has been linked to aggression. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

The Scientist Who Drew Brains, and Then a Nobel Prize

Anatomist Santiago Ramon y Cajal was the first to see--and illustrate--what neurons really do. His exquisitely detailed drawings changed our understanding of the brain and nervous system. Cajal relentlessly pursued his microcopic study of animal tissues, leading to an essential discovery: Brain signals jump from cell to cell rather than flow through a continuous web of fibers, as was believed at the time. Cajal began to study histology because it was cheap. He was a man of poor health and modest means, and examining stained specimens required little more than a microscope and patience. The fact that he had no access to the fancy tools of leading bacteriologists--he held only an obscure academic post in the scientific backwater of Zaragoza, Spain--turned him toward the study of animal tissues and cells. These "captivating scenes in the life of the infinitely small," as he called them in his autobiography, Recollections of My Life, went on to inspire ideas that overturned how scientists understood the brain and the nerves.? Here are two of his cutaway views of the cerebellum, which coordinates movement. The top drawing has a rich diversity of cells, including treelike Purkinje cells, seen in red and tan, and stellate cells, shown in black. The bottom drawing is a longitudinal cross section of the cerebellum. Copyright © 2011, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Head-Mounted Laser Microscope Peers Inside Mice's Brains

by Will Hunt The laser in a tiny but powerful microscope is giving neuroscientists their best look yet at how the brains of rats work as they scurry about their daily activities. Until now, the ability of researchers to study the animals’ brains while they socialize or look for food has been relatively limited. The best method was to hook up a restrained rat to electrodes that monitor brain signals and then play images on a screen in front of the rat to create the illusion that it is roaming through a landscape. But virtual reality can go only so far in simulating natural movement. “To understand how the animal’s brain operates, we need to let it behave as naturally as possible,” says Jason Kerr, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. To that end, Kerr and his team recently developed a 0.2-ounce multi-photon microscope that can track networks of brain cells and individual neurons. Mounted on a rat’s head, the 1.5-inch plastic and titanium instrument allows the animal to move freely and captures in real time how brain cells interact during everyday behaviors. One key to the microscope’s success is its powerful  2-photon laser, which emits pulses that probe up to 300 microns deep into the brain. Before researchers activate the laser, they must inject a fluorescent dye to highlight brain cells. Then the laser bombards the dye with photons, causing it to glow green when a cell is active. A miniature scanner guides the beam across the cells. A plastic optical fiber collects the emitted light, which is converted into an electric signal that appears as an image on a computer screen, allowing scientists to track cells without limiting the rats’ mobility. Since rats and humans probably share similar decision-making mechanisms, this technology could help us understand how we make choices, Kerr says. Copyright © 2011, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Glasgow University researchers 'decode' brainwaves

Scientists believe they are a step closer to being able to read people's minds after decoding human brainwaves. Glasgow University researchers asked volunteers to identify different emotions on images of human faces. They then measured the volunteers' resulting brainwaves using a technique called electroencephalography (EEG). Once researchers compared the answers to the brainwaves recorded, they were able to decode the type of information the brainwaves held relating to vision. The research was carried out by the university's institute of neuroscience and psychology. Six volunteers were presented with images of people's faces, displaying different emotions such as happiness, fear and surprise. On different experimental trials, parts of the images were randomly covered so that, for example, only the eyes or mouth were visible. The volunteers were then asked to identify the emotion being displayed. The participants' brainwaves were measured using EEG which allowed the researchers to identify which parts of the brain were active when looking at different parts of the face. BBC © 2011

How "Inadmissible" Brain Scans Can Still Influence the Courts

By Michael S. Gazzaniga The world of law as practiced in the real world is far removed from that usually discussed by law professors and philosophers or shown on television and in movies. In idealized or fictional cases the law always operates formally and may seem to pursue some abstract quest for justice. In the everyday practice of law, however, things work differently—it is all about cobbling together the most compelling and convincing story possible either for or against a defendant. Attorneys will shoehorn into their arguments any information they can find that might further their ends. The legal system therefore efficiently uses every scrap of relevant data that might pertain to a case—including findings such as brain scans that might not normally be formally admissible during trials. The reality is that few criminal cases—only about 3 percent of federal ones and a bit more than 4 percent at the state level—ever go to trial. Normally, after someone is charged with a crime, the prosecution and the defense attorneys engage in confidential plea bargaining away from the courtroom. The plea negotiations are usually conducted informally (although in intense cases, such as those that might involve the death penalty, they can take on the appearance of a condensed sentencing hearing). During these plea bargaining discussions, the defense presents any available information that might reduce the severity of the charges or the potential penalty against the defendant. To save a client from the death penalty, for instance, the defense might bring up brain-imaging data that suggests the defendant has a certain neurological or psychiatric condition that should reduce his or her culpability. The defense might suggest that the brain scans would at least cast doubt on the prosecution's ability to get a jury to return a sentence of death. © 2011 Scientific American

The Brain Is Not an Explanation

"Brain scans pinpoint how chocoholics are hooked." This headline appeared in the Guardian a few years ago above a science story that began: "Chocoholics really do have chocolate on the brain." The story went on to describe a study that used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of chocoholics and non-cravers. The study found increased activity in the pleasure centers of the chocoholics' brains, and the Guardian report concluded: "There may also be some truth in calling the love of chocolate an addiction in some people." Really? Is that a fair conclusion to draw from the fMRI data in this study, reported in the European Journal of Neuroscience? Brain stories have become incredibly popular in the news pages in recent years -- and brain imaging stories especially, in part because of the colorful "pictures" that often accompany the data and analysis. But how much can we really conclude from these images? How skeptical should we be, as readers of the science pages in the paper? A growing number of scientists, including neuroscientists themselves, are calling for more caution from scientists, both in reporting and interpreting fMRI data. Among them is University of Illinois neuroscientist Diane Beck, who in a recent article in Perspectives on Psychological Science discussed both the appeal and the pitfalls of popular stories about the brain and behavior. The difficulties of these stories begin with the technology itself, the sheer complexity of which makes accurate reporting a challenge. Despite those colorful images that grab our attention in the news pages, the fMRI is not a photograph -- not even close. © 2011 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

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