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By Doug
Beazley It's the Holy Grail of brain research: trapping God in a magnetic bottle. In late 2003, University of Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard started inviting local Carmelite nuns to strap themselves into a barber chair in his lab, so that he could scan their brains with a powerful magnetic field. He was looking for physical evidence of the unio mystica, the profoundly emotional Christian experience of God as a physical presence. Since devout Christians like the Carmelites only get the real unio once or twice in their lives, Beauregard asked the nuns to simply remember the sensation, while their heads were wrapped in electrodes. He wasn't trying to debunk the experience - just explain it, in biological terms. THE REAL THING "The experience is real, but the manifestation is in the brain," he told one newspaper. His hope is that by quantifying religious bliss, doctors may someday be able to induce it for anyone seeking spiritual comfort or growth. Imagine a machine that could mimic the sensations of religious rapture, without the bother of all that prayer and fasting. Nirvana, for the price of getting your teeth capped. Functional magnetic resonance imaging is the technology that's making these speculations possible. Unlike older medical imaging technologies like X-rays, MRI scans track where oxygenated blood is travelling throughout the brain, providing a real-time image of the brain in action. By scanning subjects when they're performing cognitive tasks (like remembering someone's name or communing with the Almighty), scientists hope to work out which parts of the brain are involved in which functions. From there, they hope to someday interpret - and influence - emotion, mood, even consciousness itself. Early last month, scientists affiliated with the University of Toronto announced promising early results for "deep brain stimulation" on severely depressed patients. DBS involves delivering high-frequency, low-voltage current through electrodes implanted directly in the grey matter. "We're talking here about people who'd failed every other type of therapy, including drugs," said lead investigator Dr. Helen Mayberg, now with Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia. "These people were so ill they wouldn't get up to go to the bathroom. Now, four out of six of the test patients are actually doing quite well." Mayberg's DBS therapy was modelled in part on brain-imaging work she published in 2002 on men taking medication for depression. It found that long-term recovery from depression required changes deep in the brain - in the brainstem, hippocampus and striatum. "These areas we're working on are very important for modulating negative moods. When they don't work, it's like a broken thermostat." MIND-READING Some researchers believe brain imaging could come much closer to actually tracking simple thoughts - "reading the mind," in a crude way. In 2003, researchers in the U.S. reported MRI scans of subjects telling lies showed a distinctive pattern of activity in the brain - suggesting the subject had to actively "suppress" the truth in order to lie. If the research stands up, it could be used to design lie-detectors based on brain imaging that would be far more effective than the crude polygraphs used today, which only measure the side-effects of anxiety. All of this work could be bringing us closer to a technology that could map consciousness - shining a bright light into the last dark corner of privacy in the modern world. "It's certainly possible," said Dr. Martin Lepage, who researches schizophrenia at Douglas Hospital in Montreal. "We're getting closer. "But it is disturbing, yes. There's so much about the mind we don't understand - how memories are formed, for example. We have to be humble, I think." SOURCE: Edmonton Sun More headlines at www.mindpowernews.com
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