Watching the cogs go round - Cover story
1 min read
Imaging techniques are helping researchers to understand the workings of the brain almost in real time. By David Boothroyd.
What is the most complex known object? Our galaxy? DNA molecules? The web? Wrong: the most complicated structure we know of is what is enabling you to read this – your brain.
With 100billion neurons, each linked to as many as 10,000 other neurons, plus many different chemical signalling processes and functional areas, the hyper network that is the human brain dwarfs any other object known to science.
Only a few decades ago, the idea that we would be able to understand how it works, in precise detail, must have looked hopeless. Yes, it could be dissected after death and its structure examined. But how much could that ever tell us about its true nature, which is surely defined by what it enables its owner to do, second by second, as they live?
It is surely one of the greatest achievements of any technology yet developed that, in little more than 30 years, we have started to unravel how the brain works. A series of scanning techniques – some well established, others quite new and still emerging – are now slowly but surely revealing how the brain performs its miracles.
These techniques include computed tomography (CT), positron emission tomography (PET), electroencephalography (EEG), magnetoencephalography (MEG), single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) and, arguably the most important and the one that has seen the most significant advances, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and its relative, functional MRI (FMRI).
Many of these scanning techniques have been with us for some time – decades in some instances. But it is only relatively recently that technological advances have started to transform the whole nature of brain scanning, for one simple reason: speed.
