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The BSI Dream
- A Fitting Start of a New Millennium
| Dr. Andreas A. Ioannides |
Head, Laboratory for
Human Brain Dynamics |
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Philosophers have debated for centuries the nature of reality: does the universe have an independent objective reality when there is no observer to experience it? Physicists late last century felt that just round the corner in the twentieth century a description of a predictable, objective and knowable physical world was waiting. What a glorious failure this turned out to be: it produced no final and all embracing description of the universe, but a new panorama where external reality was described in terms of elusive particles and probabilities. Today, physics offers again a new theory of everything, a little more knotty than last century's one, to be born in a new century out of the marriage of strings and black holes two of the children of twentieth century physics. Physics building blocks have aged a dimension in a century from points to strings.
Our own little but select BSI community has a twenty year mission worthy of straddling millennia: to understand, protect and finally create the brain. Looking back in history it is difficult to find a similarly extravagant plan so daringly pursued in such a short time scale. Astonishingly we believe we can do it, or at least we can go a long way in that triple goal - that is why we are here!
We study the reality and dreams in our own heads, we are dreamers and dream-makers, charged with the duty to make our case and make it good. In my team we believe that Magnetoencephalography (MEG), the technique we use, holds a special key in understanding brain function: MEG is capable of showing us the brain in action at the scales that really count: in space MEG contains information which distinguishes activity from segregated areas which can be as close as a fraction of a centimeter or in opposite sides of the head. This is good enough to separate most of the areas on the cortex which either specialise in processing specific aspects of stimuli, or assess their value for the organism, or control aspects of motor planning, or the recognition and induction of emotions or even mediate the passage from unconscious processing to wilful decision. In the temporal domain MEG can not only sample, but it is also senses changes only milliseconds apart, as long as it takes for the influence from one of the segregated areas to reach another. Most crucially we can do this in a completely non-invasive way on humans who can respond and describe their subjective sensations, feelings and mood. Furthermore we have and continue to refine tools to extract and show this information in the background of anatomy. We proudly fool ourselves to believe we have The key to unlock the mysteries of the brain.
Every now and then we open our eyes and we see glimpses of the universes in our colleagues minds. What a dream machine BSI is! You walk to a seminar on a topic you know next to nothing, and you realise how important the topic is in general but also for the understanding of one of your own small problems. At the BSI retreat you chat at a poster, or over coffee or in the bowling ring later with someone you never met before or knew anything of his/her work (although he/she was working just one floor away from you). Ideas and dreams will not carry you far in exploiting the potential that this new knowledge brings - you have to invest resources, amongst them the one that is most limited and hence most precious: your own time and the time of your team. A chat can spawn an idea but the idea will only turn into a tool if work is done often in two teams that never had any contact before. At the end it is a choice, a choice where to invest and harder still to what wonderful idea to shut your eyes - to chase too many will mean catching none.
So, as we step outside the partial view endowed by our tools we seek to combine what we have with what other teams have with style and intelligent economy of effort. Our macro MEG view is but a piece in the mosaic and must be seen in conjunction with the single unit recordings at a finer scale and the grand-time-averages of hemodynamic measures. The foundations at the molecular and genetic level although seemingly distant are very often a crucial parameter and possibly the origin of much of the variability which we encounter.
Even in our dreams the top waits inviting but distant, and we know if and when we reach our target we will see plains below and even higher mountain ranges in the horizon. Our hope is that we can say to our children-dreamers "we have reached the summit we could set eyes to and more than anything we enjoyed the climb. It is your turn now, there far in the horizon is your mountain range and your summit is waiting for you, go and good luck".
As I write these words I remember a little boy some forty years ago in a dusty large-village-come-small-town on the other side of the planet. The boy dreamt great dreams, BSI-like dreams. A decade or two later the man witnessed the loss of his home which had grown rich and less dusty before it was taken away, and mourned in the belief that the childhood dreams were seemingly gone forever. But a decade or so later that little boy still inside me says thank you BSI for the dream, the dream is still the same and the dream is very much alive!
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