The trends shaping brain research

As a school girl listening to the announcement that the structure of DNA had been solved. As a neuroscientist, whose research on brain damage recovery has improved the lives of countless babies born prematurely.  As Chief Scientist for Western Australia from 2006 to 2013.

And as the chair of the Advisory Board of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Integrative Brain Research, Lyn Beazley has been following and fashioning science’s trajectory for over 40 years.

Here, she describes three trends that will shape the next few decades of brain research.

And here, she talks about what it takes to be a world-class neuroscientist.

Only connect

From the galaxy of sensory information that bombards us, our brains can focus on only one or two stars at a time.

How this focusing and filtering plays into the myriad other tasks our brains have to do is of key interest to Jason Mattingley, CIBF chief investigator, and his team of 25 neuroscientists at the University of Queensland.

One of his recent studies got widespread attention because it showed, for the first time, how paying attention could directly influence the more routine brain function of controlling movement. [Download a PDF of the study]

In the study, Mattingley focused a magnetic field the size of a bottle top on the part of volunteers’ brain cortex that controls their left hand. Used alone, this transcranial magnetic stimulation — or TMS — marginally increases “plasticity”, the strength of connections between nerve cells.

But in the case of the “left hand” experiment, plasticity soared when volunteers also focused their attention on their left hand (flickering LED lights near the hand made sure this happened).

Brain plasticity is, of course, key to learning and memory. For stroke patients, it is also key to recovery.

Mattingley’s study was inspired by people who have had a stroke that triggers “spatial neglect” – a common condition, in which the brain ignores all sights and sounds on one side of the body. They recover their physical abilities much slower than people who have the same type of stroke, but without spatial neglect.

“We are trying to work out better ways for these people to improve function,” says Mattingley, “Our study suggests that they might recover more quickly if they are given both physical exercises and exercises to help them focus their attention on those physical movements.”

The work is rewarding. Still, Mattingley is sometimes wistful for what he calls a scientist’s “golden years”: the ‘postdoc’ period after a PhD, and before setting up a lab.

Postdocs can work anywhere; ask any scientific question. Mattingley went to King’s College, Cambridge. “There, I felt free to follow the scientific direction I wanted,” he says. And he got to eat at ‘High Table’. (“It was ridiculous for an Aussie,” he says.)

To recapture that carefree feeling, these days Mattingley takes leisurely bike rides along the Brisbane River with his partner Ada and son Nick.

David Van Essen and the Connectome-in-a-Box

Data is the life-blood of science. Without it, there’s no discovery. So it’s not surprising that traditionally it’s been guarded jealously by scientists; held close and protected.

But all that is changing as new imaging and computing technologies transform brain research — and, indeed, other sciences such as astronomy — spawning huge amounts of data and a new culture of sharing.

David Van Essen, who co-directs the Human Connectome Project from his lab at Washington University in St Louis, is a champion of this scientific open-data movement.

The HCP is using different types of brain scans to reveal the brain circuitry — or “connectomes” — of 1,200 healthy people, including twins and siblings. At the same time, HCP collects reams of information about behaviour, cognitive abilities, personality and genetics from the same people.

In this morass of data — we’re talking tens of terabytes here — there are fundamental discoveries to be made about how the internal workings of the brain relate to human behaviour. To speed things up, and to maximise the creative input into the analysis of the data, HCP makes its findings freely available to the global scientific community through the Connectome-in-a-Box program.

Here, Van Essen explains more about HCP, and Connectome-in-a-Box.

Van Essen’s lab also studies the folding of the human cerebral cortex, the crinkled outer part of the brain that is key to higher cognitive function such as language and memory. These studies include investigating abnormalities that occur in premature babies (the cortex is smoother in some regions), and the subtle differences seen in brain disorders such as autism and schizophrenia.

The cortex is essentially a pizza-like sheet of tissue that is folded and scrunched during development so that it fits neatly inside the skull. Here, Van Essen talks about his idea for how, and why, this happens.

When Van Essen, who is a member of CIBF’s advisory committee, is not doing science, he enjoys jogging, as well as backpacking and cross-country skiing with his family, including grandchildren.

Marta Garrido and the oracle brain

Your brain has to be ahead of the game, predicting what will happen next and combining its predictions with information from the environment. This allows you to respond rapidly to a threat or opportunity — an incoming tennis ball, say.

The idea that the brain is a prediction machine — the so-called “Bayesian brain hypothesis” – is at the forefront of brain research. But the details are still being worked out.

This is what Marta Garrido, a CIBF chief investigator, researches at the University of Queensland.

“I look at pattern recognition, and what happens in the brain when we encounter a surprising event,” she says. One of her lines of enquiry is working out how distraction – performing an intellectually demanding task, say – changes the brain’s ability to learn and predict.

Previously, Garrido studied electrical activity in the brains of people in coma.

She was one of a team that used maths to extract signatures of brain activity in people in vegetative states, who are thought not to feel pain or have any cognitive function. The team also looked at people in minimally conscious states, who may speak a few words, and feel pain.

The signatures suggested that communication between the planning part of the cortex, and the part where sounds and words are processed, is disrupted in people in a vegetative state.

At the moment, doctors work out levels of consciousness by watching patients’ behaviour – how well a patient tracks an object with their eyes, for example. But these diagnoses are notoriously inaccurate. Combining Garrido’s signatures with behavioural observations could lead to better diagnoses.

When Garrido is not examining electroencephalographic (EEG) records, she can be found playing her guitar, or at a contemporary dance class.

Peter Robinson and the essence of brain

Peter Robinson trained as a theoretical physicist in the 1980s.
At that time, the physics of the human brain — a dynamic system made up of billions of elements — was considered too difficult to understand.
Fast forward 20 years and advances in maths and high-performance computing were making the brain look more tractable.

Robinson, chief investigator with CIBF at the University of Sydney, became part of a team investigating the electrical waves that are captured with electroencephalogram (EEG).

EEG waves change with a person’s behaviour. They can be used to probe brain function, or identify parts of the brain that are not working — for example, you might see an increased number of waves before a seizure. But the cause of EEG waves has been uncertain, limiting their usefulness.

The Robinson team went a long way to solving that mystery by constructing a mathematical representation – or “model” — of the brain.

As the researchers changed the values used in its equations, the model generated waves that mirror those seen in real-life. That suggested how changes in actual neurons create the waves. The model also showed how two major types of epilepsy — grand mal and petit mal — had key electrical features in common.

The Robinson team’s original model is constantly being refined, and put to other uses. It is now helping predict the effect of drugs on the brain, develop new computing methods, understand sleep rhythms — even to work out why the brain has its particular structure, and whether evolution could have built it differently.

When Robinson is not pondering new ways to use physics to probe brain function, he enjoys nature with his partner, 14 year old son, and 10 year old daughter.