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.

On the perils of neurotech in the loungeroom

“It may work, it may not. We are still in the early investigative stage,” says Kate Hoy, referring to tDCS or transcranial Direct Current Stimulation.

In tDCS, a current applied to the brain appears to make brain cells more likely to fire.

Initial studies suggest that it may improve cognitive performance, or reduce symptoms of disorders such as depression and schizophrenia.

But far more work needs to be done, says Hoy, who leads the Cognitive Neurotechnology Research Group at the Monash Alfred Psychiatry Research Centre (MAPrc) in Melbourne.

In contrast, another brain stimulation technique, Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation or TMS, has shown its mettle in clinical trials, winning approval from the US Food and Drug Administration, for treatment-resistant major depression.

tDCS has not been approved by FDA. However, $300 devices are marketed online to gamers to improve performance.

Hoy is concerned that tDCS has escaped the lab and made it into the lounge room too soon. “Nobody knows who’s using it,” she says. And whereas in the lab, scientists carefully control the duration, frequency and intensity of tDCS stimulation, home-users may be tempted to push the boundaries, says Hoy.

Scientists are trained in how to prepare and place electrodes, and don’t use tDCS on pregnant women or people with recent skull fractures. “But anyone can do it at home,” she says.

She’s also concerned about the effectiveness of so-called electrodoping. “Home users may believe that tDCS will give them a real brain boost, but there’s just not the evidence that that is the case.”

“There needs to be a proper discussion between regulatory bodies, scientists and home-users to get guidelines, and restrictions if need be,” says Hoy, who suggests that the National Health and Medical Research Council or the Therapeutic Goods Administration might be appropriate bodies to lead discussion.

When not in the lab, Hoy is passionate about science communication, as well as a keen photographer, who uses old-school analogue cameras.

Hoy took part in a May 2015 The Brain Dialogue event called “Zap My Brain”. The event explored the use of devices like tDCS and TMS to treat depression and other disorders, how they help reveal how the brain works, and issues surrounding unregulated home use.

Photo credit: Ross Bird

Catapulting research out of its ivory tower

For a person only three decades or so on this planet, Buzz Palmer has covered a lot of ground. He has trained as an orthopaedic microsurgeon in his native England. He has helped teach science and surgical skills (not to mention rugby) to Maasai communities in Kenya. And he now finds himself a driving force of medtech entrepreneurship in Australia. He’s a visionary with a knack for knocking research out of its ivory tower.

Australian government invests in brain research expecting a return. “At the moment, the return is publications,” says Palmer, a CIBF end-user representative. “It should be better healthcare and innovations for Australians.”

Palmer certainly walks the talk as CEO of STC Australia, an incubator for small tech companies, and Founding Director and Executive Partner of stem cell company Cytentia. He also teaches commercialisation skills at Monash University.

Universities tend to train students as research-based scientists. “They don’t encourage them to set up their own companies,” says Palmer. “Industry should grow from technology arising from universities.” Whether academics embrace this concept of their own free will or whether they’re forced to by new requirements in grants, he feels that change is coming.

When he describes the latest brain-tech advances, Palmer lights up. Live monitoring of brain activity to send a patient an alert that it’s time to take a pill for Parkinson’s disease or a warning of an epileptic seizure minutes before it strikes. Restoring a sense of sight without touching the eye. Putting a very small chip in the brain to decode your intention to move a robotic body part. “That’s exciting,” he says.

Despite his passion for technology, Palmer confesses that his time with the Maasai was his most rewarding experience. “I live in a very material world, but out there I had nothing,” he says. “Yet I found myself more at peace than I have ever felt in my life.” Well, perhaps one day brain tech will unlock this essence.

It’s not the cards they control, it’s you

“Magicians are controlling your brain,” says Nicholas J Johnson, who makes his living from illusions and scams.

Johnson, who might one moment be stealing your PIN, the next persuading you he can read your mind, brought his brain-fooling act to the panel discussion “Who’s in Charge: You or Your Brain?” in September 2014.

“I’m an honest conman,” he says, using his scamming skills to entertain and educate rather than to take advantage.

Magic, it seems, only exists in the brain of the viewer. “It doesn’t exist in the real world. It takes advantage of psychological and neurological weaknesses in the brain,” he says. “Rather than controlling the deck of cards, magicians are controlling the way you see those cards.”

Having performed magic since childhood and studied science and sociology at university, Johnson has always been fascinated by the brain. Now his interest is professional. “The human eye can only focus on the centre,” he explains. “Outside of that frame, the brain fills in the picture for us. I can appear to be holding a coin in front of your eyes when I am really slipping it in my pocket.”

And also personal. Johnson suffers from Tourette’s and stutters when nervous. “I spend a lot of time reading about Tourette’s. It’s frustrating but fascinating.”

Johnson visits schools with his Bad Science Show, where he explains the placebo effect, where the “brain cures you”.

“The brain provides the treatment, rather than the medicine,” says Johnson.

He has appeared on television and radio, including on news programs A Current Affair and The Project, and performs at international comedy festivals. He is the author of Chasing the Ace, a novel about scamming.

When not revealing con artists’ scams, Johnson is removing coins from the ear of his one-year-old daughter Beatrix.

Jane the explorer

“We are exploring the inside of our brains, in the same way we explored the earth in the 16^th, 17^th and 18^th century — it’s unchartered waters”, says Jane Caro.

In September 2014, Caro chaired “Who’s in Charge: You or your Brain?”, a panel discussion and magic demo exploring the brain’s ability — and inability — to attend to the world about us.

Caro calls herself a rank amateur when it comes to understanding the brain. She has, nonetheless, forged a career that relies on a deep understanding of one of the brain’s key outputs — human behaviour.

She has won international awards for adverts like this one. She is currently a principal at Jara Consulting, a marketing and communications consultancy which she runs with her husband.

She is a historical novelist, and the co-author of five books on topics that include education, feminism and religion. Her most recent is “For God’s Sake! An Atheist, a Christian, a Muslim and a Jew Debate Religion”.

“I explore what makes us human, why people do the things they do. Brain research puts a light on that in ways we have not been able to do before,” she says. Caro appears regularly on Australian television, including The Gruen Transfer, where she and fellow commentators take a look at the world of advertising, news and entertainment show Weekend Sunrise, and Q&A — where members of the public get to quiz politicians and opinion makers.

A mother to two grown up children, when Caro is not pondering what makes us tick and what motivates us, she can be found “chilling out” at her cattle property in Australia’s Hunter Valley.

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.

Tools for successful learning

“Teachers need bite-sized information on the [neuroscience of learning] research, and how it can be applied, to read in the five minutes they might get at recess or lunchtime,” says Helen Silvester, head of science at Mentone Girls’ Grammar School in Melbourne.

Although many teachers are interested in the neuroscience of learning, it’s difficult to find reliable information on the latest research, and to judge how good the evidence is that it will make a difference in the classroom, she says. “The best way [for neuroscientists] to reach teachers is through the teaching journals such as Teaching Science from the Australian Science Teachers Association,” or tools like the Education Endowment Foundation’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit.

In the late 80s, Silvester studied neuro-immunology as an Honours student at Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, later working in endocrinology as a research assistant at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital.

Silvester uses her grounding in science to engage students with the subject and provide them the tools for successful learning.

“At a basic level, I’m just telling the students why they shouldn’t study in front of the TV,” she says. “That the brain is like a lawn, and studying is like repeatedly walking the same way across it. Eventually a path is created, and connections are made. If a student is distracted by Facebook, they will keep wandering off and it’s harder to create the path.”

“But my advanced students see beyond that, and want to know more about how the brain makes those connections, how the brain learns,” says Silvester, who also works in science curriculum development, writes textbooks and consults on high-school projects with CIBF’s Education and Training team.

Silvester walks and runs in her spare time, which is good for a healthy brain. “It gives me time to think about how to use what I know about the brain.”

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.

Citizen neuroscientist

“When I feel cognitively drained at the end of the day, and I don’t want coffee, I find that tDCS ever so slightly increases my vigilance and alertness,” says Peter Simpson-Young, a home-user of a brain stimulation technique called tDCS or transcranial Direct Current Stimulation.

But, he concedes, “That could just be a placebo effect.”

Simpson-Young took part in a May 2015 The Brain Dialogue event called “Zap My Brain”. The event explored the use of devices like tDCS and TMS (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation) to treat depression and other disorders, how they help reveal how the brain works, and issues surrounding unregulated home use.

A self-described citizen scientist, Simpson-Young is one of an unknown number of people using tDCS at home. Devices are bought online, or made at home. This lab-to-lounge room transfer of tDCS, a technology whose safety and effectiveness is still being worked out, concerns researchers who study it in controlled laboratory settings.

Simpson-Young shares some of their concern.

There are hundreds of tDCS home-users on online forums, he says. Some are trying to self-medicate depression; others are hoping for quick cognitive boost. “They have no understanding of neuroscience,” he says.

Simpson-Young has undergraduate degrees in neuroscience, psychology and philosophy, and is part of small, loose community of tDCS home users who pride themselves on keeping abreast of the latest research on brain-modulating technologies. He works as a research officer for a health NGO in Sydney.

“I first heard about tDCS in my undergraduate degree,” says Simpson-Young, 24. “It got a lot of attention as an easy and safe method of modulating brain function. I wanted one for my own interest. It was pure novelty.”

Simpson-Young believes he is using tDCS conservatively, and as safely as possible.

“I am aware of the maximum current and duration, and I know how to place electrodes,” he says. “But I am not kidding myself, there is an element of self experimentation.”

Simpson-Young doesn’t think home-use tDCS will become massive, but points out that there are other brain-modulating devices around the corner that will also appeal to home-users, raising similar issues about safety and effectiveness.

Some brain researchers are calling for restrictions on the home use of brain modulating devices through regulation or legislation. Simpson-Young believes such moves will be ineffective, “You are not going to convince people not to use it at home,” he says.

Instead he would like to see more information for home-users. “Some medical researchers say this is ten years from being useful, others say it is ready to take home. But there’s nothing out there about how to use it at home,” he says.

As for who might provide such information to home-users, “I am not sure who has the moral obligation to do this,” he says.

In his spare time, Simpson-Young builds aquaponic systems combining aquaculture and hydroponics to grow vegetables fed by nutrient-rich waste water from fish tanks.

He has studied in Japan, and worked there as a model.