Dr Giovanni d’Avossa is a lecturer in the School of Psychology at Bangor University and a neurologist with special qualification in Behavioural Neurology. He is interested in the cerebral correlates of spatial attention and the neuropsychiatric disorders that follow strokes.

Have you ever wondered how the brain works? How do humans see, speak and think? How do we learn to type or play the piano? Why do we want what we want? And how stroke, injury or disease affect mental function? It seems that neuroimaging may have the answers to these psychology puzzles.

Today, thanks to the relatively young technology of MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), scientists can now watch the brain at work. In MRI, strong magnetic fields interact to create high-resolution, three-dimensional computer images of the interior of the human body. In fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), the images are set in motion; scientists can watch local changes in blood flow and non-oxidative metabolism related to mental processes. This allows useful inferences regarding aspects of neural activity related to information processing.

Around the world, these new neuroimaging techniques are transforming our understanding of the brain. Increasingly, scientists, doctors and researchers rely on MRI and the like to map the functional organisation of the brain and identify markers of common neuro-psychiatric diseases. As a result of this trend, a few universities are now offering MRI-specific degree programmes, such as the MSc in Neuroimaging at Bangor University. Overall, we expect neuroimaging will help shed light on longstanding questions in neuroscience, such as the controversy between regionalistic and network theories of brain function. Moreover, neuroimaging is playing an expanding role in clinical trials designed to test new treatments for common neurological disorders and is expected to be an important clinical tool in the future for individualising treatment in neuropsychiatric patients.

Mind mapping
Bangor’s Dr. Paul Downing is one of the ‘brain mappers’. A specialist in vision, he uses fMRI to watch people see, and to map areas of the brain involved in processing visual information. Although we’ve known for nearly 100 years roughly what part of the brain processes other people’s faces, Downing has just recently discovered which parts of the brain process other people’s body parts. When we see an arm or a leg, it activates a specific part of our brains.

From that insight, we can learn about how the brain interprets social interactions involving the body. For instance, some of Downing’s subsequent work (in collaboration with his former PhD student Dr India Morrison) focuses on this question: when we see other people in pain, how does empathy work? Are there particular brain structures related to this function?

‘The ability to identify and interpret the actions and intentions of other people is a crucial human social skill,’ Downing explains. ‘How do we know when another person intends harm or help? How does the brain differentiate?’ Using fMRI to see how others see, Downing begins to see how others process, think, and interact.

Bangor’s Dr. Jörn Diedrichsen is also working to relate brain structure to brain function. In his Human Motor Control Lab, Diedrichsen instructs participants within an MRI scanner to manipulate a robotic arm with their hands. While the arm records the person’s hand motions in fine detail and in three dimensions, it also applies forces to the hands, which the subject is required to predict in order to properly execute the instructed movement. MRI shows Diedrichsen what’s happening simultaneously within the person’s brain. In this way, he can learn how the brain modifies its activity while it learns how to deal with a force field.
‘How do people learn to perform complex manual manipulations, like typing or playing the piano?’ asks Diedrichsen. ‘Your hands are just a small part of a much larger process. Most of this learning is your brain orchestrating complex assemblies of neural structures, and then remembering these orchestrations.’ Through MRI, Diedrichsen gains insights that will prove important for understanding aspects of procedural learning.

Craving knowledge
Bangor’s Dr. John Parkinson specialises in desire. He’s using the fMRI to look at what parts of the brain are involved in appetite, anticipation, motivation, and addiction – principally as they relate to food at the moment, but to other substances (drugs, sex, alcohol) in future.
‘We’ll put someone into the MRI machine,’ explains Parkinson, ‘and then show them photos of food or menus. We then look at which areas of the brain are activated.’ He has found one central ‘desire system’, which is triggered whenever people want to satisfy a physical craving. Within that, there are different sub-divisions related to the substance desired.

‘We are hoping to better understand not only which areas are involved in normal motivation,’ says Parkinson, ‘but this has clear implication for abnormal motivation, such as addiction or impulsivity.’ At the moment, he’s working on an MRI study about motivation and performance: When people are hungry, are they quicker at food-related tasks and/or slower at non-food-seeking work?

Of course, in addition to mapping the structures and functions of the healthy brain, neuroimaging is also transforming our understanding of disease, injury, and treatment. For example, Bangor’s David Linden, a professor of the Wales Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, has used fMRI to study the brains of people with dementia, Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia. In one landmark study, Linden discovered that, in the brains of people suffering from auditory hallucinations due to schizophrenia, the same areas were activated as in normal people who were hearing actual people speaking. When a schizophrenic reports hearing voices, he or she is actually hearing voices, just as a non-schizophrenic participating in a normal conversation.

Dr. Ayelet Sapir at Bangor University has been investigating the structural damage associated with specific impairments in visually guided arm movements that follow strokes. She has shown that the proper execution of these movements depends on a specific structure of the inner core of the brain, the putamen. This structure belongs to a complex circuit that is involved in other disorders such as Parkinson’s disease. Sapir is currently working to uncover whether other sensory-motor impairments that follow strokes have such a precise structural mapping, but also whether more general impairments of cognition and mood, that commonly follow strokes, can be related to damage to particular structures in the brain.

As the neuroimaging trend continues and expands, so will the demand for qualified professionals in the field. Those with advanced training in neuroimaging techniques will be well poised for careers in academic and medical research. Bangor University and its psychology department (rated one of the top 10 departments in the 2008 RAE assessment) now offer one of the world’s first master’s degree programmes to focus on neuroimaging. An MSc in Neuroimaging will arm aspiring neuroscientists with the knowledge and experience necessary to design, analyze, and evaluate neuroimaging studies.

Only rarely in human history has one technological innovation transformed so many diverse areas of investigation. Like the microscope and the telescope before it, neuroimaging has transcended the limits of human vision. In just one generation, it has not only expanded the limits of what we know about the human brain and body, it has expanded our sense of what we can know.  
 

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