Naked Brain How the Emerging Neurosociety Is Changing How We Live, Work, And Love

1 The Emergence of the Neurosociety Brain Imaging: Peering into Bertino's Brain As a first step in appreciating the impact of social neuroscience, it helps to understand the power of imaging techniques to provide a window into events happening within the brain. The earliest techniques capable of revealing the brain's inner processing carried a definite risk of injury and sometimes even death. Consequently, they were restricted to patients suffering from various brain diseases. As a result of this emphasis on disease, we presently know more about the functioning of abnormal brains than we know about normal ones. As a neurologist, I'm especially aware of this paradox. Ask me about the brain dysfunctions associated with strokes or autism or even some forms of learning disability and I can explain the difficulties in more detail than you probably want to hear. But ask me how the brain of a genius differs from that of his or her less intellectually gifted counterparts and the explanation isn't going to take long at all. Not that we can't learn a lot about the normal brain on the basis of studying abnormal brains. Even a study of the diseased brain often provides some helpful insights toward furthering our understanding of the normal brain. My favorite example of this comes from the observations of the late-nineteenth-century Italian experimenter Angelo Mosso. In the course of his research Mosso encountered a peasant, Bertino (no last name is recorded), who several years earlier had suffered a head injury severe enough to destroy the bones of the skull covering his frontal lobes (located immediately behind the forehead). The resulting opening, covered only by skin and fibrous tissue, provided Mosso with a window through which he could directly observe the pulsations of Bertino's brain. Similar pulsations can be observed in a newborn baby during the first few weeks of life prior to the growth and fusion of the skull bones. When the baby cries or strains, the pulsations increase; when the baby sleeps, the pulsations subside. One day when Mosso was observing the pulsations he noticed a distinct increase in their magnitude coincident with the ringing at noon of the local church bells. At this point Mosso, in an act of inspiration, asked the peasant if the ringing of the Angelus reminded him of his obligation to silently recite the Ave Maria. When Bertino responded yes, the pulsations increased again. Intrigued at this sequence, Mosso asked his subject to multiply eight by ten. At the moment Mosso asked the question, the pulsations increased and then quickly decreased. A second increase occurred when Bertino responded with the answer. From this simple but elegant experiment Mosso correctly concluded that blood flow in the brain could provide an indirect measurement of brain function during mental activity. Inspired by Mosso's findings with Bertino, students of the brain during the early and middle parts of the twentieth century developed more accurate techniques for measuring blood flow and metabolism in the human brain. For instance, dyes and radioactive substances injected into the arteries leading to the brain help pinpoint the relevant structures responsible for vision, movement, and sensation. But one important limitation lessened the usefulness of these probes into the brain's functioning: All of them were intrusive, dangerous, and on occasion fatal. While undergoing one of the tests the subject could suffer a stroke, blindness, even death. Fortunately, that problem is now a thing of the past thanks to the safety of newer techniques, which carry little risk. Current imaging techniques are often described using a kind of alphabet soup terminology: "The patent's CAT was normal but a contrast-enhanced MRI showed a small SOL in the frontal lobes later confirmed by PET.Restak, Richard is the author of 'Naked Brain How the Emerging Neurosociety Is Changing How We Live, Work, And Love', published 2006 under ISBN 9781400098088 and ISBN 1400098084.