The Future of the Mind Read Free Page A

neuroscience did not provide a systematic way of analyzing the brain. You could not simply requisition a stroke victim with damage in the specific area you wanted to study. Since the brain is a living, dynamic system, autopsies often did not uncover the most interesting features, such as how the parts of the brain interact, let alone how they produced such diverse thoughts as love, hate, jealousy, and curiosity.
    TWIN REVOLUTIONS
    Four hundred years ago, the telescope was invented, and almost overnight, this new, miraculous instrument peered into the heart of the celestial bodies. It was one of the most revolutionary (and seditious) instruments of all time. All of a sudden, with your own two eyes, you could see the myths and dogma of the past evaporate like the morning mist. Instead of being perfect examples of divine wisdom, the moon had jagged craters, the sun had black spots, Jupiter had moons, Venus had phases, and Saturn had rings. More was learned about the universe in the fifteen years after the invention of the telescope than in all human history put together.
    Like the invention of the telescope, the introduction of MRI machines and a variety of advanced brain scans in the mid-1990s and 2000s has transformed neuroscience. We have learned more about the brain in the last fifteen years than in all prior human history, and the mind, once considered out of reach, is finally assuming center stage.
    Nobel laureate Eric R. Kandel of the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen, Germany, writes, “The most valuable insights into the human mind to emerge during this period did not come from the disciplines traditionally concerned with the mind—philosophy, psychology, or psycho-analysis. Instead they came from a merger of these disciplines with the biology of the brain.…”
    Physicists have played a pivotal role in this endeavor, providing a flood of new tools with acronyms like MRI, EEG, PET, CAT, TCM, TES, and DBS that have dramatically changed the study of the brain. Suddenly with these machines we could see thoughts moving within the living, thinking brain. As neurologist V. S. Ramachandran of the University of California, San Diego, says, “All of these questions that philosophers have been studying for millennia, we scientists can begin to explore by doing brain imaging and by studying patients and asking the right questions.”
    Looking back, some of my initial forays into the world of physics intersected with the very technologies that are now opening up the mind for science. In high school, for instance, I became aware of a new form of matter, called antimatter, and decided to conduct a science project on the topic. As it is one of the most exotic substances on Earth, I had to appeal to the old Atomic Energy Commission just to obtain a tiny quantity of sodium-22, a substance that naturally emits a positive electron (anti-electron, or positron). With my small sample in hand, I was able to build a cloud chamber and powerful magnetic field that allowed me to photograph the trails of vapor left by antimatter particles. I didn’t know it at the time, but sodium-22 would soon become instrumental in a new technology, called PET (positron emission tomography), which has since given us startling new insights into the thinking brain.
    Yet another technology I experimented with in high school was magnetic resonance. I attended a lecture by Felix Bloch of Stanford University, who shared the 1952 Nobel Prize for Physics with Edward Purcell for the discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance. Dr. Bloch explained to us high school kidsthat if you had a powerful magnetic field, the atoms would align vertically in that field like compass needles. Then if you applied a radio pulse to these atoms at a precise resonant frequency, you could make them flip over. When they eventually flipped back, they would emit another pulse, like an echo, which would allow you to determine the identity of these atoms. (Later, I used the principle of magnetic