Fusion plasma researchers at the University of Warwick have teamed up
with Cambridge neuroscientists to apply their expertise developed to
study inaccessible fusion plasmas in order to significantly improve the
understanding of the data obtained from non-invasive study of the fast
dynamics of networks in the human brain.
Unless they undertake invasive techniques, neuroscientists are
limited to external sensing when studying live brains. One key method
the researchers turn to is magnetoencephalography (MEG) in which sensors
measure the tiny magnetic fields outside the head that are generated as
our brains think. In order to get a ‘functional blueprint’ of how our
brains work, researchers want to use these measurements to pinpoint
which different regions of the brain appear to be synchronised with each
other as a person does different tasks. In this study, researchers were
interested in how the brain reacts to surprise. Healthy volunteers were
asked to listen to a series of ‘beeps’, some of which were regular and
repetitive and some of which were different and out of sequence, and
researchers ‘listened in’ to their brain activity using state-of-the-art
MEG setup at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge.
MEG has great potential as a useful diagnostic tool - it is
non-invasive and much more comfortable for the subject than other
techniques - but the neuromagnetic signal varies fast, the signal to
noise ratio is low meaning that such data are challenging to understand.
These challenges - extracting signal from noise in observations that
can only be made from external sensors - are also often faced in
magnetically confined plasmas for fusion. Fusion plasma researchers at
the University of Warwick have developed methods to deal with data
analysis problems similar to those faced by the neuroscientists. The
Warwick researchers have now shared these methods and analytical
techniques with their neuroscientific colleagues in Cambridge and
Birkbeck. Together they have been able to carry out new studies that are
already beginning to provide new insights into the brain’s network -
they have made the first map of the dynamically changing network of the
brain as it deals with the ‘surprise’ of the different sounds. They have
just published the first results of this work in the Journal of
Neurophysiology in the paper “Fast reconfiguration of high frequency
brain networks in response to surprising changes in auditory input.” The
two lead authors on the paper were Dr Ruth Nicol and Professor Sandra
Chapman from Centre for Fusion, Space and Astrophysics, in the
University of Warwick’s Department of Physics who worked closely with
Professor Ed Bullmore and his team in Cambridge University’s Brain
Mapping Unit at Addenbrookes and other neuroscientists in Cambridge and
Birkbeck.
