WHAT IS BRAIN MAPPING ?

WHAT IS BRAIN MAPPING? 

Brain is  a computer and, I know its strange to think the human brain as a computer but you know its not a computer like desktop which is  architecture system.

Its an evolved system that has developed over millions of years continuously .

So In principle we should be able to understand the Human brain as a computer by reverse engineering it and underlying computational algorithms that govern its function and if we do that we can invert those algorithms and create very powerful decoding devices that can probably in the future all other kinds of brain machine interface now the brain looks like a pretty homogenous organ .

There is a cerebral cortex and this is a big folded on the top and cerebellum on the top and cerebellum at the bottom .

Underneath the cerebral cortex this mantle of tissue there are many subcortical nuclei all together ,though the brain has about some 13 ,we think on the order of say 500 different parts about a 3rd of those are subcortical nuclei and 2/3rd are to be cortical area that are functionally and anatomically distinct these are hooked together the brain is 50% connected that is for any given location on the cerebral cortex .It is connected to 50% of all these connections  .

Brain is a giant Interconnected recurrent network and systems which is known to be non linear dynamical system .

They have a property of the system as a whole its functional connections can’t necessarily be predicted  looking the individual parts because non linear dynamical system   have emergent properties and in the humans afcourse one of the most important emergent properties is probably consciousness to get a handle on what a Human brain is as a computer to understand its structures we can first of all try to “Map” it we can separate the cerebral cortex into its distinct anatomical and functional parts and try to get a handle on them and then locate at how they interact .

Now people have known for 100's of years that the human brain was divided into different functional parts and they have tried mostly successfully until recently ,really parse laid out – the  cerebral cortex the main part of the human brain that you see on in a slide that distinguishes us mostly from lower animals they have tried to parse late to the brain using a variety of methods that were mostly unsuccessful the most notorious of these is phrenology .

The phrenologist were not completely crazy they were we had very poor methods they were 40 poor scientists they did have one good idea . 

The brain is functionality localized and today we can Map  the functional localization of the brain using powerful methods such as “ Functional Magnetic Resonance Imagining “ .

 

     Example of  FMRI experiment :-

We can paint Brain activity of the surface of the cerebral cortex while someone watches a movie and they 're simply passively watching this movie and Interpretating what’s going on , afcourse think about what happens to your brain when you watch a movie anything that you can conceive if in this movie must be reflected somewhere in the brain in terms of patterns of brain activity obviously you can see the structure of the movie you can see the wall you can see water edges of the screen ,the oriented lines those are represented in one part of the brain other parts of the brain represent the information that reflects the object and actions in the movie .

Now, An online brain viewer that can actually play on a website has been created and this online brain viewer allows you to interact with these maps to determine what kind of conceptual information is represented across the brain so this  particular Dataset comes from a story listening experiment where people listened to the “Moth Radio hour”  from Radio International now we can create maps that reveal what kind of information is represented at different localized parts in the brain .

WHAT HAPPENS TO THE DIFFERENT PARTS OF THE BRAINS ? 

To represent social Information here's one in the lateral prefrontal cortex that also represent social Information 

     

     For ex :- here's a spot in the posterior parietal cortex that  represents a numerical information ,time ,money ,value , mathematical expressions that might be processing in our brain. Now, An online brain viewer that can actually play on a website has been created and this online brain viewer allows you to interact with these maps to determine what kind of conceptual information is represented across the brain so this  particular Dataset comes from a story listening experiment where people listened to the “Moth Radio hour”  from Radio International  now we can create maps that reveal what kind of Information is represented at different localized part in the brain .

Then my clicking on the Temporal lobe on the side of the head that represented social Information families ,mother’s ,father things that happen to family etc

To represent social Information the lateral prefrontal cortex that also represent a numerical information, numbers , time ,money , mathematical expressions network of green areas in fact there are networks for hundreds of different conceptual Information truth drawing sculptures anything you can think of these concepts are represented in multiple locations across the surface of cortex and each location on the cortex represent multiple kind of information.

About 2/3 reflect Individual differ which are both developmental and experimental difference that are reflected in functional .

The conceptual map ,this is mapping to 1000 different kinds of objects and action that occur in stories , across one Individual brain they are about 160 different brain areas that represents conceptual knowledge in these stories. 

CONCEPT OF  CODING AND DECODING 

One of the interacting things about these encoding models if we are just a civilian or not a neuroscientists is that once you have a computational model of the brain that relates the world to brain activity .

We can invert that model and you can convert encoding model into decoding model and can use it to decode brain activity in fact there’s an inevitable symmetry between brain coding and brain decoding .

Neuroscientists are now using brain measurements methods that will allow us to create  more sophisticated computational models of the brain those computational models will allow us to decode brain activity with much higher fidelity .So at some in the future we are going to have many cheap and powerful portable brain decoding devices that we have not yet discovered.

The brain is a non linear dynamical system and one of the most important properties of these system is that in order to understand the entire dynamical surface the sort of dynamical landscape you need to record both space and time at very high resolution.

Today is EEG(Electroencephalogram ) which has fantastic temporal resolution but it has horrible spatial resolution . 

By ( 20-50 years) from now we will be having a brain decoder which has to be worn in the form of hat and the internal thoughts will be decoded all the time and this would be a very profound effect on society after all the inner thoughts ,intentions ,desires , attitude in fact are decodable potentially. 

Now that’s both exciting and frankly quite scaring too!!! 

What’s your opinion about this ?