Brain waves 'are the best brakes'

29 July 2011 Last updated at 08:44 GMT By Judith Burns Science reporter, BBC News Volunteers wearing EEG caps used a driving simulator Tapping into drivers' brain signals can cut braking distances and avoid car crashes, according to scientists.

Researchers at the Berlin Institute for Technology attached electrodes to the scalps of volunteers inside a driving simulator.

The system detected the intention to brake, and cut more than 3m (10ft) off stopping distances, the team report in the Journal of Neural Engineering.

The team's next aim is to check the system in a series of road tests.

The 18 volunteers were asked to keep 20m (66ft) behind the simulated car in front, which braked sharply at random intervals.

Scientists used a technique called electroencephalograhy (EEG) to analyse the drivers' brain signals.

The system was able to pinpoint the intention to brake 13 hundredths of a second before the driver applied pressure to the brakes.

The team reported that at a speed of 100km/h (65m/h) the braking distance was reduced by 3.66 meters (12 feet).

Computer scientist Stefan Haufe told BBC News: "We know that any intention is generated in the brain. So it's no wonder that such things are visible in the brain.

"We were surprised it is so predictive. That is the thing!"

Lead investigator Benjamin Blankertz added: "It's quite easily explained by the fact that we can tap the driver's intention at the source of the build up of intention in the brain.

"It's a longer process, from the very first upcoming cognitive processes and intention building, until finally the muscles start the movement."

The volunteers also had the muscle tension in their lower legs analysed to detect the first signs of leg motion before they released the accelerator and pushed the brake pedal.

This data enabled the scientists to analyse the EEG information to determine which parts of the brain are key to braking. They improved the detection system accordingly.

'Point of no return'

The Institute of Physics says this is the first time that EEG has been used to assist in braking.

The technique is, however, already used to help paralysed people control computers, prosthetic limbs and wheelchairs.

The researchers are planning to conduct road trials of their system to test its viability out of the lab.

But Benjamin Blankertz stressed that he suspects there may be some way to go before EEG can be used as a safety aid in real driving situations, not least because it requires the driver to wear a plastic cap with 64 electrodes covered in conductive gel.

The technology uses an EEG cap and 64 electrodes

This is uncomfortable, takes up to half an hour to fit, and the wearers have to wash the gel out of their hair afterwards. Smaller, more lightweight versions are in development.

The paper also mentions that wearers of EEG caps have to keep fairly still which is not always possible while driving, particularly when executing an emergency stop.

Dr Blankertz also said more work needs to be done on avoiding false alarms - to avoid the possibility that the machine could misread a drivers' brain signals and brake unnecessarily.

He said: "We need to investigate intention-building and decision-taking and self-initiated movement.

"Some recent research suggests that the outcome of free choices can be predicted from brain activity before the experimental subject is consciously aware of their intention.

"A technology that would make possible real time prediction of future decisions could be used to investigate how this relates to the so-called point of no return.

The team ultimately hopes to work with the automotive industry to combine their EEG technique with radar and laser systems that are used in some commercially available crash-avoidance systems, which detect obstacles such as walls, traffic signals and other vehicles.

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Parkinson's artificial brain bank

17 June 2011 Last updated at 16:12 GMT By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News Brain cells grown from the skin cells of a Parkinson's patient are likely to deteriorate Researchers in Oxford have begun creating a bank of artificially grown brain cells from Parkinson's patients, BBC news has learned.

They are using a new stem cell technique that allows them to turn a small piece of skin from the patient into a small piece of brain.

This is the first time this has been done in a large-scale study aimed at finding cures for the disease.

Researchers say they can analyse nerve cells as they start to deteriorate.

The first batch of nerve cells have been grown from a 56-year-old Oxfordshire man, Derek Underwood.

He had to take early retirement because of the progression of the disease.

Mr Underwood will be the first of 50 patients whose skin cells will be grown into brain cells as part of a five year study.

According Dr Richard Wade Martins of Oxford University, who is leading the study, the aim is to build up a "brain bank" which will enable researchers to study how the disease develops in unprecedented detail.

"The brain is an inaccessible organ and you can't get bits of people's brain to study very easily," he said.

"But what we have here is a disease in a dish, that are just like Derek's brain cells but are accessible and can be produced in unlimited quantities"

Lab brain

The first step, according to Dr Michelle Hu of the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, is to compare the brain cells grown from Parkinson's patients, with those grown from healthy volunteers and see how they differ.

"For the first time we can look at the cells before they deteriorate and look at the earliest changes," she said.

"We can look at what cellular processes are happening that make the cells die and learn why it is that the cells get sick. And we want to see if there are any treatments we can offer to reverse that process and help patients regain normal function."

This is the first large scale clinical study to use a technique which was developed by Japanese scientists three years ago, called "induced pluripotent stem cell" or IPS for short.

Genes are inserted into the skin cells, reprogramming them to become something else.

IPS is similar to the embryonic stem cell technique which was used to create Dolly the Sheep, but IPS does not result in the creation of an embryo and so is regarded by some as an ethically more acceptable approach.

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First images of unconscious brain

13 June 2011 Last updated at 22:55 GMT By Jennifer Carpenter Science reporter, BBC News These images capture a patient's brain activity the moment they slip into unconsciousness

For the first time researchers have monitored the brain as it slips into unconsciousness.

The new imaging method detects the waxing and waning of electrical activity in the brain moments after an anaesthetic injection is administered.

As the patient goes under, different parts of the brain seem to be "talking" to each other, a team told the European Anaesthesiology Congress in Amsterdam.

But they caution that more work is needed to understand what is going on.

The technique could ultimately help doctors pinpoint damage in the brains of people suffering from stroke and head injury.

"Our jaws just hit the ground," said anaesthesiologist Professor Brian Pollard from Manchester Royal Infirmary on seeing the images for the first time.

"I can't tell you the words we used as it wouldn't be polite over the phone."

Cross talk

Although regions of the brain seem to be communicating as "consciousness fades", Professor Pollard cautions that it is early days and that he and his team from the University of Manchester still have many brain scans to analyse before they can say anything conclusive about what is happening.

The finding supports a theory put forward by Professor Susan Greenfield, from the University of Oxford, that unconsciousness is a process by which different areas of the brain inhibit each other as the brain shuts down.

Fully operable

The new technique, called Functional Electrical Impedance Tomography by Evoke Response (fEITER), is more compact than other brain imaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and so is easily transported into the operating theatre.

It involves attaching tens of electrodes to the patient's head, which send low electrical currents through the skull. The currents are interrupted by the brain's tissues and electrical signals.

Professor Pollard explained that the brain's structures should not change over a minute-long scan, and so any differences that he and his team see as the patient falls asleep must therefore be due to changes in their brain's activity.

It is hoped that this technique could be used to learn about the nature of consciousness, but it is also likely to help doctors make headway in monitoring the health of a person's grey matter after they have suffered a head injury or stroke.

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Brain research 'funding crisis'

13 June 2011 Last updated at 23:37 GMT Scientists fear the cost of getting drugs to the market place is holding back brain research Scientists say research into mental illnesses such as depression is facing a funding crisis.

They warn that new treatments will be delayed and that the next generation of neuroscience researchers will not be trained.

A report by the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology said private companies were pulling out due to the challenge of bringing drugs to market.

It called for more investment and changes to the way trials take place.

The report was the result of a summit of more than 60 representatives of governments, universities, the pharmaceutical industry and patient groups.

Higher failure rate

It said up to 80% of funding for brain research in Europe had traditionally come from the private sector. However, pharmaceutical companies were retreating from the field because of the cost of bringing drugs as far as the consumer.

The report said it took much longer to develop drugs for mental illness - 13 years on average. Those drugs had a higher failure rate and were harder to get licensed for use, it said.

Only one new anti-depressant has been approved in Europe, agomelatine, in the past 10 years.

Professor Guy Goodwin, from the University of Oxford, said a lack of funding could lead to a "generational crisis" in neuroscience research and training.

He said there should be more public money invested in brain research: "The cost and burden are really quite high, yet research attracts disproportionately low investment.

"Public investment in research should be somehow related to the burden of the disease."

The report suggested ways of encouraging more people to invest, such as increasing the patent length for psychiatric drugs - making them more profitable.

A European "medicines chest" was also suggested. Pharmaceutical companies would donate drugs they were no longer using for research, which could then be used by other organisations.

The report suggested that drugs discarded for treating Alzheimer's disease, for example, could be used in research for psychiatric disorders.

Professor David Nutt, of Imperial College London, described the current situation as "madness".

He said: "With Europe's extraordinary tradition in neuroscience innovation relying so heavily on private-sector investment, the consequences for the region's research base and public-health agenda are of major concern."

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Mobiles 'may cause brain cancer'

31 May 2011 Last updated at 16:43 GMT By James Gallagher Health reporter, BBC News Is there a risk of brain cancer from using a mobile phone? The World Health Organization's cancer research agency says mobile phones are "possibly carcinogenic".

A review of evidence suggests an increased risk of a malignant type of brain cancer cannot be ruled out.

However, any link is not certain - they concluded that it was "not clearly established that it does cause cancer in humans".

A cancer charity said the evidence was too weak to draw strong conclusions from.

A group of 31 experts has been meeting in Lyon, France, to review human evidence coming from epidemiological studies.

They said they looked at all relevant human studies of people using mobile phones and exposure to electromagnetic fields in their workplace.

The WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) can give mobile phones one of five scientific labels: carcinogenic, probably carcinogenic, possibly carcinogenic, not classifiable or probably not carcinogenic.

It concluded that mobiles should be rated as "possibly carcinogenic" because of a possible link with a type of brain cancer - glioma.

Ed Yong, head of health information at Cancer Research UK, said: "The WHO's verdict means that there is some evidence linking mobile phones to cancer but it is too weak to draw strong conclusions from.

"The vast majority of existing studies have not found a link between phones and cancer, and if such a link exists, it is unlikely to be a large one.

"The risk of brain cancer is similar in people who use mobile phones compared to those who don't, and rates of this cancer have not gone up in recent years despite a dramatic rise in phone use during the 1980s.

"However, not enough is known to totally rule out a risk, and there has been very little research on the long-term effects of using phones."

The WHO estimated that there are five billion mobile phone subscriptions globally.

Christopher Wild, director of the IARC, said: "Given the potential consequences for public health of this classification and findings it is important that additional research be conducted into the long term, heavy use of mobile phones.

"Pending the availability of such information, it is important to take pragmatic measures to reduce exposure such as hands free devices or texting."

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Smell key to big brain evolution

20 May 2011 Last updated at 09:08 By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC Nature The researchers scanned the fossilised skulls of tiny, very early mammals A highly developed sense of smell kick-started the development of mammals' big brains.

Scientists used very high-resolution scanning to study the skulls of two of the earliest known mammal species.

Comparing the shape of their brain cases to those of slightly earlier animals, or "pre-mammals", revealed that the first brain areas to over-develop were those associated with the sense of smell.

The findings are published in Science.

An improved sense of smell may have allowed our tiny, furry ancestors to hunt at night.

The researchers were able to create 3D images of prehistoric animals' brains using the latest computed tomography, or CT, scanning methods.

"Before CT, one had to break open a fossil to get to the internal anatomy," explained Professor Timothy Rowe from the University of Texas at Austin, one of the researchers involved in the study.

"[This technique] is non-destructive, so we can measure internal anatomy in ways that were never before possible."

Evolution timeline

Mammals, and humans in particular, have the largest brains in the animal kingdom, relative to the size of their bodies. So the scientists wanted to work out why mammal brains evolved to become so very large and complex.

Scan of Hadrocodium brain shown in pink

To do this, they studied the earliest known mammals - the tiny fossilised skulls of 190-million-year-old Morganucodon oehleri and Hadrocodium wui, both of which were discovered in China.

By comparing these skulls to those of more primitive animals, and to living mammals, they were able to build a sequence of events in the evolution of mammal brains.

The team found that, in early mammals, the brain regions associated with smell were much larger than in more primitive or "pre-mammal" ancestors.

"Based on what we know from living species, interpreting the [brain scans] of these 200 million year old fossils was pretty straight forward," said Professor Rowe.

He and his colleagues concluded that smell "drove most of the early expansion of the brain in these first 'proto-mammals' and in the last common ancestor of living mammal species".

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Smell was not really on the radar screens of most palaeontologists”

End Quote Professor Timothy Rowe University of Texas at Austin Dr R Glenn Northcutt from the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the research, wrote an accompanying article in the same issue of Science describing its significance.

He said that the study provided "the first solid evidence of the stages in mammalian brain evolution".

The researchers think that, 200 million years ago, mammals probably used their keen sense of smell to hunt at night, which meant that they could avoid competing for food resources with dinosaurs that shared their habitats.

"This would allow them to take advantage of nocturnal food sources like some of the insects and other arthropods that are active at night," Professor Rowe suggested.

He told BBC Nature that he was surprised to learn that smell was so important in mammal evolution.

"Most of the fossil record consists of just teeth and broken jaws, so most of the speculation was about innovations in feeding and hearing, which is tied to the jaw," he said.

"Until now, [smell] was not really on the radar screens of most palaeontologists."

Dr Zhexi Luo from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, who was also involved in the study said: "Our mammal ancestors didn't develop that larger brain for contemplation, but for the sense of smell and touch.

"But thanks to these evolutionary advancements, which gave mammals a head start toward developing a large brain, humans some 190 million years later can ponder these very questions of natural history and evolution."

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