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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.
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.
University of Warwick: Fusion plasma research helps neurologists to hear above the noise
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