August 11, 2004 PEEKING INTO YOUR BRAINŠ Can you keep a secret? Maybe not anymore. Scientists are using devices to find out what you are thinking even if you are silent and stoic. New developments in technology are providing mind boggling methods of monitoring your brain in real time. They have the potential to "read" your thoughts. One of the devices is an up-graded EEG (electroencephalograph) which pinpoints electrical activities of your brain and another is the PET scan (Positron Emission Tomography) which evaluates areas of your brain function. Since the advent of contemporary brain-imaging technologies, scientists have discovered a large number of brain areas, each dedicated to specific stimuli such as smell, taste, color perception, doing arithmetic, paying attention, spatial perception, and various kinds of memory. The devices can also map your brain's mental and emotional reactions and even reveal if you are lying and how much you like certain foods and sex. The new technologies do have enhanced capabilities to diagnosis the ills that may affect the central nervous systems. A team led by University of California San Diego (UCSD) neurobiologists, for example, has developed an innovative approach to interpreting brain EEGs, which provides an unprecedented view of thought in action---thoughts as they occur. The UCSD researchers reporting in the journal, Public Library of Science Biology, purported their EEG has the potential to advance our understanding of brain disorders such as epilepsy and autism. If the scientists from UCSD should get together with those from Advanced Brain Monitoring, Inc. of Carlsbad, CA, then wherever you may be, your thoughts could be monitored. The Advanced Brain Monitoring scientists have received a patent for the Sensor Headset. It is also designed for real-time monitoring and analysis of your brain's electrical activity. The Headset, an easy-to-apply, portable EEG monitoring and recording, device facilitates applications of the EEG outside the laboratory environment and also has a serious medical purpose. When integrated with the Company's patent-pending B-Alert(TM) software, the system classifies each second of EEG on a continuum from highly vigilant to sleep onset. The Headset is integral to several products under development that offer monitoring of: The Drowsiness Monitoring Device (DMD) monitors the EEG to assess shifts in alertness and provides an early warning alarm when drowsiness is identified. The DMD will assist airline pilots, long-haul truck drivers and other shift workers in maintaining alertness. A second product, the Alertness Profiler quantifies daytime alertness and its effects on vigilance, attention and short-term memory. No more sleeping on the job or your boss will know! No more lying on the job, either. The PET scan is being used for many things including early diagnosis of brain ills such as Alzheimer's and schizophrenia, but it also has potential as a "truth" machine. These brain scans can tell if you are thinking about a noun or a verb; a color, a sound; a particular direction; whether you are recalling a semantic or episodic memory; creating a sentence; imagining a visual image; feeling depressed; recalling a false memory; having a hallucination, or experiencing a wide variety of other mental and emotional states. PET studies make it possible to observe which parts of your brain are active during a religious experience. It has also found that murderers as a group have poor brain functioning in the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain that regulates and controls impulse control. Forget the final exams in school. Bruce Hinrichs, writing in the journal, Humanist, pointed out that neuroscientists who study regions of the brain devoted to memory have found that activity in certain brain locations is associated with the degree to which something being learned will later be remembered. He mused: "Imagine a future classroom in which brain scans are used to determine whether students have learned their lessons. It would give new meaning to 'Students, put on your thinking caps.' Would this be an advance in pedagogy or an invasion of privacy? Peeking into your brain may, indeed, have some ethical repercussions. Bioengineer Kenneth R. Foster and biomedical ethicists Paul Root Wolpe and Arthur L. Caplan, all of the University of Pennsylvania, tackled this in "Bioethics and the Brain" in a recent issue of a technology journal, IEEE Spectrum Magazine. "The consequences of new technologies are hard to predict," they write. And not that a new branch of ethics, termed neuroethics, is emerging to see that society understands the implications of neuroscience and the new devices that it enables. "Even if we can never fully anticipate the impact of employing these technologies, it is important to try" the University of Pennsylvania authors muse: "Imagine being told at your next physical that a scan of your brain activity indicates a propensity to develop schizophrenia. Now imagine that your employer and your local government have this information. Electrical activity in the brain can show whether a person is telling the truth. New imaging techniques will allow physicians to detect devastating diseases long before the diseases become clinically apparent. And researchers may, one day, find brain activity that correlates with behavior patterns such as tendencies toward alcoholism, aggression, pedophilia, or racism. But how reliable will the information be, how should it be used, and what will it do to our notion of privacy? Meanwhile, microelectronics is making access to the brain a two-way street. The same electrical stimulation technologies that allow some of the deaf to hear could one day be fashioned to control behavior as well. Might society be tempted to force behavior-modifying microelectronics on a few citizens to protect many others?" We would like to hear what you think about the potential of peeking into your brain. *** The craze for looking younger is being fueled by television programs and magazines that produce outstanding makeovers---gone are the wrinkles, blemishes and misshapen noses, teeth and breasts on the lucky subjects. Viewers and readers want their own signs of aging erased. This has had a side-effect on plastic surgeons and dermatologists. A survey of the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery (AAFPRS), facelifts have increased by almost 50 percent. Non-invasive procedures in patients under 40 have also increased. Botox injections increased 133 percent in one year and chemical peels by 369 percent. What if you have a serious medical problem concerning your skin? You may have trouble getting an appointment with your dermatologist. Kenneth Greer, MD, chairman of the department of dermatology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, in an editorial in Skin &Allergy News expressed concern that dermatologists are drifting away form medical dermatology and closer to the "cash cow" of pure cosmetic dermatology. "I see many dermatologists who have closed their practices to new patients, or who have such long wait times for scheduling appointments that patients with immediate needs are being mismanaged by other physicians," he wrote. .."It's way too easy for a patient to get an appointment for Botox or a peel---and way to hard to get in for bad psoriasis or an ugly mole." MICROWAVING AND NUTRIENTS Does microwaving your vegetables preserve or destroy nutrients? In a recent study, broccoli cooked in a microwave lost more than 97 percent of its flavonoids and up to 40 percent of Vitamin C. Flavonoids are compounds in plants that are believed beneficial to blood vessels. Boiling preserves more nutrients but still destroys 66 percent of the flavonoids and up to 40 percent of vitamin C. If you cut temperature and the time of boiling and microwaving, you can help preserve the nutrients. You may want to steam them instead because it reduces their nutrients by only 10 percent. Check A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives.
Check out Brain Workout: Easy Ways to Power Up Your Memory, Sensory Perception and Intelligence.
MEDICAL VS COSMETIC DERMATOLOGY
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