• Question: what are the benefits of brain scanning?

    Asked by anon-184186 to Tom, sarahhodge, Owen, Nathan, Lorna, Abbie on 7 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Abbie Jordan

      Abbie Jordan answered on 7 Nov 2018:

      That’s a good question and I am seeing more and more research in my field that involves brain scanning. It’s not something I do personally though. So I think the obvious thing is that we can now ‘see’ changes that just have never been visible to the human eye. So we are able to see processes in the brain that have previously been unseen. This helps us to understand what areas of the brain are involved in particular processes (e.g. attention, memory, emotion).

      But, I think there are problems with brain scanning in terms of making sure that we don’t assume that one area of the brain lighting up means that is causes something else to happen. Things may be associated (as in related) but we can’t know that one thing causes another.

    • Photo: Nathan Hook

      Nathan Hook answered on 8 Nov 2018:

      The lowest level is not always the most useful.

      Suppose you wanted to understand what your PC was doing. You could put it under an electron microscope and watch individual electrons moving down circuits. That is ‘real’ reality, but it’s not actually helpful. It’s much more useful to talk at a higher abstract level about what software it is running and what processes it is doing. In the same way, it’s often more useful to speak about brains at a higher level.

      That said, there may well be direct application for brain reading technology. It’s already possible to build a drone that can be controlled by thought for example.

    • Photo: Tom Gallagher-Mitchell

      Tom Gallagher-Mitchell answered on 13 Nov 2018:

      There are some great benefits to the use of this technology in relation to how we support diagnosis of different clinical conditions related to the area and extent of brain damage, or even tracking progression of conditions such as dementia.

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