Image: Vivienne Flesher
In Brief
Mind Control
- A technique known as real-time functional MRI neurofeedback exposes people to their own brain activity as they lie in a scanner.
- Seeing inside one's brain in real time opens up the possibility of targeted therapies that change the brain-activation patterns associated with pain, Parkinson's disease, depression and perhaps even addiction.
- Eventually these techniques could also help healthy individuals to acquire knowledge and learn new behaviors more effectively.
Melanie Thernstrom lies motionless inside the large, noisy bore of a functional MRI scanner at Stanford University. She tries to ignore the machine's loud whirring as she trains her attention on a screen mounted inside the scanner, right in front of her eyes. An image of a flame bobs and flickers, shifting subtly in size. To her, the flame is a representation of the searing pain in her neck and shoulder, with its fluctuations reflecting the rise and fall of her discomfort. To the neuroscientists scrutinizing her through a window from the control room next door, the flame is a measure of the activity in a part of her brain.
As Thernstrom's pain increases, so does the amount of activity in part of this brain area, called the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). This boomerang-shaped region, located in the frontal lobes, straddles the brain's midline between the ears and the forehead. Thernstrom's task is to will the flame to shrink, thereby reducing the neuronal hubbub in that region and the sensation of pain. With software rapidly parsing the machine's data to update the image of her ACC, Thernstrom can peer inside her own mind. She can observe, fuzzily, her brain's inner workings almost in time with the conscious manifestation of her discomfort.
This article was originally published with the title A Transparent, Trainable Brain.
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1 Comments
Add CommentThere is renewal every moment. Brain experiences it as friction from moment to moment. The illusion makes one wait for the frictionless state. Friction is experienced as pain, uncertainty, pleasure. To be comfortable with friction (without any idea, explanation) is one’s attunement to supreme relaxation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMind is inflated in pleasure, that is, when it faces something it likes.
Mind is deflated in pain, that is, when it faces something it does not like.
It can not retain or hold any pleasant feeling nor it can hold any relief. The illusion tries to hold by ideas, explanations-hence decay. To see, to feel the momentariness of any feeling is to touch the fluid state, the self-sustained ground, the Original, the ever new.
Brain is at rest only when it sees that its own sustenance is dependent upon the unpredictability of the next moment.The resistance between this moment and next is the energy that sustains the brain. All the known field is for some function, use in daily life. To know the source, to touch the source-the idea of finding stable relief through any possession or idea has to drop. Continuous unpredictable change is the Truth. What causes the change? It is again a thought ‘about’ change. The inevitability of change silences the brain.
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