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Of two minds By Ofri Ilani and Yotam Feldman Tags: brain research, MRI Most of the buildings at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan are no different from those on other local campuses: dusty, peeling, lacking any particular beauty. But five years ago an oasis was created in the wasteland: a spectacular seven-story structure that houses the Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center. If you were to be plunked down in the building without being told where you were, you would almost certainly think that you were in a thriving academic institute at a leading American university. Pleasant surroundings, state-of-the-art technological equipment and a palpable sense of intellectual ferment give the visitor the feeling that this is the real world of science. In recent years, the development of new brain-imaging technologies has prompted many physicians and neurologists to forsake the rather dreary study of nerve cells in favor of a far more glamorous arena: feelings, thoughts and political attitudes. Some of them assure us that with the advanced instruments, we will be able to understand what goes through people's head, read dreams as though they were a written text, and decide questions of guilt and innocence in a court of law. The acceleration of brain research has not bypassed Israel. Prof. Haim Sompolinsky, the director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computation at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, relates with satisfaction that he heads the largest program of its kind in the world in terms of number of research students, and that the university plans to invest $100 million to establish a new center for brain research. There is also a large center of neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, and Tel Aviv University has no less than its own Super Center for Brain Studies. Advertisement Local researchers undoubtedly draw encouragement from the extensive media coverage of this field. Reports about studies that offer a physiological explanation for a range of behavioral, social and political phenomena - from reading poetry to voting in elections - appear frequently in media outlets around the world. The Israeli press, too, has not lagged behind. For example, an article published two years ago in the mass-circulation newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth bore the headline: "Addicted to gambling? Blame the brain." A research team led by Dr. Pinhas Dannon, director of the Rehovot Community Mental Health Care and Rehabilitation Center, sent several people classified as gambling addicts for a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) test at Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, during which they engaged in a game of chance via a computer. The result showed that in all the participants "the areas of the brain that are related to the enjoyment and pleasure system are over-stimulated and overactive, due to a disproportionately large secretion of certain hormones." In the wake of these findings, the addicts' medicinal treatment was modified. A study conducted by neuroethicists at Stanford University in 2005 found that of 132 reports on brain research published in the daily press and in scientific journals, 79 percent were optimistic, 16 percent were balanced and only 5 percent were critical. Senior Israeli researchers say that leading professional journals tend to prefer reports of studies that include brain-imaging data over other studies, and that students who conduct experiments that involve the monitoring of brain activity have dramatically better prospects of obtaining research grants and being accepted to prestigious universities. "It is likely that in the future we will be able to determine quite accurately what we think - it's only a matter of developing more sophisticated techniques," Hebrew University's Sompolinsky says. Dictionary of thoughts However, many scientists are taking issue with the rising dominance of brain sciences within the study of the human mind and human behavior. Psychologists, philosophers and even a large number of brain researchers maintain that many of the studies that are attracting public interest are scientifically untenable, rely on as-yet-unproven technologies, or simply show the obvious after appalling financial investments. Others argue that the studies are unethical and subject to commercial manipulation. Last November, 17 senior brain researchers from around the world published a vituperative letter in The New York Times in response to an article in the paper that purported to examine voters' political leanings using fMRI scanning as the subjects were shown photographs of candidates. "As cognitive neuroscientists who use the same brain-imaging technology, we know that it is not possible to definitively determine whether a person is anxious or feeling connected simply by looking at activity in a particular brain region. This is so because brain regions are typically engaged by many mental states, and thus a one-to-one mapping between a brain region and a mental state is not possible," the scientists wrote. Prof. Chris Frith, a brain researcher from University College, London, one of the letter's organizers, told Haaretz Magazine in a telephone interview that it later turned out that a number of the researchers who took part in the study have ties to a company that markets brain-imaging machines. He assails the attempt to seek this type of explanation for complex social phenomena, and notes that the public is very attracted to the idea of "reading minds." One sees the images of the brain with the colored regions and thinks one is seeing what happens to people in their thoughts, which is something no one was able to do before, Frith explains. But what people are not told is that these colors are simply numbers, representing levels of blood flow or electrical activity. There is no way to look at these images and know what a person is thinking. The notion that it will be possible to compile in the future some sort of "brain dictionary" containing all human thoughts or feelings is baseless, Frith believes. One can identify a few very simple activities that are carried out in the brain, he notes, such as face recognition, but there is a tremendous difference between that and compiling a dictionary per se. In contrast, Sompolinsky maintains explicitly that producing a lexicon of this sort is feasible: "If we image your brain and examine activity in regions when you say the word 'apple' or when you see an apple - there is no reason to think that there is no specific region that is connected to that object. And when you dream, I can know that if this pattern arises in your brain, you were dreaming about an apple. It is still not clear whether the pattern will be the same for other people, too. But in my opinion, the differences are far smaller than we may believe." Prof. Marcelo Dascal, a philosopher who teaches at Tel Aviv University (TAU) and an international expert on the psychology of language, decries this approach. "Anyone who thinks that nouns exist somewhere in the brain has no idea of what awareness is, how we think and what language is. The idea that every time we think of a certain word, a fixed area of the brain is activated is simply idiotic. The whole greatness of human language lies in the fact that we can use the same word for a 1,001 different purposes." A series of studies conducted recently by Prof. Miriam Faust, from Bar-Ilan's Gonda Brain Research Center, showed that trying to grasp the meaning of metaphoric images in poetry activates distinctive regions of the brain, which are not involved in the understanding of everyday language. "I am engaged in research on creativity and solving problems by means of creative thinking," she explains. "These are situations in which the brain has to be activated in an exceptional manner. When one says 'broom,' the left side of the brain thinks about cleaning up, but the right side thinks of a witch. Similarly, when we process an unfamiliar connection between words, such as a poetic image like 'blanket of mercy,' the right side of the brain is used, because of its far wilder network of associations." How does it work? Faust: "We examined different types of linguistic connections, both regular and metaphoric. We found a certain region in the right side of the brain that was particularly active when people needed to understand a new metaphor. There is a dynamic interaction of a great many areas of the brain, but with a new metaphor the right side is stronger. In other studies we found that this right-side region is active when people need to solve language conundrums creatively. After all, in order to be creative one must activate distinctive associations, and this is true in every realm: poetry, art, cooking, science, fashion." Prof. Yehoshua Tsal, a senior researcher in cognitive psychology at TAU, maintains that any attempt to examine such complex questions by means of sophisticated machinery is doomed to failure. "It's true that it sounds terrific that one can stick flags in different parts of the brain and turn the boring stuff of the brain into something exciting. But we have to ask what is being done here. Although there are studies that have contributed to an understanding of the brain, it seems to me that many of them are of almost negligible value. If you try to examine religious belief, for example, or liberalism, it stands to reason that a large number of cognitive components exist for each of those states, which involve numberless regions of the brain. How can you possibly think that you have succeeded in pinning it down to one region? These things have advertising value - the images that emerge from the brain have the power to persuade people that there is something real and new here, even though we know that the signal does not reflect reality." Charity and the brain Last June, a group of psychologists and economists from the University of Oregon and from the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, published the results of a study that made use of imaging technology to compare the European economic system - in which services are based on taxation - with the American system, which accords a more central place to voluntary contributions made by owners of capital. The study's research group consisted of 19 female students from the University of Oregon. Media headlines described the results of the study in unequivocal language: "Donating to charity is good for the brain," The Chicago Tribune declared, and a CNN report spoke of the pleasure the brain experiences after a person makes a contribution. According to the abstract of the study, which appeared in Science Magazine, "One possible motive for charitable contributions, called 'pure altruism,' is satisfied by increases in the public good no matter the source or intent. Another possible motive, 'warm glow,' is only fulfilled by an individual's own voluntary donations. Consistent with pure altruism, we find that even mandatory, tax-like transfers to a charity elicit neural activity in areas linked to reward processing. Moreover, neural responses to the charity's financial gains predict voluntary giving. However, consistent with warm glow, neural activity further increases when people make transfers voluntarily." How did the researchers arrive at their results, which purport to put an end to the debate between the proponents of the free market and the advocates of the welfare state? "To test for the pure altruism and warm-glow motives, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging [fMRI] while subjects played a dictator game," the article explains. "Subjects received $100 and then made decisions about whether or not to give money to a local food bank. They also observed mandatory, tax-like transfers of their money to the food bank." In this state, as the subjects lay in the MRI machine, the activity levels of different regions of their brain was examined. But can one make inferences from this simple game about people's behavior vis-a-vis complex economic systems? "We can say that a correlation exists between regions that are aroused when simple pleasure is experienced, and regions that are aroused when we give charity," says Prof. Anat Biegon, director of the Sagol Neuroscience Center at Sheba Medical Center. "There is apparently something in common, giving charity apparently causes pleasure, but if you want to know whether someone enjoys giving charity - ask him. You don't need to spend $1 million for that." Last September, the journal Nature Neuroscience published an article which identified differences in the patterns of brain activity among people who hold different political opinions: Liberals show one pattern, conservatives another. In this study, two groups of volunteers, divided according to their declared political beliefs, were subjected to electroencephalography (EEG, which measures electrical activity produced by the brain). In the experiment, they were asked to press a button quickly every time an instruction to that effect appeared on the screen, in a repetitive manner that became routine. However, occasionally a different instruction appeared, requesting them to stop pressing the button. The researchers say that this tested the subjects' amenability to changes. "Political scientists and psychologists have noted that, on average, conservatives show more structured and persistent cognitive styles, whereas liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty," the authors write in the abstract to the article. They found that "greater liberalism was associated with stronger conflict-related anterior cingulate activity, suggesting greater neurocognitive sensitivity to cues for altering a habitual response pattern." Dascal believes that the value of such studies is very limited. "It is completely unreasonable for something as complex as a political attitude to find expression in a particular place in the brain," he says. "The only way studies like this can be conducted is by radically simplifying the concept of the 'political attitude' they are trying to locate, to a degree that renders the study uninteresting." Dr. Shimona Ginsburg, a former brain researcher whose interests have turned to the philosophy of science, is also skeptical about the validity of attempting to locate the place of different brain functions. Not only is the temporary sample resolution of fMRI inexact (that is, the machine's slowness might cause it to miss the point in time at which the mental activity being sought occurs), and the connection between the findings and the activation of regions in the brain indirect - but the significance of the connection is not self-evident, either. "What they manage to see, in a rather coarse form, are regions which must be active for the function that is declared. It's not that you have found the center for lies in the brain - there are several regions that are active, both when you exert energy to hide something and when you exert energy to overcome fear. So you might possibly find a zone that will characterize lies well, but this doesn't mean this is its function ... You are not measuring the brain's activity directly, you are measuring oxygen or glucose. And we do not know precisely what the exact connection is between the brain activity that develops in this cell, and the need for oxygen and the flow of blood. We do not know the temporal connection; we know that the spatial connection is not one-to-one." Then what do we see? Ginsburg: "You have to be able to distinguish between causality and correspondence. It may be that we are very advanced regarding the correspondence we can find between behaviors and accompanying activity we see in the brain. Maybe we can even find very precise correspondence and improve it. So what? So that means you saw that there are regions of the brain that are active during cognitive activity. The brain's activity is perhaps a trace or shadow, but not the thing itself. If I perspire when I lie, no one will say that perspiration is responsible for the lying mechanism." Tsal points out that costly new technological means are being introduced at the expense of many methods that served psychological research in the past and are now being neglected. "If, for example, it is important for me to characterize people as liberals or conservatives," he notes, "there are three ways I can go about this. One way is to hold a conversation with people; I can hold a sophisticated conversation in which they will reveal things they did not want to reveal. There is a second method: Maybe people do not know they are actually conservatives, and I can test that by means of reaction time. For example, I will ask them to press button A if they see something black and bad, and button B if they see something white and good - and then it will turn out that it takes more time if we attach a positive trait to the black. And there is a third method, which says we should do brain research to find out whether someone is liberal or conservative - but anyone who opts for the third method has a hole in his head. Liberal and conservative are qualities that touch on so many regions of the brain." Love in a scanner The attempt to connect character traits with regions of the body dates back to ancient times. Throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, scholars and physicians, influenced by Aristotelian philosophy, tried to link anger, melancholia and other emotions to the liver, the spleen and other organs. As the science of anatomy developed, the brain's connection to thoughts and feelings was identified, and scientists began to look for areas related to emotion and cognition in different parts of the brain. At the beginning of the 19th century, the German anatomists Franz Josef Gall and Johann Spurzheim propounded the theory of phrenology, which tried to draw a systematic link between the shape of different parts of the brain and human traits. Phrenologists claimed to have identified 27 centers that are responsible for linguistic ability, intelligence, moral standards and for traits such as a poetic leanings, generosity and violence. Phrenology became an intellectual trend that captivated scientists and amateurs alike. The skulls of criminals and geniuses were measured, and the information was documented in the form of increasingly detailed maps of the regions of the brain. Phrenology remained popular into the early part of the 20th century, and in many cases involved elements of race theory. It was not until after World War II that the theory was discarded; it is now considered a pseudo-science. Interest in the brain has sprung up again in the past few decades, following the development of machines that have made it possible to scan and image in detail the activity of the brain of a living subject. First came EEG, which uses electrodes; then computed tomography (CT), which is tantamount to x-raying the brain; position emission tomography (PET), which measures the radiation emitted from small amounts of radioactive material; and now fMRI, which works by measuring the blood flow in the different parts of the brain and uses computerized imagery to show changes in blood composition. MRI technology was developed in the 1970s and came into medical and scientific use in the following decade. It involves using a large number of magnets to create a magnetic field on the brain or on other tissue. Increased activity in a particular region of the brain or tissue intensifies the flow of blood and heightens oxygenation; oxygen-rich blood absorbs electromagnetic radiation at a different rate from non-oxygenated blood. Accordingly, an fMRI scan can measure the amount of radiation return from different regions of the brain and thus identify the differences in levels of activity. The cost of the equipment is prohibitive: The new model goes for $2.5 million, and the maintenance and usage costs are also extremely high. Judy Illes, founder of the neuroethics center at Stanford, uses the term "neuro-realism" to describe the exaggerated tangibility attributed to the images derived from fMRI. Researchers, she explains during a telephone interview, think hatred is more real after they see brain imaging of people who experience it. Such images were never seen before, and of course they are very powerful and convincing. On the other hand, Illes notes, one sometimes has to ask what relevance these findings have for the real world: People interact in society with other people; they do not function while lying in a brain scanner in an isolated environment." Can one feel love during an MRI scan? Illes: "Love in an MRI scanner is love in an MRI scanner. It is a kind of love." 'Neuro-marketing' Most of the brain research now being conducted is of a purely theoretical nature, and its declared goal is to enhance scientific understanding. At the same time, there are increasing numbers of individuals and agencies that seek to use scientific information for a wide variety of purposes. Commercial entities are trying to market lie-detectors that operate by means of fMRI (although most scientists agree that the results of such testing are unreliable in the current state of knowledge about the brain). Market researchers use brain scanning to check the effectiveness of marketing techniques. And the possibility is even being examined of using imaging technology to examine court testimonies or select children for schools. Last year, the local economic daily Globes published the results of a study conducted at the Weizmann Institute, which used brain imaging to see how effective certain marketing techniques were. According to the report, when loyal Coca-Cola drinkers were shown a bottle of Pepsi, most of the processing activity in the brain occurred on the rational side; but when shown a bottle of their favorite drink, Coke, high-intensity activity was generated in the brain's emotional region - particularly in those areas associated with self-identity, positive feelings and a sense of reward. Prof. Rafael Malach of the Department of Neurobiology at Weizmann, one of the senior advisors involved in the study, called fMRI brain imaging a "revolution which in the long term will affect both advertisers and consumers." The other senior advisor, Prof. Jacob Hornik, former chairman of the marketing department of TAU's Faculty of Management, noted that in this way, "we will be able to develop a revolutionary marketing science called 'neuro-marketing.'" Malach is a great believer in this developing science. "I have been using fMRI from the outset," he says. "For the first time, I can study biologically the connection between the brain and human perception. Previously we were in the dark about this, whereas now I can obtain very meaningful insights about human nature. We discovered, for example, a central system in the brain, which is apparently connected with internal processes of the self. This system operates in situations in which attention is directed inward." Various uses that different bodies will potentially be able to make of the new imaging techniques are beginning to emerge. A Utah-based organization called the Lighted Candle Society, whose goal is to "promote moral values," wants to use fMRI to prove that pornography is addictive. Researchers from the University of Arizona, who examined mechanisms of dopamine secretion during learning, concluded that tests of the levels of the neural mediators in the brain will make it possible to identify children who are suited for different educational environments. Nearly all the researchers who were interviewed for this article noted that existing brain-imaging technologies do not enable applications of those kinds. They believe that the attempts by American corporations to market lie-detector machines are dubious, and some of them pointed to fundamental ethical and scientific questions about the possible uses to which imaging technology can be put. Ginsburg believes that implementing the findings of these studies is at the least problematic ethically. "It can lead to discrimination," she says. "Even if something simpler, such as attention-deficit problems, is examined - maybe someone wants to hide it, which is his right." According to Prof. Tsal, selecting candidates for schools by means of brain imaging is not reasonable in principle. "Let's say you are looking for something particular, such as students for an art school. The problem is that the concept of artistic talent is extremely complex. It is related to attention, to memory, to emotional activity of all types, which exist across the entire brain. Let's say that you have even succeeded in locating these regions - an artist's life is hard, so you need highly motivated students. Now you have to look in the brain for motivation, too. I mean to say that the whole thing is improbable for reasons that are not technical. Classifications currently used for schools do not make use of sufficiently effective tools, but they are still better than anything that can be examined directly in the brain."W Bookmark to del.icio.us   Free interpretation Yesha rabbinical council ruled it is forbidden for Jews to employ Arabs. Little Africa Tel Aviv is setting up a tent city to improve the living conditions of African refugees.

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