They say a revolution is brewing.

We won’t see it in the streets and people won’t be talking about it on the daily news. Instead, it will happen in dimly lit laboratories, where human subjects lie with their heads in white tubular machines. In fact, it’s happening right now — as figures in lab coats crowd around a computer monitor, watching smudges of colour populate the screen. They are observing what’s happening inside a living human brain.

Neuroscience, the study of how the brain works, has become one of the fastest-growing fields in science, and has managed to infiltrate even the most unlikely areas of knowledge. 10 years ago, there was no such thing as neuromarketing, neuroliterature, or neuropolitics — and yet today it seems every discipline is competing for the coveted “neuro” suffix to add to its resume.

The recent explosion of brain science across so many domains of knowledge has led to forecasts of an impending “neuro revolution.” Some even believe it has already begun.

alt text
Zack Lynch, author of The Neuro Revolution and co-founder of the neurotechnology market research firm, NeuroInsights, describes the neuro revolution as an upheaval of the social, economic, and political planes of our lives, leading to what he calls the neurosociety. He explains that these changes are driven by neurotechnology, the tools used to understand and influence the brain.

“My thought on the neurosociety is that it really begins this year, quite frankly,” says Lynch. “The neurosociety begins to emerge in 2010 and takes us through 2060.”

“What we’re already beginning to see,” adds Lynch, “is that neuroscience and neurotechnology are beginning to infiltrate multiple aspects of our daily lives.”

Take, for instance, the field of neuromarketing. In recent years, a whole host of companies have sprung up, promising their big-business clients — corporations like Google, Hyundai, and Microsoft — a window into the consumer’s psyche.

Neuromarketing is based on the principle that consumers don’t generally know why they make certain choices about products: we don’t know why we like what we do. So while focus groups might lead to a fraction of that answer, technologies that allow companies to see the brain’s physical response to advertising materials seem to offer an even deeper insight into the consumer’s subconscious needs and preferences — the ones that marketers target in order to sell a product.

It’s this rationale that neuromarketers have used to ply their wares, and so far, they haven’t been hard to sell. The website of neuromarketing company Mindlab International opens with a video intro of faceless crowds walking up and down the street: “Wouldn’t you like to know what’s going on in their minds?”

Yes, we would.

And how about neuroaesthetics, the field that studies our brain’s reactions to different works of art? Or neurotheology, the science of neural processes underlying our beliefs in god? What about neuroeconomics, neurowarfare, and neuropolitics? We’d like to know what’s going on in our minds there too.

Perhaps the most notable application of neuroscience has been in courts of law. The field of neurolaw is responsible for bringing brain imaging into the courtroom for applications like brain-based lie detection. By monitoring activity in the brain regions associated with memory, researchers believe they can detect whether the accused was involved in the crime if corresponding memory areas light up when he is shown the evidence. Because let’s face it — we’d really like to know what’s going on in the mind of the accused.

alt text
In a heavily publicized case in 2008, a court in India convicted a 24-year-old woman of murder, based on the results of a brain scan. While these methods may appear tried and true in scientific literature, it is still unclear whether the results translate outside a lab setting.

“fMRI-based lie detection, for example, can do as well as 80-90 per cent correct in simple laboratory simulations where college students commit mock crimes and then lie or tell the truth, as instructed,” says Martha Farah, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and Center for Neuroscience and Society.

“But how does that percentage change when it’s a real criminal defendant, facing prison time, for a real crime that he undoubtedly has all kinds of strong feelings about? We just don’t know, but the worrisome thing is that lawyers are trying to introduce these tests as evidence in court.”

Ed Vul, a researcher at MIT and the University of California, San Diego echoes these worries. “The practical use of these [technologies] has outpaced their actual validation in the scientific community. So the use of fMRI and EEG in court, for instance, seems very, very dubious. I think it’s somewhat scary given that you can convict somebody based on somewhat shaky scientific principles.”

Within the general public, shaky scientific principles have raised both questions and eyebrows. Even in the neuroscience community itself, there have been heated disputes over the correct methods for analyzing neuroimaging data.

In 2009, Vul and his colleagues published what would become one of the most talked-about neuroscience articles of the year. The paper, entitled “Puzzlingly high correlations in social neuroscience,” reviewed the statistical methods used in 50 different fMRI studies — including several published in high-prestige journals like Science and Nature. It also demonstrated that the correlations these studies were reporting were dramatically inflated. In other words, the results of these experiments looked far more important than they actually were.

Although the article sparked considerable debate in the scientific community, Vul describes that the overall response was positive, and led to the general adoption of techniques to avoid these statistical errors.

But it is the very statistical nature of fMRI data that we often tend to ignore. As one of the most widely used techniques for visualizing brain function, to most people, fMRI seems like a magic mirror into our mental workings. Even in the field, fMRI has been the subject of clear enthusiasm. In 2007, an average of eight peer-reviewed articles using fMRI technology were published every day. But as researchers have noted, it’s all too easy to get carried away with the persuasive nature of pictures.

“I think that people find neuroimaging data somewhat convincing, because of the fact that it shows you a picture of a brain — and people find pictures very satisfying,” Vul explains. “But the statistics that go into producing the pictures are certainly not nearly as convincing as the pictures themselves.

“Probably the most important thing to keep in mind when looking at fMRI data for the common person is that it’s not a picture of a brain, it’s not a photograph, it’s not as veridical as you might imagine. What you’re looking at is an average of lots of very noisy data.”

alt text
With a more complete understanding of the nature and limitations of neurotechnology, it becomes clear that we’re facing some serious issues — especially if we expect these machines to herald a burgeoning neuro revolution. According to Farah, “The high-tech aura of brain imaging inspires confidence that is not always deserved.”

This begs the question: is this really a revolution after all? Can we really say we’re headed toward massive social upheaval based on technology that’s not quite as reliable as it looks? Or perhaps the recent excitement about all things “neuro” is simply a trend that will eventually die out.

Addressing the skeptics, Lynch argues, “to suggest that the neuro revolution is being driven by, and will continue to be driven by specific technologies of today — let’s say, fMRI — that would be sort of like saying the information revolution was going to be driven by vacuum tube computers. We still haven’t even reached the point where we have effective technologies that will actually be driving the revolution. What we have today are precursors to those very cheap, very widespread, very powerful technologies that will accelerate the exponential increase in new technologies to push the neuro revolution forward.”

It seems we are left to speculate as to what neurotechnology will do for societies in the future. For now, there is no real way for us to tell what that technology will look like. But one thing is certain: society’s interest in the brain is far from a recent development.

According to Delia Gavrus, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, much of the importance we attach to neuroscience comes from the notion of “brainhood” that emerged in the 18th century. Brainhood is the idea that we are our brains, and that the brain is where the self resides. Therefore, as knowers of the brain, we see neuroscientists as having the epistemic authority to speak about the self in ways we ourselves can’t access through introspection.

In describing his own fascination with the brain, McGill neuroscientist and author of This is Your Brain on Music Daniel Levitin explains, “I see it as one of the last great frontiers of knowledge. We already know a lot about the origins of the universe, and the fabric of space-time, and we’ve decoded the human genome. But one of the great mysteries is how it is that the simple firing of neurons gives rise to all of our hopes and dreams and desires and beliefs and sensory experiences.”

These insights into the human mind will come with some major responsibility — especially when the technology used to gain these insights is spreading increasingly outside the scientific domain. According to Farah, that’s where the field of neuroethics comes in.

“As in any science, when applications begin to be profitable, there is sometimes a conflict of interest — for example, between the desire to sell your brain-based lie detection, or brain-based market research or brain-based educational technology, and the obligation to assess it accurately and honestly. This is where the community of neuroscientists can help correct or at least question assessments that might be overly optimistic.”

According to some, it is not only the dialogue between neuroscientists that is crucial, but also opening up the conversation to the public.

“All the sciences are finding their way into public consciousness,” says Levitin. “We talk about the genome, which would have been unthinkable forty years ago. We talk about the Big Bang theory…and thirty years ago it was an obscure notion among a few physicists. So I think that a trickle-down of science to public consciousness is a good thing.”

Maybe we are racing toward a neuro revolution or perhaps this is simply a false start. Either way it makes sense to at least fasten our seatbelts.


fMRI: How it works

Functional magnetic resonance imaging — fondly referred to as fMRI — is the primary tool neuroscientists use to monitor the brain regions active during specific mental tasks. fMRI works by detecting changes in blood flow in the brain, which produce an indirect measure of neural activity called the blood-oxygen-level dependence, of BOLD signal.

In a typical fMRI study, researchers look at the average of the BOLD signal evoked while the participant performs one task, and subtract it from the average BOLD signal evoked during a different task. The image at the top of the page shows regions of the brain that are more active when participants make perceptual discriminations about famous faces, compared to perceptual discriminations for non-famous faces. The study, performed by Dr. Morgan Barense of U of T’s Department of Psychology and colleagues, was published in the journal Hippocampus in 2010.