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Asked by smileyface123 to Damien, Rachael, Simon, Suzi, Tim on 13 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by ailhep123.
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Suzi Gage answered on 10 Jun 2011:
Hi @smileyface123
I’m afraid I don’t actually know much about neurology. I studied Neuropsychology for a year, which is similar, trying to understand how the brain affects how people behave.My favourite thing about neuropsychology was getting to have my brain scanned by a giant magnet (a magnetic resonance imaging MRI scanner), and being able to see the inside of my brain on a computer screen!
We could then use the scans to see which bits of the brain were involved in different tasks that a person did while in the scanner. Very cool 🙂
Hope this answered your question, sorry I changed it a bit 🙂
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Damien Hall answered on 12 Jun 2011:
I think my favourite thing is how precise you can be about someone’s brain when you examine it neurologically – you can scan and see exactly where something is happening.
It might not be really obvious – well, it’s not! – but there are a lot of really cool connections between neurology and language. In the lab I used to work in, there were a few people who specialised in that. One experiment they did was that they put people in a machine that detected the tiny, tiny electrical currents created when the brain works, then gave them a few sentences to read, and they had to judge whether the sentences were true or not. My friends measured the differences between the currents created when someone thought something was true and the ones created when someone thought something was false. If you know about that sort of thing, you can then predict the effect that certain brain injuries might have (for example), based on where the injury was and where the different types of current were created in the brain.
There’s actually something great in the paper today about neurology, if you want to read it:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jun/12/ellen-bialystok-bilingual-brains-more-healthy
It’s about how people’s brains can cope with Alzheimer’s better if they are bilingual (fluent in more than one language from childhood). It says that the scientists (in Canada) looked at a few people with Alzheimer’s who all looked as if they had the disease to about the same level – that is, their behaviour was affected by it in about the same way. Then they scanned their brains and found that the ones who were bilingual’s brains were much more badly-injured than the ones who were monolingual (only spoke one language). This means that the bilingualism might have helped those people’s brains cope better with a much worse level of injury. We wouldn’t have known that if some neuroscientist linguists hadn’t looked – and that’s the kind of discovery that could really help someone.
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Rachael Ward answered on 13 Jun 2011:
That’s a hard question to answer. I love how many different things the brain does, how complex it is. I also love looking at neurons under a microscope. We can attach coloured flourescent proteins to individual neurons or groups of neurons so they stand out from one another. I have done this to look at neurons in the worms I study but other scientists have used lots of different colours of flourescent proteins in mice brains to create a “brainbow”. This helps us understand how different neurons are connected to one another but also looks really beautiful. You can find out more about it and see the pictures here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainbow
I have one of these pictures as my computer wallpaper, it makes me smile every day!
Comments
smileyface123 commented on :
thankyou all for the v. specific answers! 🙂
they’re all really interesting, ;D