Interactive Brains

Neuroanatomy was my favorite class in medical school. I loved tracing out the brain pathways, figuring out which part did what, connecting up clinical syndromes to what I knew about brain structure and the nervous system. I learned all this back in the dark ages, back in the paleontologic age when whales had legs, before comets struck the earth and caused the last ice age. The World Wide Web didn't exist then either. I had to learn this stuff by examining the actual brains of dead people, by looking at stained microscope slides of brains and by pouring over books (the things with pages, covers and ink) rather than web sites.

So now the modern age is here and students get all kinds of cool high tech stuff to learn with. Just out of curiosity I scoured the web and put together a quick and dirty list of some web sites that provide interactive imaging of the human brain. Dang, I wish I had that when I was a med student.

Michigan State Brain Bank

Harvard's Whole Brain Atlas

University of Florida (takes a while to load, Flash-based, no labels)

University of Washington

Wayne State University

University of Utah (This one was my favorite atlas. It shows actual photographs of gross brain anatomy. You can click on the name of the structure and an arrow points to it. No neuroimaging to interpret, just identification of gross structures.)

University of Michigan

Columbia Brain Atlas

My Three Shrinks Podcast 38: New & Improved!

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Okay, this podcast is a milestone for us. Dinah bought several hundred dollars worth of sound equipment (Alesis MultiMix8 w/Firewire, Behringer C-1 mics), which took us several hours to properly set up to record so that each of us comes into the MacBook as a separate track, thus letting us have more equal sound volumes (before we all shared the same mic, so our voices were at different levels).

I've set it up so that if you listen to the .m4a version (that's what gets downloaded from iTunes), Clink's more on the left channel, Dinah's more on the right, and I'm in the middle. Let us know how you like it. I'm still figuring out how to use it all to achieve the best sound quality, but I think #38 is the best one we've ever done so far.

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November 11, 2007: #38 New & Improved!


Topics include:

• MacArthur Foundation Grant. Decision-making, substance abuse, and brain abnormalities. Developing guidelines for judges about neuroimaging and brain function.
  
  
• On our Shrink Rap blog, Clink blogs about What She Learned (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) at her AAPL conference.
  
  
• Delirium. Roy discusses delirium, or encephalopathy, what it is and recent findings about longer term damage. This was on the front page of a recent WSJ.
  
  
• Shrink-proof containers. Clink brings back a hotel bottle of mouthwash that she could not open.
  
  
• Q&A: Gerbil brings up recent study on chocolate lovers.
  
  
• Online CBT for Depression. Study finds it helpful for mild-moderate depression. Eliza.
  
  
• Telepsychiatry. We just chat about some of the issues.
  

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Find show notes with links at: http://mythreeshrinks.com/. The address to send us your Q&A's is there, as well. This podcast is available on iTunes (feel free to post a review) or as an RSS feed. You can also listen to or download the .mp3 or the MPEG-4 file from mythreeshrinks.com. Thank you for listening.

Neuroscience Funding Gets A Boost

Just a couple weeks ago the Justine and Catherine MacArthur Foundation awarded a $10 million dollar grant to twelve universities to study neuroimaging and the law. The purpose of the grant is to get a better understanding of the relationship between functional neuroimaging studies and forensic issues such as competence to make decisions, criminal responsibiity and disabiity. This grant has the potential to really change the nature of psychiatric expert testimony.

The grant has three components: brain abnormalities, substance abuse and decision-making. There will be some overlap between these areas, but the general idea is to start bridging the gap between what is seen on a functional MRI and the ultimate legal questions of criminal culpability and competence. This can be a life or death question---in Roper v Simmons neuroimaging was used as evidence that juveniles should not be given the death penalty. Hopefully the MacArthur grant will shed some light on whether the degree of brain myelination in juveniles is, in fact, relevant at all to criminal responsibility. Right now the legal opinions based on neuroimaging have tended to leap a bit beyond what science has shown in my opinion.

My Three Shrinks 5: Sex, Lies, and Neuroeconomics

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Today's podcast is brought to you by the letter "M" and the number "5".

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January 9, 2007:
Topics include:

• New Yorker Magazine (Sep 18, 2006): Mind Games: What Neuroeconomics tells us about money and the brain, by John Cassidy. The neuroanatomy and functional connectivity that lies behind our economic decisions and risk aversion. As measured by functional MRI imaging (fMRI), the constant tug-of-war between the orbitofront al lobe, the amygdala, and the insular cortex mediates everyday economic decisions. Related links include the Neuroscience Marketing blog, New York University's Center for Brain Imaging, Google "neuroeconomics", and the Omnibrain blog (one of our favorites).
• Book "Paving Wall Street: Experimental Economics and the Quest for the Perfect Market", by Dinah's brother, Ross.
• Dinah refers back to a Shrink Rap post on compulsive blogging and to another one on a combination Wellbutrin (bupropion)/Revia (naltrexone) pill called Contrave for weight loss.
• The Interview Room, a novel by forensic psychiatrist Roderick Anscombe, provides insight into how the brain betrays people's lies. His website provides 14 tips on how to spot the liar (very interesting reading).
• Washington Post (Oct 30, 2006): Using fMRI machines to detect lies. See also website for No Lie MRI.
• Be nice to Dinah, who had a bad day.
• Clink's Favorite Podcasts: BusinessWeek, NPR, State Department Press Briefings, Slash Dot Review, Byzantine Emperors.
  
• Roy's Favorite Podcasts: Comic Strip Live, FLOSS Weekly, Futures in Biotech, Inside the Net (now http://www.twit.tv/ITN), NEJM, This Week in Tech (TWiT).
  
• Dinah's Favorite Podcasts: "Umm, why would I want to listen to podcasts, anyway?"

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Find show notes with links at:
iTunes. You can also listen to or download the .mp3 or the MPEG-4 file from mythreeshrinks.com.

technorati tags:psychiatrists, psychiatry, blog, podcast, psychology, neuroeconomics, fMRI, MRI, brain, scan, lies

Blogged with Flock

Roy: Warrantless Brain Scans

This whole search for terrorist collaborators thing is getting a little ridiculous. Tapping into millions of domestic phone calls (and probably blogs and emails and IMs) in the name of terrorism? That's legal?

So, here's my nightmare scenario. If this is legal, the next step is to force functional MRIs on people to determine what they know (about terrorism, of course). The technology is there. Functional MRI (fMRI) measures minute changes in blood flow in the brain, comparing areas to see which ones have more blood flow, and thus are more active. It seems that one must use specific brain areas to make stuff up. This technology is being used for good purposes (eg, controlling chronic pain), but could certainly be applied to darker motives.

Talkleft asked:

"Would the Court view an involuntary brain scan as a nonintrusive gathering of information rather than a search governed by the Fourth Amendment? Would the Court view brain scans as forcing an involuntary disclosure of thoughts prohibited by the Fifth Amendment's requirement that individuals not be made to testify against their will?"

fMRI is not "invasive" in the classical sense. No needles. No tubes. Sorta like going through an airport scanner, but lying down (you can even keep your shoes on). So what's to stop them from using this technology on Gitmo detainees (or on us)?

The chronic pain link above is interesting, BTW. It makes me wonder if real-time fMRI scanning can be used to learn how to better control obsessive thoughts or auditory hallucinations or anxiety.