Unlocking Secrets of the Mind

My name is Pendleton Red Montague junior. I'm a professor of physics at Virginia Tech. What my lab does and what my center for human neuroscience research does. We would seem like a bunch of desperate individuals to get inside people's heads. We want to listen across the scalp, with functional MRI, with electroencephalography, with optically pumped magnetometry. You would call that a non invasive way to look inside the head. And so we use the latest generation of sensors like that. They used to be about this long. Now that the size of a big sugar cube, we put them all over your head, and then we engage you in some sort of cognitive task, in our case, some sort of social exchange task with other people, and we record from your brain. We have another group here that uses ultrasound to send sound waves through the brain to perturb regions and ask the consequences of that. We mean something when we say your mind. What exactly do we mean? Well, let me tell you some of the things we might mean. The kind of things experimental psychologists study. When you sit, you're trying to decide whether you turn left or right or you eat the chocolate cake or the carrots. What's going on there? Well, that's more like a software problem. There may be lots of hardware solutions that underwrite that software problem, and that might differ across people. That's important because when those things break, You're not right. You can be called ill. You don't perceive the world in a way that's consistent with others, or you may have faulty circuitry that ends up being diseased in some way, and that develops over decades, and then you end up really really sack. We don't like that, and we're willing to pay a lot of money to go and try to fix that and figure that out. Since you always had to have an electrode in contact with neural tissue, that basically meant you always did it in an animal, until I met Reid and found out that there are ways you can do it in humans, which is profound. This is the first time that this has ever happened. On top of that, his twist on the method allows us to measure more than one neurotransmitter at a time, and I don't want that to be lost on you. That is a huge deal. I mean, even in animal models, we have not been able to do that well. So this is not only the first time you're seeing these signaling molecules in humans, it's the first time you're seen him able to dance. We've never been able to see the dance floor before. Our focus here is humans is the human being, and the way in which these neurochemical dynamics relate to the things that you think of as perception and cognition. For the first time ever, when you hear an emotional passage red, when you see a movie clip that has some content to it that has meaning to you. When you look at dots drifting across the screen, and you just tell me, are they going right? Are they going left? Now if you have a wire in your head for some reason, we can do chemistry on that wire. Can't do all chemistry on that wire, but we can record neurotransmitters on that wire at fast time scales and across neurotransmitters that are really important to your mental health, like dopamine, like serotonin, like no epinephrine, like histamine, even the molecules that you take under the care of a psychiatrist or neurologist to perturb those systems. You do something simple all the way up to, how did this poem make you feel? I'm not just asking you that anymore. I'm challenging you with a cognitive challenge that you can quantify, and I'm recording its impact on these neuromodulatory systems that are crucial to you staying alive to you chasing food, water, salt, and sex. These same systems are engaged by things that are emotionally moving, that are motivating, that are mood changing. Energizing, et cetera. This has changed the entire field of neuroscience and our entire ability to query the human mind and brain with a technology that was just not even imagined, I think, not too many years ago. It would be shocking to me if there weren't all sorts of applications. I'm not sitting here with a glib list of them here, but when we start providing these tools to clinicians who have intuitions about it, there's going to be a lot of that information. To have real precision and quantitation on what's going on with those things. Who knows what doors is going to open for new types of interventions, you know, in medicine, in psychiatry in particular. The only thing I think we can be sure of, it's going to be extremely important to the future for developing treatments.