Get the picture: The UCLA Brain Mapping Center

A woman with major depression lies as motionless as she can, her head inside the doughnut hole of an MRI scanner that clangs, beeps, chirps and buzzes as it captures images of neural activity. She’s wearing headphones so she can listen to Pandora. However, brain mappers can see on their computer screens what’s going on in her head. At the UCLA Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center (ALBMC), they are measuring her brain’s structure, shape, chemistry and function before treating her with electroconvulsive therapy. A few days after the treatment, they’ll map her again to compare the before and after. Spencer Lowell/UCLA Servers in the Neuroscience Research Building represent the digital technologies that enable unprecedented storage and analysis of data about the brain. Two hundred miles per hour is the top speed of signals that pass between active neurons, the cells that process and transmit information through electrical and chemical signals. Billions of them are at work in our heads. At UCLA’s brain mapping center, scientists map the paths those neurons take and the networks they form with high-tech scanners, enabling the study of a vast array of processes going on in our brains. These include sleep, learning, aging and memory, and the aberrant activities caused by such afflictions as schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, autism, clinical depression and brain injuries. Brain mapping was named one of this decade’s “10 Big Ideas of Brain Scien...
Source: UCLA Newsroom: Health Sciences - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: news