The rapidly expanding field of neuroimaging brings new meaning to the adage “A picture says a thousand words.” Newly released, The Human Brain Book combines incredible brain images with fascinating neuroscientific findings. (See a sample of some of the images in our brain gallery.)
NEWSWEEK’s Ian Yarett spoke with author Rita Carter about her interest in brain imaging and her thoughts on the societal implications of the neuroscience. Excerpts.
What got you interested in cataloging images and putting together a book like this?
I started doing this quite early on in the '90s when brain-imaging technology was just coming online. I was a medical journalist before that, and when I first saw those early pictures of brains actually thinking—which had never been possible before then, and which I think most people would have said was never going to be possible—[it was incredible] to actually have an image in front of you of someone’s thoughts or emotions. And then suddenly here were these pictures actually saying, you know, this is a thought, this is an emotion. I was knocked out by it.
What are some of your favorite photos or types of photos from the book?
Gosh, there’s so many . . . It’s quite difficult to know where to begin. One of the big, big stories in neuroscience recently has been about brain cells called mirror neurons. They’re these amazing neurons that become active when you see somebody doing something or even making an expression that you yourself might make, and they are the same brain cells that would bring about that particular expression or emotion or action if you were doing it yourself or feeling it yourself or thinking it yourself. And so it’s a kind of built-in mechanism by which human beings have a way of knowing what other people are thinking. The studies that have looked at the mirror-neuron system show, for example, that when you see someone else being pricked by a needle, the brain cells in your own brain which become active include the ones that would become active if you yourself were being pricked. So in other words, you actually feel the pain for other people. Now, I think that those studies are astonishing not just because of what they show but because of what they tell us about human beings. And so I suppose . . . the images which become my favorites are the ones which really show something extraordinary about us.
What are some of the other recent advances in brain research that you find exciting and interesting?
Research showing the physiological basis of things like morality and belief and calculation is astonishing—people have long debated how brains actually do what they do and work things out. And now we’re starting to see exactly how it does this step by step—how we make decisions and judgments and calculate things. We used to think of people, say, being good at numbers or bad at numbers, but actually a person can be very good at some kinds of numerical skills [and not at others]. And so it’s starting to shed light as well on a lot of these skills that we have, which hitherto have been very puzzling—speech difficulties, dyslexia, things like creativity. To actually see the nuts and bolts, the mechanics of how we do these things, tells us a lot about how we can maybe get better at certain things and also explains why some people are good at things and other people are bad at things.
Where do you think the neuroimaging field is going?
One of the ways that neuroimaging is already starting to impact society as a whole is in the law. We have already seen [in the United States] moves to get lie detectors based on brain imaging accepted in the courts because scans of people talking giving evidence seem to be very, very accurate at detecting whether they are telling the truth or not. This is going to make a huge difference, and of course it comes with an awful lot of questions about civil rights—mind-reading and so forth.
Isn’t there some debate about the utility of brain imaging for those purposes and whether the technology is ready to be used in that way?
Every time somebody says, oh, it can’t do that, you can’t look at a brain scan and tell what someone’s thinking—well, almost as soon as anyone says that, the next thing is, well, yes, you can. This was shown very clearly within the last year—they got people in a brain scan, they gave them a picture, and then they read off through a computer interpretation of the scan. It managed to actually print out a picture of the thing the people were looking at. I mean, as close to thought-reading as you can get, or a visual image anyway. It was actually a cover feature of the journal Nature. It went by remarkably unnoticed outside of the field, but I think this is just breathtaking.
To what degree do you think our brain patterns determine who we are?
Oh, totally. I think we are our brains. When we change the brain, we change the person. The more you look at brains . . . it becomes unavoidable that essentially everything you are is determined by the way that organ is working. And people who, for example, have a serious accident where a bit of their brain is knocked out, there is no doubt that a bit of them goes with it. Of course, [on the other hand] it does allow one to change and to learn. And yet there is still a very instinctive sense that we are more than our brains—and I can kind of sympathize with that because it’s common to us all, but I do think that if you really look at neuroscience you are forced to admit that all we are is this particular pattern of electrical activity in an organ, really.
