Brain ChaosThursday, 26 October 2000
Our brains are the most complex things in the universe. Yet while we’re all familiar with the Big Bang theory of how the Universe formed, even scientists are still struggling to explain the origins of our thoughts, memories and emotions.But a Melbourne mathematician may have finally cracked the secret code of our brainwaves. If he’s right, his visual model of a brain a work shows that our thoughts are as beautiful as they are complex. (full transcript...)
Producer: Naomi Lumsdaine Researcher: Joy Mitchell
Related Sites:
David Liley’s homepage
Story Contacts:
Dr David Liley School of Biophysical Sciences & Electrical EngineeringSwinburne University of TechnologyPO Box 218HawthornVIC 3122
Full Program Transcript
NARR: Our lives are directed by a mysterious controller. We know little about how it operates, and yet it forms our every action, thought and emotion, It’s the brain. DR DAVID LILEY: The thing that fascinates me about studying the brains is that it’s the most complex thing in the known universeNARR: Dr David Liley, believes it’s time to change the way we think about the brain. He’s frustrated by what he considers to be a theoretical vacuum in neuroscience.DR DAVID LILEY: At the moment our theories are relatively I would say, we basically don’t know anything about the brain. And we’re in a sense being driven by theories that really have their development sort of about 150 years ago.In the past, research has focussed on finding sections of the brain directly responsible for our body’s functions.David Liley sees this cause and effect approach as too simplistic.DR DAVID LILEY: Well locations can just show you location. That’s all they show you. So for instance if you say this part of the brain lights up when I do something. That doesn’t really tell you about the processing that underlies the task. It just tells you about the location of that, and even that’s debatable.NARR: So what’s the answer? David and his colleagues at Swinburne University of Technology, are trying to explain how the brain works using mathematics. They’re developing equations based on the physiology of the brain: details such as the way that neurons travel and interconnect.It’s a huge task. There are something like 100 billion neurons operating in the brain. How can we describe such complexity?Imagine the brain is like a town, and neurons the people living in it.It’s not feasible to predict the actions of the whole population by studying every single person. But by looking at general patterns of human behaviour, it becomes possible to make predictions. By taking a general view of the brain, David believes it’s possible to develop models of brain activity.DR DAVID LILEY: The equations were just basically asking the simple question, what is the behaviour, or the dynamics in a sense of large populations of neurones as found in the brain. NARR: And this is David’s first success - a mathematical description of brain waves. These electrical signals have been observed using EEG machines since the 1920’s, but they have never been fully understood. David’s equations are now helping to reveal hidden patterns in their rhythm.DR DAVID LILEY: One of the long standing questions in research in EEG is whether the EEG is noisy or whether there is actually detail in it. And by simulating these equations you get output that looks noisy, but when you project it and replot it in a certain way has quite profound order.NARR: David hopes that his equations will provide testable models of brain activity. Since they’re based on physiology, they can be adapted to predict the affect on the brain of changes in, say, blood pressure or medication. But David believes that ultimately, the brain will always defy total explanation. For him, the challenge of finding new ways to explore the brain’s complexities is plenty of reward.DR DAVID LILEY: "My student and I we sit there often looking at our latest results and just going wow, isn’t the brain just amazing. It’s just elegant. It’s just.. the aesthetic beauty of trying to understand something as prodigiously complex as the human brain is a great motivator."
Our brains are the most complex things in the universe. Yet while we’re all familiar with the Big Bang theory of how the Universe formed, even scientists are still struggling to explain the origins of our thoughts, memories and emotions.But a Melbourne mathematician may have finally cracked the secret code of our brainwaves. If he’s right, his visual model of a brain a work shows that our thoughts are as beautiful as they are complex. (full transcript...)
Producer: Naomi Lumsdaine Researcher: Joy Mitchell
Related Sites:
David Liley’s homepage
Story Contacts:
Dr David Liley School of Biophysical Sciences & Electrical EngineeringSwinburne University of TechnologyPO Box 218HawthornVIC 3122
Full Program Transcript
NARR: Our lives are directed by a mysterious controller. We know little about how it operates, and yet it forms our every action, thought and emotion, It’s the brain. DR DAVID LILEY: The thing that fascinates me about studying the brains is that it’s the most complex thing in the known universeNARR: Dr David Liley, believes it’s time to change the way we think about the brain. He’s frustrated by what he considers to be a theoretical vacuum in neuroscience.DR DAVID LILEY: At the moment our theories are relatively I would say, we basically don’t know anything about the brain. And we’re in a sense being driven by theories that really have their development sort of about 150 years ago.In the past, research has focussed on finding sections of the brain directly responsible for our body’s functions.David Liley sees this cause and effect approach as too simplistic.DR DAVID LILEY: Well locations can just show you location. That’s all they show you. So for instance if you say this part of the brain lights up when I do something. That doesn’t really tell you about the processing that underlies the task. It just tells you about the location of that, and even that’s debatable.NARR: So what’s the answer? David and his colleagues at Swinburne University of Technology, are trying to explain how the brain works using mathematics. They’re developing equations based on the physiology of the brain: details such as the way that neurons travel and interconnect.It’s a huge task. There are something like 100 billion neurons operating in the brain. How can we describe such complexity?Imagine the brain is like a town, and neurons the people living in it.It’s not feasible to predict the actions of the whole population by studying every single person. But by looking at general patterns of human behaviour, it becomes possible to make predictions. By taking a general view of the brain, David believes it’s possible to develop models of brain activity.DR DAVID LILEY: The equations were just basically asking the simple question, what is the behaviour, or the dynamics in a sense of large populations of neurones as found in the brain. NARR: And this is David’s first success - a mathematical description of brain waves. These electrical signals have been observed using EEG machines since the 1920’s, but they have never been fully understood. David’s equations are now helping to reveal hidden patterns in their rhythm.DR DAVID LILEY: One of the long standing questions in research in EEG is whether the EEG is noisy or whether there is actually detail in it. And by simulating these equations you get output that looks noisy, but when you project it and replot it in a certain way has quite profound order.NARR: David hopes that his equations will provide testable models of brain activity. Since they’re based on physiology, they can be adapted to predict the affect on the brain of changes in, say, blood pressure or medication. But David believes that ultimately, the brain will always defy total explanation. For him, the challenge of finding new ways to explore the brain’s complexities is plenty of reward.DR DAVID LILEY: "My student and I we sit there often looking at our latest results and just going wow, isn’t the brain just amazing. It’s just elegant. It’s just.. the aesthetic beauty of trying to understand something as prodigiously complex as the human brain is a great motivator."
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