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A Wellcome brain gain for world leading
neuroscience lab
London, UK, October 27: One of the world's
foremost brain imaging research facilities has received a major boost after
being awarded £6.74 million funding over five years by the Wellcome Trust. The
former Functional Imaging Laboratory at University College London (UCL) is the
recipient of a Wellcome Trust Strategic Award and becomes the
Wellcome Trust
Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL.
The Strategic Award will further bolster the
reputation of a laboratory already renowned for its research into the neural
basis of human cognition, work which is extending our understanding of common
neurological and psychiatric diseases, such as schizophrenia and dementia.
"The human brain and human cognition are
incredibly complex, and as such, understanding them requires not only
state-of-the-art technology, but also a body of science with strong theoretical
underpinnings," explains Professor Ray Dolan, Director of the laboratory. "Our
goal at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL is to provide
excellence in both these aspects of imaging neuroscience. This will enable us to
study in depth the functional architecture of the human brain, with the ultimate
objective of identifying the core mechanisms that cause common human
neurological and psychiatric diseases."
Disorders of human brain function are a major
source of human morbidity. Finding effective treatments for common expressions
of human brain dysfunction, such as schizophrenia or dementia, poses major
intellectual and technical challenges.
A lack of means to study the living human brain
has historically been a major barrier to progress, but this is now less of a
problem due to the availability of powerful non-invasive imaging tools such as
functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG). The WTCFN
has three state of the art fMRI scanners and one MEG scanner.
"There has been formidable progress in
understanding human brain function using fMRI and MEG techniques over the past
ten years," says Professor Dolan. "Application of these techniques has reached a
level of maturity that we are now poised to apply them in a manner that can
impact on our understanding of fundamental mechanisms of brain based diseases."
"We are very pleased to support the Wellcome
Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL," says Dr Sohaila Rastan, Director of
Science Funding at the Wellcome Trust. "Research at the laboratory has provided
valuable insights into our understanding of the basic processes of perception
and cognition which will undoubtedly impact on the development and assessment of
effective therapies for common human neurological and psychiatric disorders.
"The Strategic Award builds on the Trust's
continued support of the laboratory and will allow its research staff to
continue producing science that is world class and high impact, aided by
highly-skilled support staff."
In addition to the Wellcome Trust funding, UCL is
providing a further £1.2 million as its contribution to the Strategic Award.
"We are delighted to receive this award of nearly
£7 million from the Wellcome Trust, and UCL will provide a further £1.2 million
to support neuroscience research at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging
at UCL," says Professor Malcolm Grant, President and Provost of UCL. "Brain
imaging is one of the most exciting and powerful tools available to explore the
human brain. This award will enable us to make further great strides in mapping
the brain's many functions and finding new treatments for a range of
neurological conditions which still pose a challenge to science and medicine."
Since its inception in 1994, the Functional
Imaging Laboratory has developed a world class reputation, with such leading
names as Professors Ray Dolan, Chris Frith, Richard Frackowiak and Karl Friston,
four of the "top 25 most cited scientists" worldwide in Behaviour and
Neuroscience.
Some recent research highlights from the
Functional Imaging Laboratory include:
INSIDE THE MIND OF A TAXI-DRIVER
One of the most famous studies to come out of the FIL was carried out by Dr
Eleanor Maguire, who showed that London's cabbies have enlarged hippocampi due
to their having to navigate the city's streets.
Dr Maguire's research aims to establish how we
internally represent large-scale space and our experiences within it, and seeks
to determine how this supports our sense of who and where we are.
Dr Maguire also studies disorders affecting
memory, such as developmental disorders in children and dementia in the elderly,
with the aim of developing clinical memory tests for early diagnosis and, in the
longer term, to inform treatment and rehabilitative interventions.
DECODING CONSCIOUSNESS
Professor Geraint Rees heads a group of clinicians and scientists that is
attempting to decode the neural processes underlying conscious awareness of the
world around us. Research from his group suggests that consciousness is
associated not just with activity in areas of the brain related to sensory
processing, but also those associated with attention.
Using functional MRI scanners, Rees and his team
are developing ways to use brain activity to accurately track how the contents
of an individual's stream of consciousness changes over several minutes. His
team has also made the first steps towards decoding subliminal perception and
the unconscious mind. By measuring brain activity when an object is shown
briefly and subliminally to volunteers, the scientists were able to predict what
was being shown even when it was invisible to the volunteers themselves.
Professor Rees says 'These are the first basic steps towards reading somebody's
mind'
BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN THEORY AND EXPERIMENT
Developed by Professor Karl Friston, Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM) is
both a concept and a piece of software, now used by hundreds of neuroscientists
worldwide to analyse brain imaging data. Whether they are studying vision,
language or stroke, researchers can use the same general purpose tool, SPM, to
bridge the gap between theoretical and experimental neuroscience.
Unlike previous methods of analysis, SPM treats
imaging data as samples of a continuous process, and reports results in a
brain-wide co-ordinate system. Originally designed for fMRI and PET, more
recently, SPM has been augmented to handle EEG and MEG which provide richer
information about the brain's dynamics.
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