Mission Statement of the Center for Brain Research and Informational Sciences

"The classroom is the sole forum for teaching. Or is it? In the eyes of many faculty, especially new faculty, teaching takes place inside the classroom. A carefully planned class, well crafted lectures, and more recently, multi-media presentations are their focus. But teaching can, and should, extend beyond such confines. Specifically, faculty-student research collaboration offers a rich forum for many opportunities for teachers to practice their craft and students to learn -- outside the classroom. The pivotal element in such collaborative scholarship is the gradual process of professional growth shown by our students. While this growth can bring many rewards for them, faculty also accrue genuine rewards in such collaboration."

-- The Value of Collaborative Scholarship with Undergraduates: The Observer, January 1995. Published by the American Psychological Society.

The Center for Brain Research and Informational Sciences (BRAINS) was formed as an integral part of the teaching mission of the experimental science program of the Department of Psychology. The Center's role in such a program is analogous to the theater in the School of Performing Arts and the various clinical and educational opportunities made available to students in the Schools of Nursing and of Education, as well as the clinical programs of the Department of Psychology. Hands-on training is the essence of all such opportunities and in experimental science hands-on means carrying out basic research.

Basic research is basic in that it has multiple applications. Often these applications take time to actualize. The story is told that when Faraday was asked by the Chancellor of the Exchequer (whose support was being sought) what the then basic research on electricity might be good for, Faraday's reply was "some day you'll be able to tax it."

There are two types of basic research: the development of new technologies and the collecting, handling and interpreting of data. Two new technologies have been developed at BRAINS. One technique centers on collecting electrical recordings with fine wires (microelectrodes) from single cells or small groups of cells located in the brains of rats. The other technique centers on recording brain electrical activity from the scalp of human subjects. These basic techniques were chosen because, with the advance of computer technology, both are on the threshold of providing major advances in our understanding of brain function. Also, these two techniques allow experimentation within a reasonable budget. Other technologies with equal promise such as Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging have start-up costs running into many millions of dollars and need a sizable staff to maintain and operate the facility.

Since its inception in 1990, major advances have been made at BRAINS with both the microelectrode and the scalp recording techniques. At the time of the Center's creation, it was customary to record only the overall response of a brain cell to a given stimulation. Now we are able to apply basic geometric principles to plotting the processes that produce the cells' response. We record as much as a gigabyte (billion "words") of data each day of experimentation. Furthermore, the techniques are sufficiently advanced so that under the direction of Professor Joseph King, undergraduate and graduate students are able to carry out the experimentation, thus providing a range of learning/ teaching opportunities for them. We have trained three Master's degree students in these techniques. They have all been accepted in doctorate programs: at UCLA, Louisiana State University, and University of Pittsburgh.

With regard to scalp recordings, a similar increase in recording power is occurring. Prize-winning work on hypnosis reported by Center personnel was accomplished with four electrodes. Then, for five years we used twenty electrodes, and now we are actively working, in cooperation with the University of Oregon, with a geodesic array of 128 electrodes which allows us to accurately locate where electrical fields occur in the brain. The most striking finding obtained with our current system of recordings is that the electrical activity in the brain changes quite rapidly -- 100-200 times per second. This dynamic quality was initially recorded on video; we then developed techniques to quantify the speed with which changes are occurring and to draw maps that portray this dynamic quality.

The computer programs for all of this research were developed by two students matriculating in electrical engineering at Virginia Tech. Their theses on several aspects of signal processing involve their work at BRAINS which has therefore benefitted from the supervision of their thesis committees. As well, of course, the signal processing experts at Virginia Tech profited by having real-world data to reckon with. These two graduate students have been ably assisted by a Radford undergraduate who has programmed a large portion of the more routine aspects of the scalp recording techniques. Another Radford student received his Master's degree in our program and is now enrolled as a Ph.D. student in Psychology at Virginia Tech. An integral relationship between electrical engineering, computer science and psychology has thus been established between the two institutions.

Currently, we are testing five groups of subjects: 1) Young (college age); 2) Middle age (30-60 years); 3) Elderly (60-90 years); 4) Patients with depression; and 5) Patients with Alzheimer's disease (in conjunction with a local neurologist). The subjects are performing a simple task in which we record behavioral responses. We are thus able to relate the records of brain electrical activity to the records of behavioral performance. A variety of statistical techniques, such as factor analysis and measures of complexity, are showing interesting results. The students are, therefore, learning a great deal; in particular, they have learned to appreciate the attention to detail necessary to accurately record data. Additionally, students have discovered that statistical analysis can be very useful to uncover facts that are not immediately obvious. Four Master's degree students are currently working with Professor Tom Pierce in this area of research; a previous Master's student is enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Tufts in Psychology and has a laboratory to continue her research at the Shriver-Kennedy Center in Boston.

The computer programs for all of this research were developed by two students matriculating in electrical engineering at Virginia Tech. Their theses on several aspects of signal processing involve their work at BRAINS which has therefore benefitted from the supervision of their thesis committees. As well, of course, the signal processing experts at Virginia Tech profited by having real-world data to reckon with. These two graduate students have been ably assisted by a Radford undergraduate who has programmed a large portion of the more routine aspects of the scalp recording techniques. Another Radford student received his Master's degree in our program and is now enrolled as a Ph.D. student in Psychology at Virginia Tech. An integral relationship between electrical engineering, computer science and psychology has thus been established between the two institutions.

In addition to teaching and research, the Center has sponsored five yearly conferences. These Appalachian Conferences on Behavioral Neurodynamics are supported by private contributions, by the International Neural Network Society (INNS), and by the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH). Two Nobel Laureates have keynoted the conferences which have included luminaries from locations ranging from Oxford to Japan. The thrust of these conferences has been to indicate that, with regard to everyday experience (consciousness), the brain appears to process information along the lines that operate in quantum physics. The conferences have proved to be immensely successful both from a teaching perspective and in bringing together scientists from various disciplines to address issues of immediate concern to the ongoing research at BRAINS. The conference proceedings have been published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. under the following titles: Rethinking Neural Networks: Quantum Fields and Biological Data; Origins: Brain and Self Organization; Learning as Self Organization; Scale in Conscious Experience: Is the Brain Too Important to be Left to Specialists to Study?; and Brain and Values: Is a Biological Science of Values Possible.

Equal Opportunity Statement

These pages were last updated on October 8, 1996.