Mind movies
Paul Thompson has brains. Lots of them. The 33-year-old has degrees in Greek and Latin, mathematics, and neuroscience, and a colleague calls him "the smartest person I know." But we're not just talking about smarts. Thompson really does have lots of brains--about 7,000 at last count.
To see them, step out of the bright Southern California sunshine and into the dark confines of the Reed neurology building at the University of California-Los Angeles, where Thompson has his office and lab. There, in a room behind a heavy glass panel, is a large, humming black computer, and inside are brain images captured by high-tech medical scanners: young brains, old brains, autistic brains, Alzheimer's brains, schizophrenic brains, drug addicts' brains, and a whole bunch of normal ones. "My brain is in there somewhere," Thompson says.
Yet individuality is not what Thompson is interested in. He's mapping brain diseases in large groups of people. By constructing incredibly detailed 3-D images of brains with Alzheimer's and then combining them, he has been able to trace the typical path of the disease and show just how it ravages different parts of the brain over time. Now scientists can see which structures get damaged when--and also see which drugs might keep that damage at bay. In schizophrenia, Thompson's maps have pinpointed a brain region involved in understanding sounds as the first part to be hurt; a common symptom of this mental disorder is hearing voices. His maps are part of a current study of how new and older antipsychotic drugs shield this brain region. "We've never before been able to show these links between brain changes and behavior," says Jay Giedd, a psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md. "So these maps are incredibly powerful."
But they are also still research tools, Giedd cautions, and not useful for actually diagnosing patients. Still, says Andrew Leuchter, vice chair of psychiatry at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, "one of the most important things about Paul's work is that everything he does helps to trace the earliest signs of disease, because that's the logical place to begin treatment. So much other imaging work is on advanced stages of illness." The key is to see when things first depart from normal. "The brain is the last giant black box of medicine, locked up inside the skull. Paul shows us what it looks like."
Imaging power. Thompson's start in brain science didn't make it seem as if he was going to show anyone anything. "When I first came to UCLA to do my Ph.D., I had trouble in the labs where they were using test tubes and chemicals. A few things got, well, a bit broken." He laughs. "The man running the lab was really quite sweet, but I think I saw a look of relief on his face when my year with him was up."
Things improved when Thompson moved on to neuroimaging. He had always been fascinated by--and good at--advanced mathematics, "and brain imaging is where you can apply math to some tough problems, like understanding what makes people's brains differ from each other. You can collect a lot of brain images, but it's really a mathematical problem to figure out what the patterns of differences are."
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