What do your cell-phone and a brain scan have in common? Both need clear signals for optimal efficacy.

Doctors often have to work with sketchy data when it comes to brain scans–but the solution to that problem isn’t one that many patients will clamor to try. A new study to be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience says the best way to get clearer EEG brain scans is to remove a part of the skull.

For years, doctors have been treating patients who have suffered severe head trauma like a gunshot or knife wound by cutting out a chunk of the skull–a procedure called a hemicraniectomy. This gives the brain room to swell, and when the wound heals they re-attach the chunk of skull.

Neuroscientist Bradley Voytek of the University of California at Berkeley, the lead author of this study, worked with hemicraniectomy patients and utilized this window to see how the skull acts as a barrier to EEG’s–a brain scan that is done to assess the brain’s electrical activity.

Wired reports that the patients were instructed to peform simple tasks:

During these tasks the team measured a patient’s brain waves on both sides of his head. On one side, just a thin flap of skin separated the brain from the EEG electrode, while on the other side the skull was intact. Signals from the skull-free side were, unsurprisingly, much stronger, less noisy and easier to pinpoint to a specific task and region of the brain.

The study not only offers a creepy way to get clearer brain scans, it also suggests another way to situate neural implants, like the kind that may one day be used by paralyzed people to relay their brain signals to prosthetic limbs. Researchers note that it’s difficult to maintain a long-term electrode in the brain, but some delicate brain signals aren’t strong enough to be read from outside the skull. By drilling a small hole into the skull and placing the electrode on the outermost surface of the brain, the researchers think they might obtain better brain signals.

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DISCOVER: Brains Don’t Lie

Image: Bradley Voytek

Welcome to this week’s installment of the From Eternity to Here book club. Today we look at Chapter Two, “The Heavy Hand of Entropy.”

[By the way: are we going too slowly? If there is overwhelming sentiment to move to two chapters per week, that would be no problem. But if sentiment is non-overwhelming, we'll stick to the original plan.]

Excerpt:

While it’s true that the presence of the Earth beneath our feet picks out an “arrow of space” by distinguishing up from down, it’s pretty clear that this is a local, parochial phenomenon, rather than a reflection of the underlying laws of nature. We can easily imagine ourselves out in space where there is no preferred direction. But the underlying laws of nature do not pick out a preferred direction of time, any more than they pick out a preferred direction in space. If we confine our attention to very simple systems with just a few moving parts, whose motion reflects the basic laws of physics rather than our messy local conditions, there is no arrow of time—we can’t tell when a movie is being run backward…

The arrow of time, therefore, is not a feature of the underlying laws of physics, at least as far as we know. Rather, like the up/down orientation space picked out by the Earth, the preferred direction of time is also a consequence of features of our environment. In the case of time, it’s not that we live in the spatial vicinity of an influential object, it’s that we live in the temporal vicinity of an influential event: the birth of the universe. The beginning of our observable universe, the hot dense state known as the Big Bang, had a very low entropy. The influence of that event orients us in time, just as the presence of the Earth orients us in space.

This chapter serves an obvious purpose — it explains in basic terms the ideas of irreversibility, entropy, and the arrow of time. It’s a whirlwind overview of concepts that will be developed in greater detail in the rest of the book, especially in Part Three. As a consequence, there are a few statements that may seem like bald assertions that really deserve more careful justification — hopefully that justification will come later.

Here’s where I got to use those “incompatible arrows” stories I blogged about some time back (I, II, III, IV). The fact that the arrow of time is so strongly ingrained in the way we think about the world makes it an interesting target for fiction — what would happen if the arrow of time ran backwards? The straightforward answer, of course, is “absolutely nothing” — there is no prior notion of “backwards” or “forwards.” As long as there is an arrow of time that is consistent for everyone, things would appear normal to us; there is one direction of time we all remember, which we call “the past,” when the entropy was lower. It’s when different interacting subsystems of the universe have different arrows of time that things get interesting. So we look briefly at stories by Lewis Carroll, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Martin Amis, all of which use that trick. (Does anyone know of a reversed-arrow story that predates Through the Looking Glass?) Of course these are all fantasies, because it can’t happen in the real world, but that’s part of the speculative fun.

Then we go into entropy and the Second Law, from Sadi Carnot and Rudolf Clausius to Ludwig Boltzmann, followed by some discussion of different manifestations of time’s arrow. All at lightning speed, I’m afraid — there’s a tremendous amount of fascinating history here that I don’t cover in anywhere near the detail it deserves. But the real point of the chapter isn’t to tell the historical stories, it’s to emphasize the ubiquity of the arrow of time. It’s not just about stirring eggs to make omelets — it has to do with metabolism and the structure of life, why we remember the past and not the future, and why we think we have free will. Man, someone should write a book about this stuff!

With one week until the premiere of the final season of LOST, let’s consider the possibilities for what might happen next…

At this point in the story, the island has stopped jumping through time, but some survivors stuck in the past have just detonated–or attempted to detonate–a conveniently placed nuclear bomb. If successful, they could change everything.

Their plan was first concocted by the island’s resident physicist, Daniel Faraday, who figured out that variables (i.e., time travelers) may be able to alter the future, but unfortunately, he was shot by his own mother–who was pregnant with him at the time. So the other survivors took up Faraday’s mission to change what’s to come, reasoning that if the island and its mysterious energy no longer existed, their plane would not have crashed, they would not meet each other, and the entire first five seasons would never take place!

Where are we now? It also seems that master manipulator Benjamin Linus was just a pawn for the even greater master manipulating smoke monster (a.k.a., the Egyptian god Set?) who found his loophole to kill Jacob in John Locke. However, we suspect Jacob anticipated what would take place and set a series of events in motion by visiting each of the main characters before they reached the island, possibly derailing the smoke monster’s plan so his own murder would never happen. Further, it appears that this is a sort of game the two play: Endlessly calling travelers to their island to move them about like chess pieces. And Jacob always triumphs… so far.

Still with me? So this thread’s just for fun for all of the LOST fans out there. Let’s speculate on what’s to come in the final season and whether Jughead can actually change the future–or if it’s all been done before. What do readers think? I’ll get us started with a similar question to one I posed last year:

If you theoretically travel back in time to change the future–only to realize you’ve already been there and failed–might free will result in different choices leading to new and alternative realities?

Eric Berger of the Houston Chronicle has a really important article out about how, basically, the good guys lost a major battle in the climate war over the past few months. Some combination of the weather, ClimateGate, the relative failure of Copenhagen, and now, the decreasing likelihood of the U.S. Senate passing cap and trade have shifted a mood of climate optimism–which I certainly felt about a year ago–to one of deep despair. “The climate surrounding climate change has changed, and not for the better for those seeking to reduce carbon dioxide emissions,” writes Berger. Sadly, I have to agree.

What went wrong? That’s a very long story, and Berger relates much of it. For my part, I am convinced the fundamental factor is that our camp egregiously misunderestimated the skeptic/denial camp and what it was capable of. Our thinking went something like this: “the science keeps getting stronger, and now we have Obama…the tide has turned.” And so we were lulled into a false sense of security. Now, there is a hell of a lot of regrouping to do, and I am not even sure where to begin. But one thing is certain: We should never again assume that science alone is going to make the political difference on this issue, no matter how strong it gets.

This isn’t really about astronomy, but in a way, it is.  I was cruising around the web the other day, and I went to a site I usually visit because of amusing content and comments.  The site had used 15 images produced by NASA et al, ESA et al, and various astrophysicists to illustrate that day’s post, but none of the images were credited.  Not a single one.  I commented on it, and wrote the site owner twice, but nothing was done to credit the owners of these images.  I never got a response, either – not from my comment or my two emails.

What’s that called in the digital era?  We used to call it “rude”, “copyright infringement”, and “theft”.

Organizations like NASA and ESA don’t care if you use their images; they want people to see them and enjoy them.  That’s why they put them out there.  But you have to credit the image, guys.  These agencies and the people working for them depend on public recognition of their work for funding.  If you didn’t know it was Hubble that put all those amazing images out all those years, do you think we’d still have the program?  No way.  The Hubble would have been shut down within two years, and look at all we would have lost.

I think it’s wrong.  There’s no excuse for it, especially when it’s so easy to credit the image.  I mean, it’s written right THERE to whom it belongs, you can’t miss it when you go to NASA or HubbleSite or wherever to get the image… it just takes 30 sec worth of typing to attribute the image.  Forgetting is one thing; blowing it off is another.

I’m still kicking around whether or not I should link the site to NASA and ESA and let them contact the site owner… because they will if they know about it.  They’re very careful about attribution, because it matters to them.

And it should matter to us.