Carleton grads are using the latest neuroscience research to develop innovative technologies.
By academic standards, neuroscience is a relatively new field, but its basic principles can be traced back thousands of years to Mesopotamia, where people observed and recorded on clay tablets the effects of alcohol on humans as a way of learning how to dilute medicines. In the 17th century BCE a battlefield surgeon in ancient Egypt wrote on papyrus about the effects of head trauma in two wounded patients, the earliest known reference to the brain. From the Roman Empire to the Renaissance, anatomists dissected animals and human cadavers to learn more about the brain and the nervous system.
With the invention of the microscope and the development in the late 1890s of a staining procedure that revealed the structures of single neurons, studies of the brain became more sophisticated. In the 20th century, scientists modeled the transmission of electrical signals across synapses—the spaces between neurons. They uncovered the roots of certain behavioral disorders and developed new treatments for previously intractable maladies such as depression.
In recent years, neuroscience has progressed at a lightning-fast pace, in step with the technological revolution. While its core mission remains to study how the brain and nervous system function, new uses are opening for the results of high-tech brain research.
Because their work is naturally interdisciplinary, neuroscientists collaborate well with chemists, computer scientists, engineers, and doctors. This factor also makes the discipline a natural fit for study at Carleton, which has offered a concentration in the field since 2007. Psychology professor Julie Neiworth, who has directed the neuroscience concentration from its inception, says that learning how to interpret data accurately is a key issue for the future of neuroscience.
“Rapid progress can lead to mistakes in understanding,” Neiworth says. For example, analysts who measured prospective voters’ brain responses found that a voter may show signs of aversion to a particular candidate but still end up voting for him or her.
“Voters’ consumer instinct may say ‘yuck,’ yet their decision to vote may not relate to disgust,” says Neiworth. “Other factors, such as their stance on a particular issue, can contribute to their choice. This kind of data can be unclear.”
Carleton has graduated 88 students with a concentration in neuroscience and another 32 are currently enrolled in the program. Alumni Deepa Iyengar ’95, Monika Heller Roots ’02, and Pranav Yadav ’07 are in the vanguard, developing ways to use neuroscience research that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.
Back in the early days of market research,someone would approach you in a shopping mall and offer you 10 bucks in exchange for sampling breakfast cereals or watching a movie trailer.
Pranav Yadav ’07 favors a more scientific approach. Yadav is CEO of Neuro-Insight US, an innovative market research company that uses patented brain-imaging technology to measure how people’s brains respond to communications.
Yadav—who was recently named to Forbes magazine’s “Top 30 under 30” in the marketing and advertising category—was a triple major in math, economics, and physics at Carleton. He worked at Goldman Sachs in New York and later spent time in the New York office of ReD, world leaders in innovation strategy consulting. “All of the disciplines I studied at Carleton and all of my previous work experience come together here at Neuro-Insight,” says Yadav. “I can be a bridge between the science and business aspects of the company.”
Yadav joined Neuro-Insight three years ago because he was impressed by the science behind the company’s unique approach to neuromarketing. Neuro-Insight uses a proprietary technology called steady-state topography (SST) to measure electrical signals on a person’s scalp, creating a second-by-second picture of changes in brain activity as the person views an ad. Study participants wear visors and headsets equipped with sensors to record their “immediate, prerationalized responses to what they are viewing,” Yadav says. By measuring the speed of brain activity in different locations of the brain, SST can track responses in five different areas: long-term memory encoding, engagement (personal relevance), emotional intensity, like or dislike, and visual attention.
So far, Neuro-Insight has studied how viewers react to different versions of advertisements, how sound quality affects media viewing experience, and how consumers respond to packaging and logos on store shelves.
Ultimately, Yadav says, the biggest challenge is sorting through the data and coming to the right conclusions. “Everyone thinks that just having access to technology will allow them to make accurate conclusions, but brain-mapping technology is very good at showing what is going on, not why it is happening,” he says. “So, in addition to neuroscientists, we also employ psychologists and marketing strategists to analyze the data. We have to strike a very fine balance of making logical conclusions from the data without contributing anything that doesn’t come from the data.”
Monitoring brain activity allows Neuro-Insight to overcome many of the hurdles facing traditional market researchers, from participants’ inability to recognize their unconscious responses to their struggles to verbalize their feelings. That’s why companies are becoming increasingly receptive to neuromarketing. “Eventually technology like SST will be as commonplace as a focus group or a survey,” says Yadav. “It will become essential to market research.”
Imagine you’ve been captured by a zombie that wants to eat your brain—a scenario we’ve seen played out countless times in films and on television. Yet unlike the disgusting creatures in The Walking Dead, this well-bred zombie insists on using a spoon. And just as he’s about to dig in, you use your brainpower to bend his spoon, foiling his attack.
That’s the premise behind 28 Spoons Later, a game released in 2012 by Iceland-based video game publisher MindGames. Cofounded by Deepa Iyengar ’95 in 2009, MindGames eschews traditional game controllers in favor of a player’s mind.
Iyengar, who majored in physics at Carleton and has a master’s degree in brain and cognitive sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, notes that this technology is “not a result of thinking ‘Go this way, now go left or right, now fly.’ That’s what people expect. Instead, the player has to learn to relax and concentrate.” In addition to entertainment value, there’s practical significance: players essentially are being trained to control their mind at will. And beyond that, such games hold potential as an alternative therapy for ADHD, depression, and other brain disorders.
Brain cells communicate using electrical signals that collect at the surface of the skull. As a person concentrates, the level of electrical activity at the scalp increases. EEG technology—which measures the electrical activity (or brain waves) at a person’s scalp and is often used to diagnose epilepsy, sleep disorders, and comas—allows players to simply strap on a headset and control the outcome of a game via their brain waves.
Interest is brewing in the medical community. According to Iyengar, scientists are looking at ways to use games to treat mental disorders, including depression, by identifying a relevant signal in the brain to target. On the MindGames website, Iyengar postulates different ways that mind-control games could be used. For example, to treat depression, a game could focus on a mental control that would force users to change their train of thought. To treat anxiety, the mental control could encourage relaxation.
As companies like Iyengar’s continue to explore how games can complement or replace prescription drugs, more developments are on the horizon. In the not-so-distant future, she says, “you’ll have a computer that will be able to understand you, that detects when you’re frustrated. The better you concentrate, the faster the computer will know what you want.”
Child and adolescent psychiatrist Monika Heller Roots ’02 is chief medical officer of CogCubed, a Minneapolis-based startup that creates games that eventually could diagnose and treat brain disorders. Founded in 2011, the company is already garnering attention: Google awarded CogCubed a $20,000 grant as part of the Google Developers Startup Pack.
CogCubed uses the results of relatively easy to play games to evaluate the cognitive function of the player. Their best-known creation, Groundskeeper, is a Whac-A-Mole–like game in which players use small, handheld digital cubes designed by the MIT Media Lab. The rules are simple. Three cubes with digital displays of a lawn are placed in a diagonal line. When a cartoon gopher appears on one of the displays, the player has to tap the side of that cube with another cube. If another character—a rabbit, say—appears, the player must refrain from tapping that cube. There are 17 game sessions, each 90 seconds long, with a 20-second break between sessions.
According to its creators, Groundskeeper assesses deficiencies in executive functions, which are the skills a person uses to achieve goals, such as switching focus or remembering certain details. CogCubed views the game’s technology as a chance to both evaluate and treat depression, anxiety, autism spectrum disorder, and other cognitive disorders. CogCubed’s research has found that test subjects’ brains release dopamine—a hormone and neurotransmitter that plays several important roles in the human brain and body—as a result of one of their game’s reward mechanisms. The extra dopamine helps balance out a deficiency found in people with ADHD, which ultimately may cause neuroplasticity and allow changes in brain structure.
Groundskeeper measures both the attention and distraction of a player. An extraordinary amount of data is collected with each game, as 33 variables—including correct responses, how many times the cube is tapped, and how far the cube is moved—are evaluated.
Ultimately, this data can potentially predict the chances that someone has ADHD and also determine the type of ADHD he or she has. In an interview with the web-based journal MedGadget, CogCubed founder Kurt Roots—who is Monika’s husband—said that in a pilot study of 52 adolescents (half of whom have ADHD) conducted with the University of Minnesota, Groundskeeper could detect the disorder up to 78 percent of the time. Current assessment methods are roughly 60 percent accurate, says Kurt Roots. A 2010 study by economist Todd Elder found that almost a million people in the United States had been misdiagnosed with ADHD.
Monika Roots’s experience in child and adolescent psychology suggests the potential of objective and empirical methods for detecting cognitive disorders to supplement or replace traditional subjective methods such as behavioral observation. “In my own field, there are many ways of diagnosing ADHD,” she says. “We are trying to look at objective measures. We made sure that the game is able to capture behavior.”
Photographs by Peter Murphy (Yadav), Bernhard Kristinn (Iyengar), and Kelly Davidson (Roots)