STACEY SINGER – Palm Beach Post Staff Writer – June 19, 2006) pdf
One hundred billion neurons, packed to the size of two fists, control what we see, do and feel. The tools of modern medicine allow scientists to see the living brain, to map its intricate geography and learn about its chemistry.
But understanding how it actually works raises questions for Florida Atlantic University Professor J.A. Scott Kelso about how it recovers from injury, changes with experience and reacts to the presence of another. Over the years, Kelso has devised a series of experiments, employing metronomes, fingers — and even the Owls, FAU’s football team — in his quest to understand the brain.
In a trailblazing study, he took baseline brain scans of FAU players before the football season began. Later, after particularly hard-hitting games, he scanned those who had sustained head injuries. Soon, he was documenting disturbing changes in players with concussions. His research may have changed a few minds. Many people think of the brain as a computer. It’s not like any computer we know of, he insisted. “We are a bunch of reflexes, a bunch of inputs and outputs — you will still see that written,” Kelso said in his gentle Scottish-Irish lilt. “But when you think of how the brain controls things, what does it have to do?”
In his mind, the brain behaves like a surfer, spontaneously changing patterns as it rides through a sea of instability, always seeking the optimum configuration. Kelso called it a “self-organizing system.” Many scientists think of the brain as a federation of specialized regions: the amygdala controls emotion, the hippocampus controls memory and so on. True enough, Kelso said. But when the brain is injured, such as when a quarterback is tackled from behind, the brain tries to compensate for the damage by recruiting other regions, other types of neurons, to do the same work.
So which is it? Is the brain a series of specialized departments, or is it a single, flexible organ? It’s one of the oldest questions in brain science. “The new principle is the brain is both,” Kelso said. The ideas can coexist, he said. “Part of the problem is that we’ve always asked the question, ‘Is it this way or that way? Is it good or evil? Is it nature or is it nurture?’ I think it’s time to move away from that.”
The FAU Owls have helped emphasize his point. The year of the Owls’ first football season, 2001, Kelso kicked off his controversial brain project on sports and head injuries. The study is slated to continue at least through 2009. Given football players’ tendency to bang heads, he thought, why not take before-and-after brain scans while the players attempted mental tasks? “Let’s try to understand what a mild traumatic brain injury actually is” by starting with a normal baseline, Kelso said. “Nobody had ever thought of that before.” Carrying out the experiment required magnetic resonance imaging at University MRI, as well as the agreement of athletes, trainers, a human subjects committee and then-coach Howard Schnellenberger.
Kelso and Assistant Professor Kelly Jantzen knew there was a risk they might end the season with no concussions, and hence, no data. They need not have worried: FAU’s first football season was a brutal one. Findings raise new questions In a legendary game against Bethune-Cookman, defensive back and most valuable player Taurian Osborne returned a fumble for a 99-yard touchdown. Later, a hard tackle sent him off the field with a concussion — and left him with no memory of the incredible play.
During the same game, defensive back Coisge McCullough also left the game with a concussion. He, too, had little memory of the game. In all, Kelso and Jantzen were able to study the brains of eight players, four of whom suffered head injuries. Usually, the injured athletes wanted to know one thing: How soon could they return to play?
“They were a brand-new football team. Almost everyone on the team was a freshman and they were just getting pounded,” Jantzen said. “We were lucky the first year to get those eight cases.” The players were asked to do math problems and finger puzzles while their brains were scanned. A task Kelso devised that involved touching thumbs to fingers in specific numbered sequences showed the most dramatic changes. Pre-concussion, a small part of the motor cortex and some analytical areas lit up on the MRI. Post-concussion, there was a significant change in the injured players’ brain patterns. Scans looked more like a city at night: The lights were scattered throughout the head, suggesting that the brain had to work much harder to carry out the task. Even when some players outwardly seemed fine, their brain patterns had been altered, Kelso said.
The findings were published in the American Journal of Neuroradiology in May 2004. But they raised as many questions as they answered. Would the brain patterns revert to normal after the players healed? Or would their injury forever alter their minds? To understand what a concussion does to the brain, picture a bowl of layered Jello, some orange, some green. On impact, the Jello shimmies against the sides of the bowl. But more seriously, it tears where the orange and green layers meet. In the brain, a concussion works the same way, creating the most damage not on the exterior, but inside. “It’s the boundary between the white matter and the gray matter where the tension and the forces are most strongly applied,” Jantzen said. How long does the effect last? Jantzen and Kelso’s grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke continues for three more years, and the pair said they hope to gain those answers. Others have begun similar work. But as the Owls have gained experience through the years, the number of concussions has fallen off. Data is growing more difficult to obtain, Jantzen said. He’s considering adding other athletes to the mix. Extreme sports are particularly promising. Kelso was born in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, to an Irish mother and a Scottish father. He’s an intense thinker, quiet and studious, yet given to springing from his chair if asked the proper question.
Twenty-one years ago, Kelso left Yale University to found FAU’s Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences. He was recruited with an impressive title, eminent scholar chair in science, and a $1 million endowment. Initially, he worked out of a leaky trailer. Over the years, the center has moved into FAU’s Behavioral Sciences building. Kelso’s research, meanwhile, has attracted about $45 million in federal grants and advanced several theories about the interplay of mind and body. Other studies under way Meanwhile, Kelso has become terribly interested in two other aspects of how the brain works:
• What in the brain differentiates the novice from the expert performer?
• What happens in the brain when people cooperate?
It’s a huge question, because so little is known about the brain’s social processes, Kelso said. His research on cooperation, to be published soon, suggests that a unique pattern can be seen in the brains of two people interacting. Neurons oscillate when communicating, and a change can be detected in those vibrations. “Something gets inhibited when there’s social interaction,” Kelso said. Electrodes on his test subjects’ heads picked up tiny changes in the current. “Here is a new brain rhythm called the ‘phy complex’ that actually distinguishes when you’re socially interacting and when you’re not.” It’s an important finding, because it may enable advances in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases like autism and schizophrenia, where the inability to have harmonious social interactions is problematic. In 1988, Kelso found that if a test subject were asked to wag a finger out of synch with a metronome, then forced by the metronome to swing it faster and faster, he actually could watch instability develop simultaneously in the brain and finger, until the brain was provoked to switch the finger’s wag phase. The same concept was used for his current paper on social interaction. Two subjects, asked to wag their fingers, first are not allowed to see each others’ hands. Then a barrier is removed. Soon, most will fall into cadence together. Unique brain signatures distinguish independence from cooperation. “Cooperative phenomena in nature are like this. The schooling of fish, the flocking of birds. There are reasons you go into a collective mode,” Kelso said. The subtle blend of independence and cooperation has inspired his latest book, published by MIT Press, called The Complementary Nature, which has a companion Web site: .
Another study, funded by the U.S. Navy, seeks to find a brain signature for the difference between novice and expert, with an eye toward helping people make that transition more
efficiently. Kelso and his postdoctoral students have developed a pole-balancing experiment to track that transition. A long pole is attached by a hinge to a moving platform. Keeping it erect requires constant movement back and forth. It takes many tries to master. They’re hoping to document the patterns in the brain at the moment the brain says, “I’ve got it.” When he teaches, Kelso tells his students that the most important part of scientific research is developing precisely the right experiment. “Newton did not give us the laws of motion for a falling leaf,” Kelso said. His experiments have shown him much about the brain. But as for certainty? “I understand that I understand nothing. I understand less and less. The more we know, the less we understand.”
Photo:
Craig Richter demonstrates one of FAU Professor J.A. Scott Kelso’s interaction tests. Two subjects, wearing headpieces that measure brain activity and blocked by a panel, wag their fingers as the panel is removed.
