How courting peacocks could help treat strokes

SO what is the human brain for anyway? That mind-boggling question is going to be taxing the grey matter of 70 North-East scientists over the next decade.

The scientists are part of a unique project housed in Newcastle University's new Henry Wellcome Building of Neuro Ecology, which officially opened last night. If they successfully answer that question, it could lead to a range of tailor-made new drugs acting directly on different areas of the brain, Potentially this could provide new treatments for a wide range of neurological illnesses such as Alzheimer's disease, strokes, brain injuries, dementia and other degenerative neurological diseases

It could even help doctors understand the causes of little-understood conditions such as autism, dyslexia and other brain diseases which stop some of the five senses from working properly.

Psychology professor Malcolm Young, who heads the pioneering unit, believes it could even lead to eye transplants, overcoming the existing problems of "wiring" the new eye to the brain to allow normal sight. There is certainly scope for more knowledge about the brain.

"Less is understood about the brain than any other organ in the human body. Yet a third of all NHS patients present with some type of brain disorder," the professor says. "We need now to make a huge effort to understand brain function so that these advances can form the basis of new treatments and new hope for people."

The Tyneside team's work could have much wider ramifications outside the world of health care and medicine.

It could trigger a revolution in how computer screens are designed, how the images on security cameras can be enhanced or even help a fighter pilot pick out an enemy aircraft before he is shot down.

Prof Young explains: "What you see on your computer screen is profoundly different to what your visual system is used to looking at. Your system knows how to process images from the real three-dimensional world. If you start looking at flat text on a screen, it is totally different."

"It would be interesting to try to manipulate what you see on your screen to make it more natural and to draw your attention to something you need to see."

In short - this is big science.

The 70 multi-disciplinary scientists are part of a team assembled at great expense at Newcastle University. Equipped with advanced hi-tech equipment and housed in a glass-fronted new building next to Newcastle Medical School, the new team means business.

Prof Young heads the academic team whose average age is 36. He who helped to invent a new scientific discipline dubbed Visual Neuroecology.

This is a very 21st Century discipline which uses the latest computers and other advanced technology to try to understand how visual information is processed by humans and animals.

Discovering precisely how the brain is wired up and how it works is a big enough task, but finding out what human brains are for seems daunting.

"I think we are very close to understanding how our brains are wired up. It is maybe three to five years away," says Prof Young. "In some ways this is bigger than the cracking the Genome. Understanding brain function is something that is much more intimate for people. After all, that is where we live, that is where we are. We are the product of what goes on in our brain."

For centuries, man has wondered about the exact seat of consciousness - and Prof Young admits that this tantalising issue is "on the agenda" for the Newcastle team, but the most pressing issue is the practical goal of understanding how the brain is wired.

"The next thing we need to know is what processes are going on inside the brain when it is doing its stuff. We have the right equipment to make a substantial contribution," says Prof Young.

"When you have got four things: how the brain is organised; what processes go on inside it; how these processes interact to cause the behaviour of the system; and what is it for, then you will have really cracked it," he adds.

So how do you convert this rather esoteric knowledge into something that will pay the bills?

'The most immediate spin-offs are probably going to be in drug development. The computational tools we use to analyse brain networks are also extremely useful for analysing what is going on inside living cells," the professor says.

The combination of knowing precisely which parts of the brain are involved in different activities, combined with an ability to monitor tiny biochemical changes by using MRI scanning and the centre's supercomputer, should help pharmaceutical companies develop more targeted drugs for a range of neurological problems.

"We already know that you can improve the condition of some Parkinson's Disease patients by actually destroying a little bit of the brain," says Prof Young.

That principle could be used to tackle other diseases rooted in a dysfunctional brain. "It is better to do that with drugs rather than opening up people's heads," says Prof Young.

Another important fact to bear in mind is that, unlike surgery, drug therapy is normally reversible.

"I hope that a very practical spin-off from the work we are doing here is going to be a better outlook for neurologically damaged patients."

To encourage a greater cross-fertilisation of ideas, the new centre brings together a cross-section of specialists from different backgrounds.

The groundwork is laid by people who work on how visual systems have evolved in the animal world, who are known as evolutionary biologists. "It is observational and mathematical and somehow involves going to the Rockies to watch humming birds," he says.

The next group comprises scientists who study the very different visual worlds that men and animals inhabit.

"They analyse image sequences on computer screens to see what people can discriminate and what animals can discriminate," says Prof Young.

This second group finds it useful to look over the shoulder of the evolutionary biologists to find out what a specific visual system is trying to do, he says.

An example of how observational skills meets hi-tech is the study of how the dowdy peahen chooses a mate.

"Until now we have not had the tools to understand what it is about a peacock's train that the peacock is paying attention to. Is it colour, number of eyes, or iridescence?"

But by bringing together experts from different disciplines and using the latest in digital cameras and powerful computers, the scientists can now work out what is going on in the bird's brain.

"We have a fancy camera which has the same visual equipment as a peahen's eyes, which can pick up ultraviolet light," says Prof Young.

"If you bring together equipment which can exactly simulate what animals eyes tell their brains, do the observational stuff and then do the computation, you can find out what the animals were looking at and why. That is a new thing which I think is quite exciting."

The third group of scientists is trying to understand how the brain actually affects the behaviour of animals and humans. This is where the £2m stand-up MRI (magnetic resonance imager) comes in.

"This allows you to look into the brain from the outside. There is only one other unit like it in Europe," says Prof Young.

We already have a rough idea of which areas of the brain are involved in different activities but this new scanner, combined with a super-computer, should improve our knowledge.

"It is often the areas that change their activity most which indicate the bit of brain that is working harder," Prof Young says.

"It's a kind of binary system, neurons listening in to their inputs and deciding whether to fire or not, across a machine with 100 billion neurons which produces conversation and an appreciation of art."

Apart from all the heavy science, Prof Young is also thinking about the leisure market. "It could also help to design computer games which are fun to play," he laughs.

* The £8.3m funding for the new Neuroinformatics centre has come from the Department of Trade and Industry, the Higher Education Funding Council and the Wellcome Trust.