Chinese scientists go in search of the soul with world’s most powerful brain scanner

According to south china morning post  China has launched a plan to develop the world’s most powerful brain scanner, one that could generate an extremely strong magnetic field to observe for the first time the structure and activities of every neuron in a living human brain.






The goal is to build the world’s most powerful magnetic resonance imaging device.
The projected scanner would not only produce a snapshot with details far beyond what existing instruments can provide, but also track various types of chemical agents including sodium, phosphorus and potassium that pass critical signals along neural fibre networks to study consciousness and brain-related diseases such as Parkinson’s.
The billion-yuan device “will revolutionise brain studies”, said a senior scientist working on the project, which is based in the city of Shenzhen in southern China’s Guangdong province.


The total budget for the facility, which is still under construction, will exceed that of FAST (Five Hundred Meter Aperture Spherical Telescope), the world’s largest telescope in Pingtan, Guizhou province, said the scientist, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the programme has not gone fully public.
But instead of aiming at the sky, this powerful “telescope” would peer inward to probe the origin and evolution of consciousness, the scientist said.



The prominent physicist Zhao Zhongxian, winner of China’s top science award for his contributions in superconducting material science, is the programme’s science adviser, the statement said.
Zhao said that China had a solid foundation and advantages in numerous areas like superconducting materials, imaging electronics and engineering equipment. He urged the project team to beat competitors in other countries and said that the only way to do so was by “independent innovation”.
Human tissues such as organs, muscles and brain contain a large amount of water. In a strong magnetic field, the nuclei of hydrogen in water molecules, for instance, align and spin in the same direction.



By applying radio waves to the magnetic field, scientists can make the nuclei flip their spins in opposite directions. By then gradually reducing the strength of the magnetic field, the nuclei would return to their normal state one after another, releasing a weak radio signal radiation.
Detecting and measuring the signal can reveal the internal structure of tissues, direction and speed of blood flows or the intensity of oxygen consumption. In brain science, researchers can use the information to deduce, for example, which areas of the brain are turned on or switched off when engaging in certain types of cognitive tasks.



Earlier this year, researchers at the University of Minnesota in the US took the first picture of a human body with a 10 tesla machine, with the university saying only that the device “promises to produce scans at a finer level of detail”. Images of the scan were not made available.
The construction of an 11 tesla device was also recently finished in France, but it could still only resonate hydrogen nuclei – not generate stronger fields – because the superconducting material used was the same as in standard hospital machines.
Superconductivity lets electric current run through a coil without resistance. Without it, the coil that generates the magnetic field could melt. The usual superconducting material is a compound of niobium and titanium, a soft material that can be easily rolled around the coil, but which starts losing superconductivity beyond 10 tesla.


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For instance, the 11-tesla project in France cost 200 million euros (US$228 million) and 10 years to build, and still has yet to release an image.
Professor Lu Haidong, a brain scientist at the State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience at Beijing Normal University, said that MRI technology generally had an important advantage over other imaging methods like X-rays.
MRIs did not emit a radioactive beam, so did not harm the tissue, he said.


professor He Rongqiao, a researcher at the Institute of Biophysics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing who studies the health effects of magnetic forces on the brain, said he did not believe the machine would see the soul or consciousness.
“What is consciousness? There is not even a scientific definition. If you can’t even define it, how do you know what you see is what you are looking for?” he said.

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