The day science fiction became fact

Years ago, there was a programme on the telly called 'Beyond 2000' which, by reporting on strides and advances the scientific world was making, gave us a picture of what life would be like, as the title suggested, beyond the year 2000.

So here we are, 11 years after that magic year, and I can honestly say they got it terribly wrong, on so many levels. They never saw the iPhone coming, or the indeed the general ubiquity of mobile phones and the internet.

They somehow thought we'd all be living in giant cities under water and that holograms would be a big deal.

Eh, yeah, whatever.

The only thing they kinda got right was electric cars, but they completely missed the boat on hybrids.

But one thing they had lots of, was people sitting down with harnesses on their heads and a load of wires flowing, medusa-like, from their head to a bank of computers.

And that's why, when I found myself last Friday evening sitting in a lab with a harness on my head and wires flowing to a bank of computers, I felt a little nostalgic, and giddy – although as I soon learned, giddy was not a good idea.

A friend of mine, Kevin Sweeney, is a Ph.D researcher at NUI Maynooth. A few weeks ago he put out an appeal on Facebook (something else the Beyond 2000 people missed) saying he needed volunteers for his research.




This be Kevin.


So I volunteered, without entirely knowing what I was I was volunteering for..

I emailed Kevin, who is a former pupil of the Salesians in Celbridge, and made the mistake of asking him.....

“What I am looking at is the noise that can be embedded on the fNIRS records due to the movement of the recording optodes. And my PhD is basically trying to remove this noise. So I will be getting you to do some small test while I record the change in the oxygenation levels in your brain,” was his prompt response.

“And then as you do that I will be disturbing the recording optodes intermittently to create motion artifact. I can then use that data in my post processing.”

Now, aren't you glad I asked?

Not admitting defeat, I turned to Google (something else they missed) and typed in fNIRS and came across a paper written on the topic. For the record, it stands for functional Near Infra Red Spectroscopy.

I started reading the paper, and recognised words like “at” and “the” and “and”, but nothing else.

And then I noticed that the authors of the report were Darren J Leamy, Tomás Ward and Kevin T. Sweeney. Yep, that would be the same Kevin Sweeney.....the man himself.

Anyway, I confessed my ignorance and general confusion to him. He reassured me he'd explain it all to me in laymans' language when I saw him.

And, actually when he did, it was pretty straightforward.

Kevin is part of a team that is aiming to improve our ability to measure what's going on the brain.

There are all sorts of practical applications for this sort of work, including working with people who have brain damage or have had a stroke, etc.

Current technology can give doctors and scientists a certain amount of information. Kevin and the lads are hoping to be able to come up with a method of giving doctors a clearer picture of what (if anything) is going on inside our noggins.

You can only imagine the jokes flying around the newsroom of the Leinster Leader when I announced where I was headed last Friday afternoon.

“What if they don't find anything......,” was the general gist. Oh the wit!

So I turned up, and made my way to the Engineering building on the north campus of the college. Inside, Kevin met me and brought me to a small-ish room on the first floor.

He showed me everything, and how it would all work and why he needed the information.

I was to be one of about 15 people the test would be done on.

The measurement essentially works by measuring the oxygen levels in the blood that flows around the brain. This can be measured quite simply. Those of us who have visited hospital in recent times will be familiar with the small plastic clamp the nurses put on your finger.

The clamp shines a light which is similar to infra-red light into your finger and measures the response. This tells them if your blood is properly oxygenated. Effectively, what it's really monitoring is to see if your heart, lungs and blood are all working properly.

In the case of the brain, there's a slight difference. When a certain part of the brain is activated (if, for instance, you decided to raise your arm) oxygenated blood is sent to that part of the brain.

So by measuring the level of oxygen in the blood, you can measure the level of activity in that section of the brain.

But rather than putting a giant clamp on my head, Kevin used a strap with a couple of small optodes resting against my forehead. The optodes contain the lasers that fire the light into my brain.

“You could fire that light into a glass of milk if you wanted and you'd get a certain reading,” he explained. “What happens is that a certain amount of the light comes back out, and by measuring that, we can tell how oxygenated the blood is.”

I was instructed to sit on a chair. It was a little bit funny because it was a carseat. I couldn't tell what kind of car, but it looked a little odd surrounded by computers and wires. The idea was to make the person feel more comfortable than they would on one of the normal office chairs, and it worked.

Having attached the strap to my head, turned on all the computers, computer programmes and sensors and given me a pair of big laser-proof glasses to wear, I was told to sit still for nine minutes.

This is a lot harder than you think! You suddenly starting itching in places you've never itched before, for no good reason – but you can't move a muscle!

One of the optodes pressed against my forehead was really uncomfortable, and threatened to drive me nuts.

I moved once, two minutes into it, and he had to start over.

However during the third nine-minute period of stillness I discovered that closing your eyes and trying to sleep was as good a way as any to keep still.

Every minute or so, one of the computers would beep, and Kevin would move one of the optodes on my forehead. This varies the data which he can then analyse later.

After the first nine minutes, he gave me a test to do on a computer screen. I won't explain it all here, but essentially it involved trying to match up cards on the screen. There were three different patterns that could be used to match up the cards and you initially had to figure out which pattern it was.

I sat there for another nine minutes, doing this test, and not moving except for my finger on a mouse.

The third nine-minute period was the same as the first and then the fourth one involved doing the cards again.

Although I was pleased to hear that I'd done well in the card test, the results were somewhat irrelevant. The purpose of the test is to activate a certain section of the brain.

Throughout the testing, there were several computers around monitoring what was going on inside my head.

One of them, to my left had about a dozen different graphs with various sized yellow lines going across the screen. God knows what it all meant.

Kevin said that he couldn't tell much from what the various graphs were showing him during the test – it would only be later on, when he analysed it all that he could tell anything.

The only thing that stands out is your heart rate. For each beat of my heart, a spurt of blood would run through my brain and this showed up as an even series of spikes across the screen.

But I suppose at least I can go back to the (nit)wits in the Leinster Leader newsroom and assure them I do indeed have a brain!



This was the result. Nope, still don't understand it fully, but at least confirms that I have a brain, and it works reasonably well.....



Almost 20 years have passed since I left school

Observe the photograph above.


It was taken on a bright early summer's day in May 1992, almost 20 years ago.

The 103 young men pictured here were pupils of Naas CBS and were weeks away from sitting their leaving certs and heading on to wherever the world was going to take them.

They were all between 17 and 18 years old, which means that they are now somewhere between 36 and 38. Next June will be the 20th anniversary of their departure from the school.

Back then they were all school boys, obsessed with football, music, school discos in Stirrups, the Ambassador, Nijinky's, leather jackets, the Batman movies (the first two), the Cure, An Emotional Fish, Nirvana, (very) early Blur, Doc Martin's and girls from the convent.

None of them had mobile phones, although the father of one, who worked in the bank, had one, and it resembled a size-11 shoe with a six inch aerial (15.24 centimetres for the young people).

Needless to say, that phone did not send text messages, take photographs, upload said photographs to the internet, browse the internet, book flights, play games, play music or use satelites to direct you to your holiday home in Spain (in the unlikely event that you had one of those).

A handful of the 103 had access to computers which were just about able to handle word processing (a forerunner of Microsoft Word for you young people) and Pacman. It's hard to comprehend this now, but there was no internet, no Facebook, Bebo, Twitter or email.

It wasn't uncommon to see a queue for a pay phone.

Digital photography did not exist. Photographs, including this one, were taken on film that had to be processed.

None of the lads had a car, although one had a small Honda motorbike which was pored over and endlessly discussed as if it was a space ship.

We didn't have Oxegen, Electric Picnic or the Festival of World Culture. We didn't have multiplex cinemas, the IFC, McDonalds on every street corner, breakfast rolls, Lucozade Sport, hybrid cars, X-Factor or a thousand channels in our televisions.

We had RTE 1 and 2, BBC 1 and 2, UTV and Channel 4, Ford Escorts and Toyota Corolas. We had Malone's Bakery and Feile, and until we lost them, we never realised how much we loved them.

Twenty years later, the class of 1992 are doctors, lawyers, a journalist (yours truly), an equestrian centre manager, a mechanic, business men, computer engineers, quantity surveyors, accountants, a writer on Fair City, a surfer, an artist, a lecturer in literature, a poet, a plumber and every other thing you could possibly imagine, and surely some you probably can't.

For many, their full heads of dark hair (long was in at the time) are a mere memory, while not-so-full waist-lines are a similar ancient memory.

Many have left the county, and many have even left the country.

At least one of them, tragically, has passed away.

Many of them are the fathers of young families, and consequently they're often to be seen wandering alone late in night, tired and dazed, like ghostly figures, along the dimly-lit aisles of enormous supermarkets, looking for baby wipes.

Some of them may even have sons who will go to Naas CBS, where they will obsess over football, music and girls from the convent and it's nice to know that in that sense, some things never change.

Those 20 years have been more transformative than anyone alive at the time could have imagined. To the class of 1992, the Kildare of late 2011 would have been just about barely recognisable.

Back then, we didn't necessarily know it, but we lived in a country that fell far short of the standard of living experienced by the rest of western Europeans.

There were essentially no Polish people living in Ireland, or from anywhere else in eastern Europe, which had, until three years previously, still languished behind the Iron Curtain.

Ah yes, the Iron Curtain. It wasn't mentioned in our history books because it wasn't yet history. Your average 17 year old may not fully understand the concept of this now, but there were no weekends away in Prague, Berlin, Krakow or Budapest. You simply could not go there, even if you wanted to.

Ryanair was there, but it wasn't the low-fares monster it is today and consequently only the wealthiest took weekends away.

A flashy car was something of a rarity and hitching, which was still a viable and reasonably reliable form of transport, was the best way for most people to see the inside of a flashy car.

When we were growing up, a number of things were clear. After school, we would either be one of the lucky few who found a job in Ireland, or emigrate. Going to college wasn't really a third option. It was an interesting and fun way of delaying the inevitable and making us more employable in another country.

In a short space of time, by the time any of us who had gone to college had graduated, everything had changed.

The Celtic Tiger was starting to purr and with each passing month, opportunity knocked louder and louder.

Technological advances have changed our world dramtically. Recently I was texting a friend who was relaying to me, in real time, how she was getting on during a hike at Yosemite National Park - which is in a rural part of northern California.

She also sent me pictures and a short video of her group making dinner over a camp fire, 5,000 (8,000kms) miles and nine time zones away.

Using Skype on her Iphone, I could have chatted to them all as we ate dinner together, except that my laptop was on the blink.

In 1992, I might have gotten a battered postcard, three weeks after she arrived home – and would have pored over it endlessly. The world was still an enormous, exotic and mysterious place – an exciting proposition.

Now we can acccess so much of it at our fingertips that, as Kavanagh said: 'Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder'.

Technology has opened up Kildare to the rest of the world and the rest of the world to Kildare. The class of 1992 can now do business in another county or country, without actually moving there.

With a population of 200,000 there are now twice as many people living in Kildare as there were in 1992.

Naas in the early 1990's, for a bunch of spotty lovelorn teenagers was a place that was on the edge of somewhere (Dublin) and miles from anywhere else.

Now it's is a comfortable, cosmopolitan and lively place to live, whereas in 1992, it was the sticks.

To reflect the changes in Kildare and Ireland over the past 20 years, the Leinster Leader wants to try a small social experiment.

Between now and the New Year, we're calling on the men in this photograph to make contact with us, and give a brief outline of what they've been up to during the last two decades.

It's likely that there were some in the class who are not in the photograph, and we would of course be happy to hear from there as well.

Email conor@leinsterleader.ie