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.
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| 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!
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| 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..... |
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