Lasers, magnetism allow glimpses of the human brain at work

NEW HAVEN, Connecticut -- To the untrained eye, the graph looked like a volatile day on Wall Street -- jagged peaks and valleys in red, blue and green, displayed on a wall.

But the story it told was not about economics.

It was a glimpse into the brains of Shaul Yahil and Shaw Bronner, two researchers at a Yale lab, as they had a little chat.

"This is a fork," Yahil observed, describing the image on his computer. "A fork is something you use to stab food while you're eating it. Common piece of cutlery in the West."

"It doesn't look like a real fancy sterling silver fork, but very useful," Bronner responded.

And then she described her own screen: "This looks like a baby chimpanzee ..."

The jagged, multicolored images depicted what was going on in the two researchers' heads -- two brains in conversation, carrying out an intricate dance of internal activity.

This is no parlor trick.

The brain-tracking technology at work is just a small part of the quest to answer abiding questions about the workings of a three-pound chunk of fatty tissue with the consistency of cold porridge.

How does this collection of nearly 100 billion densely packed nerve cells, acting through circuits with maybe 100 trillion connections, let us think, feel, act and perceive our world?

How does this complex machine go wrong and make people depressed, delusional or demented? What can be done about that?

Such questions spurred President Barack Obama to launch the BRAIN initiative in 2013.

Its aim: to spur development of new tools to investigate the brain.

Europe and Japan also are pursuing major efforts in brain research.

The mysteries of this organ, which sucks up about 20 percent of the body's energy, are many and profound.

But with a collection of sophisticated devices, scientists are peering inside the working brains of people for clues to what makes us tick.

At the Yale lab, Yahil and Bronner were demonstrating a technique being used there to investigate how our brains let us engage with other people.

That's one of the most basic questions in neuroscience, as well as an ability impaired in autism and schizophrenia, said lab director Joy Hirsch.