Desktop psychophysics
Not so long ago, setting up a psychophysics experiment could take months. You had to acquire this special hardware and that special software, then set the whole thing up in some special room. But with software like the Psychtoolbox, designed by neuroscientists and freely available on the web, anyone鈥檚 PC can become a world-class psychophysics lab, says Eric Altschuler, a neurologist at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Newark. 鈥淚 think it鈥檚 radical really,鈥� he says. 鈥淵ou could probably do a career鈥檚 worth of psychophysics while you鈥檙e on an airplane.鈥�
Molecular imaging
鈥淚n animal research people have been talking a lot about molecular imaging,鈥� says Tom谩s Paus, director of the Brain and Body Centre at the University of Nottingham, UK. Rodents are injected with substances that label whichever genes are being expressed. In theory, you should be able to expose an animal to a particular environment for a few days, then scan to see what genes are expressed, he says. 鈥淭his is a way I can get at the molecular mechanism of whatever I鈥檓 interested in 鈥� in vivo,鈥� he says. 鈥淵ou could go from a systems level to a molecular level and back.鈥�
Reference brains
More than anything else, it was the desire to improve the signal-to-noise ratio in functional brain mapping that led neuroscientsits to adopt the practice of 鈥渟patial normalisation鈥� 鈥� that is, transforming a brain image from its natural form to a standardised reference brain. Now, says Peter Fox, Director of the Research Imaging Center at the University of Texas Health Science Centre in San Antonio, the practice is paying dividends. 鈥淏ecause most investigators published using coordinates, we can pool similar studies to get ultra-high quality consensus studies,鈥� he says. They can do powerful connectivity studies based on coactivation patterns. 鈥淭his is very cutting-edge stuff,鈥� says Fox.
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