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The Social BrainHow do you measure trust?by Ruth SoRelle, M.P.H.
What have I done? I am a volunteer in a study at the Baylor College of Medicine Human Neuroimaging Laboratory. The study deals with the reward centers of the brain, and the researcher who designed it hopes it will offer new information about reward and addiction. The headphones muffle the banging sound as the technician takes baseline pictures of my brain. Then the test starts, and the red and blue images flash bright and then gray. The colors pulse faster and faster as I push the buttons, choosing one and then the other. In between, the 'reward' mechanism moves up and down. Somewhere, I know, my brain is responding to this. I look for a pattern, and I can find none. Gradually, I become obsessed with the problem. How do I get the reward? How can I make the signal go up and up? Time loses importance, and I am disappointed when the flashes stop. What does this mean? What does this say about the brain and how it responds to rewards? What does it say about me?
Currently, he directs BCM's Human Neuroimaging Laboratory where he and colleagues blaze new trails daily in the understanding of the brain and how it responds to stimuli and to other brains. Using special magnetic resonance imaging technology called functional MRI or fMRI, he can actually identify areas of the brain affected by external stimuli such as video games, taste and reward. Functional MRI takes advantage of two brain phenomena. One is that blood contains iron, the oxygen-carrying part of hemoglobin inside red blood cells. Iron atoms cause small distortions in the magnetic fields around them. These distortions can be seen on high-tech MRI scans. The second phenomenon is the dilation of small blood vessels in activated parts of the brain. When this happens, freshly oxygenated blood rushes to the active brain structure. This changes the magnetic field in the area and generates a signal that the fMRI scanner can read. In this way, the scanner can actually determine which areas of your brain are working when it is presented with a stimulus. With software developed in his laboratory, Montague can scan two brains at once. He and his colleagues often scan the brains of interacting individuals in machines thousands of miles apart - a technique called "hyperscanning." Montague has put a new wrinkle into the equation. With software developed in his laboratory, he can scan two brains at once. Today, he and his colleagues often scan the brains of interacting individuals in machines thousands of miles apart. He calls the technique "hyperscanning." Using it, he can identify the areas of the brain in which trust is formed. Even more important, he can measure how that trust develops over time and how one person begins to "read" the other through interaction. "Stripped down, it is a proxy for how one negotiates or forms socially cooperative bonds with people," he said. As the two people interact in a simple game of exchange, they begin to form ideas about one another - models of how the other person acts. Then each begins to trust that model of the other and bases the exchange on that model – often before the other person acts. "It is another way to get to the central issues of neuroscience," said Montague. "It is the way we operate in shared mental spaces." By scanning the two brains at the same time, they were able to identify a "neural signature" of where each individual built his or her models of the other. "We couldn't have done that unless we could scan them at the same time," said Montague. He sees enormous potential for using the information. Trust plays an important role in many psychiatric diseases. In many, the ability to form an attachment to another person or the ability to understand other people and their motivations is broken. Such individuals cannot build models of other people, inhibiting their ability to interact successfully with the rest of society. People with autism or a sister disorder called Asperger Syndrome are typical.
He is also using the hyperscanning technique to help with understanding of "borderline personality disorder," a problem involving mood instability, difficulty in maintaining relationships, problems with self image and impulse behavior. Because the diagnosis is controversial, Montague hopes to establish some kind of brain signature for this kind of pathology. "We have an absolutely stellar signature of this disease," he said. By that, he means that the scans of brains with people who have this disorder light up in a special way. "There is evidence that they are absolutely different from normal people in their behavior and in their brains." "What does it do to your propensity to trust?" he said. "We don't know the final answer there yet." He hopes to expand his "hyperscanning" internationally, studying people in the United States and interacting with others in places as far away as China or Germany. The cultural differences involved could provide important information about techniques of negotiation that will become more important as the world becomes smaller and smaller. Already, his forays into economics and economics have evoked headlines and attention. A study on preferences for Coke© or Pepsi© intrigued the public, but it was even more important in that it was part of a new dialogue about economics and marketing. The direction the lab is now taking into practical areas is important, Montague said. "These answers can be very useful," he said. The "trust" game, played anonymously and with people who have met one another reveal important information about individuals but also how the brain responds to cultural norms of trust and dependence. "We think we are starting to touch on this," said Montague. "Over the next decade, it may scale into understanding how different parts of economic models work." Functional MRI and hyperscanning provide important new tools in understanding how people interact and what happens when that interaction goes wrong. His studies are just the beginning of a new and important field that promises to provide important insights into the human animal and how it thinks. Funding for the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at Baylor College of Medicine comes from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the Brown Foundation, Inc., founded by Herman and Margarett Root Brown and George R. and Alice Pratt Brown to distribute funds for public charitable purposes, and the Kane Family Foundation. |
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Volume 1, Issue 2, Summer 2005 |
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| Last modified: October 10, 2008 |
As the technician Kristen Pfeiffer carefully tucks a sheet around my body and pushes the button that slides me into the magnetic resonance imaging machine, I almost panic. 
Dr. P. Read Montague, Jr., Professor of Neuroscience and Psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine, cannot yet answer those questions, but he has devoted his professional life to finding those answers and others. He has been taking peeks into the way people's brains work by various means for most of his professional career. His work is aimed at understanding the parts of the brain that are activated by everyday social interaction, by external stimuli and by brain pathology.
Already, Montague and his colleagues are developing experiments that could help researchers understand the disconnect in such individuals. Perhaps, he said, they may scan parents as well as their autistic children to determine if there are precursors of the disorder.