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Question: Where do you think medical imaging technology is going to go from here? Are we going to refine existing methods or find some new way of looking inside our bodies?
Well it is very easy to say we'll refine existing methods because obviously that's what we do all the time. If you were in medical imaging at the moment what you would be turned on by is wedding these different ways of looking inside the body together. So people get very excited about building a positron emissions scanner and putting a CT scanner alongside it. Or a CT scanner with a nuclear medicine scanner and wedding them all together. Flavour of the month at the moment - it has just been announced by Siemens is that you can put an MRI machine with a PET machine. It's interesting, it is wonderful, it is technologically wonderful but it is not a big step forward in the sort of scientific point of view. Where is it going in the future? Certainly the technique that I showed you at the end is going to have profound implications for how we think about consciousness and perception. Again that's not to do with the technology of the scanner which is what you’re asking about and I don't think I can answer that because I think we are waiting for a bright young person like yourself to come along and maybe build us an X-ray lens. Or maybe find some other really neat way that we can exploit nature and see something else about what's going on inside our body so please keep me posted.
Question: So, when you're doing MRI, you're using magnets or magnetic fields. So I know that you aren't supposed to have anything metal when you go into the MRI scanner. But what about things like, people have like wires in their teeth like retainer wires and things like that. Does that mean that people with these things can never have an MRI scan? Like what happens to the metal and what happens about it?
Mostly these materials we are talking about are MRI safe. And that just means that they're probably made of very high grade steels that are not very easy to magnetise anyway. So that's point one. I've had an MRI scan, I've got a metal plate in my hand. If it is fixed very firmly. The only danger of these metal objects is that they get dragged into the core of the machine. And if that means they get dragged into the core of you they can caused serious damage. But if they are fixed firmly enough then they'll be okay. If you go into an MRI scanner, you'll be screened religiously for all kinds of metal fragments and pacemakers. Simply because if they are loose they could fly into the machine and cause the machine damage.
Question: Erm, you said that in some way it is possible to know the thoughts of a person if you see the brain; do you think it will be technologically possible to control thoughts in the future?
Technologically possible to... control thoughts.
Well that's a very interesting question. I don't know about control thoughts but certainly there's a group that work at Aston University at the moment. That are using strong pulse magnetic fields to send pulses into the brain and they can do things like knock out a certain part of the brain and stop it functioning. So they can target the part of the back of the brain that you use for seeing and they pulse it and suddenly your blind and you stay blind for a few of seconds. And they can do that for the part of the body that will enable you to more your arm and then you’re paralysed for a few seconds. So yeah you can control the brain in fairly crude ways at the moment but in principle there is no reason why you can't start telling it to do things with hardware from the outside. I don't know where that's going sounds pretty scary though.
Yeah, true.