‘Mind-reading’
‘This “mind-reading” experiment, is quite a sensationalist term,’ says Dr Demis Hassabis reflecting on the media response to a recent experiment, ‘but it’s not entirely incorrect either.’ Hassabis is one of a group of Wellcome Trust researchers based at University College London, who have been looking at how memory is stored in the brain. ‘I am interested in auto-biographical memory, events in our lives, what makes us who we are,’ says Hassabis. ‘That is the type of memory that goes first in Amnesia, in Alzheimer’s, it’s the most vulnerable because it is also the most complex memory.’  The team is looking for what is encoded by memory when people experience something, and are exploring the hippocampus, the part of the brain critical for memory. 
 
Higher-level thinking
‘People have done experiments,’ says Hassabis, ‘where they have shown participants pictures of cars and people, and they worked out from their brain activity what they were looking at.’ What they haven’t been able to identify is higher-level thinking, such as spatial memory. Before he completed his Doctorate, Hassabis was a well-known computer games developer, and he brought this expertise to this project.

‘We basically created an experiment with a virtual reality environment,’ says Hassabis, ‘which people navigated around, like playing Quake. The only task you had to do is walk from A to B to C to D, four pre-described positions in a green room and a blue room.’ When participants reached the assigned point they pressed a button, eyes down to the floor so they weren’t registering any image in particular, while brain activity was being scanned the whole time.

Spatial memory
‘We showed,’ explains Hassabis, ‘that just from activity in the hippocampus, we can predict where somebody was standing in the room. We are in some sense looking at the internal representation of space in the person’s brain. The only difference in each position is the person’s internal map of where they are. We were the first to show a high-level thought, a high-level memory, and investigate the nature of that in the human brain.’ The key says Hassabis, is that if you know what makes something memorable, you could develop a therapy to, ‘emphasize those aspects that we know are good for something being memorable.’

大脑解读
“这项实验的叫‘大脑解读’，这名字听上去可够有轰动效应的。” 回忆起媒体对这项试验的反应，戴米斯•哈萨比斯说，“但这也不完全不对。”哈萨比斯是伦敦大学学院的一名维康基金会研究员。他主要研究记忆是如何储存在大脑中的。“我的研究兴趣是人的自传式记忆，我们生命中各种事件和我们如何形成自己个性的，”哈萨比斯说。“如果人们患上了遗忘症或阿尔茨海默氏症（又称早老性痴呆症），自传式记忆将最先消失。这种记忆最容易受损，因为它是最复杂的记忆。”哈萨比斯所在的研究队伍正试图发现，当人们经历一个事件时，是什么被编码在了记忆里。他们还在进行海马区的扫描工作。这一区域对记忆来说至关重要。

高级记忆
哈萨比斯说：“人们对大脑进行过很多实验。比如，科学家给人们出示汽车或人物的图片，并通过研究人脑的活动判断他们所看的图片内容。” 但是，这些实验还没有涉及人的高级记忆，比如空间记忆。在完成自己博士学位之前，哈萨比斯就已经是一个知名的电脑游戏开发人了，他把自己这方面的专业知识应用到该项目的研究中来。

“我们利用虚拟现实技术设计了这个实验，”哈萨比斯说，“人们可以在这个虚拟世界自由行动，就像玩《雷神之锤》游戏一样。这里面你唯一要完成的任务就是从A点走到B点再走到C点再走到D点。这四个预先设定好的点分布在一间绿屋子和一间蓝屋子里。” 参与者到达一个预定点后就按一下按钮。然后眼睛看地板，这样他的大脑就不会接收任何别的图像。这时科学家会对他的大脑活动进行扫描。

空间记忆
“实验显示，”哈萨比斯说，“单从观察海马区的活动，我们就能预测出实验参与者在房间中的位置。从某种程度上讲，我们在观察大脑对空间的内部反映。各个点的唯一不同在于它们在大脑内部地图上位置的不同。我们是第一个做到呈现人类这种高级思维和高级记忆的。我们正在对这种记忆的属性进行研究。”哈萨比斯说，研究的重要性在于，如果我们能够发现是什么因素使某个事件进入记忆，我们就能研究出一种治疗方式，用来“强化那些使人们获得记忆的因素。”

 

 

该内容来源于英国总领事馆文化教育处