That Neuroscience Guy - Neuroscience Bites- Why We can't Always Study Neuroscience in the Real World

Episode Date: July 14, 2023

In today's Neuroscience Bite, we discuss why a large portion of what we know about neuroscience is learned in the lab versus out in the real world. 

Hi, my name is Olof Kregolsen, and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to another Neuroscience Bite. So today I wanted to talk about just a little bit of an explanation on how research is done. And I recorded the mind-wandering episode recently, and people might not understand how we study things like attention and why we do it the way we do. Well, in a perfect world, we would study attention out in the real world. So we'd be monitoring someone's brainwaves, and when they pay attention to something, we would look at that brain response. And when they're mind-wandering, we'd be monitoring someone's brainwaves, and when they pay attention to something, we would look at that brain response. And when they're mind-wandering, we'd look at that brain response.

The problem with that is how do you know when they're paying attention to something? It's almost impossible to tell. So if we knew what the brain responses looked like, then we could determine that. But the problem is we don't know what the brain responses look like, or at least we're still learning more about what they look like. So it's impossible to do. And that's what forces us into the lab. All right. So what we can do is we can put someone in a very controlled environment. For a lot of the work we do, you're sitting in a small room. And if you want to study attention, for instance, we can flash some images on a computer screen and we can tell which way you're attending by the way we manipulate information. So for instance, if you're in a

dark room and something flashes on the left-hand side of the screen and we look at eye tracking data, for instance, we know people look at it because something's just appeared. So we know that you're paying attention to it. We know that with 100% accuracy. And that allows us then to look at the brain response to this thing appearing on the screen. And it's not ideal. A little green circle flashing on a screen is not the same as paying attention in the real world. And I wouldn't claim that it is. But it's the best we can do. And the reason we want to control it so much is to rule out all of the other factors. So we can survey people. How much did you sleep? Did you consume the alcohol last night? Did you exercise today? And we can control the stimuli on the screen or

the things that happen on the screen. So we know exactly what's happening and we can wire you up with tons of gadgets. And that's the why research in neuroscience is done the way it is, at least in terms of cognitive neuroscience, which is primarily what I'm talking about here. I would love to do it in the real world. And I've mentioned on some episodes, we are moving into the real world. You can use mobile EEG technology, something like the Muse headband to measure brainwaves out in the real world. There is now mobile eye tracking. There's a pair of glasses that's been released recently that allows you to, it tells you basically where someone is looking. So we're close to studying

things like attention in the real world, but I just wanted to give a bit more of an explanation about why research is done in such a controlled lab-based setting. And it's basically because we have no choice. All right. The only way we can do it properly, at least given current technology, is to do it in the lab. Anyway, hopefully you found that interesting. And if nothing else, it's an explanation of why most research is done in these little tiny rooms in front of computers. Anyway, the bump is the same as usual. Check out the website, thatneuroscienceguy.com.

You can follow me on Twitter at thatneuroscienceguy and suggest some ideas. And of course, please subscribe to the podcast. My name is Olaf Kregolsen, and I'm that neuroscience guy. Thanks for listening to another Neuroscience Byte.