Brain centre on cards

Sometimes it seems we cannot enjoy a single idle thought without some neuroscientist probing into the whys and wherefores.

They ask vexing questions, such as: what patterns of neural activity underlie our sensory perceptions? How does the brain control movement? How do children pick up language? How do we organise thought into memory? And by what mechanisms do we later retrieve these files?

Academics at Oxford University are accelerating the learning process with the opening of an Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience next year. Under the umbrella of the centre, more than 80 academics from faculties as seemingly unrelated as psychology, physiology, philosophy, archaeology and engineering will come together to pool fragments of information and in time paint a cohesive picture of cognitive functions in healthy and brain-damaged individuals.

The brain centre will kick off with a Pounds 2 million grant, from the Medical Research Council, which will last until 2003. Colin Blakemore, professor of physiology, will be the director, and his only regret is that until more money is raised, the centre will remain without a roof.

"We need a building to create more of an identity for the new efforts of the centre - an open building where we will hold public meetings, where people can share facilities and where outside researchers will feel welcome to bring their work," he says.

Oxford University is no stranger to brain work: since 1991 it has been furthering research into neuroscience under the MRC Research Centre in Brain and Behaviour programme, and it has also benefited from a prestigious grant from the McDonnell-Pew Program in Cognitive Neuroscience. But what will make the forthcoming centre so unique, according to Professor Blakemore, is its emphasis on the human brain rather than that of the laboratory rat of monkey.

He says: "Until recently we were not able to approach a deep analysis of the human brain, but new imaging techniques that are all the rage in human brain science give us the chance to work out the networks in humans safely."

Edmund Rolls, an associate director at the centre, adds: "Understanding how different parts of the brain work is one of the most fascinating problems that faces humans - almost more interesting than life on Mars, and certainly with more practical applications."

Alan Cowey, also an associate director, particularly welcomes the centre's union of philosophers with scientists. "Philosophers by training think clearly," he says, "They are interested in the use of words and the nature of concepts and often help us get our ideas straight. Now, for the first time, philosophers talk about experiments."

The research centre will broadly follow three themes: sensory development and perception; memory; and attention, intention and action (including language).

As Professor Rolls from the department of experimental psychology explains, researchers will be seeking to understand not only what functions are carried out by different parts of the cerebral cortex, but also how these functions are performed.

Professor Rolls is particularly fascinated by the how? question, and his primary research tool is, unsurprisingly, the brain cell and how it interacts with its neighbours. Part of his research revolves around vision, and how memory allows us to recognise objects.

His focus is the hippocampus, an area of the brain that leads to amnesia if damaged. His studies with primates have shown that the hippocampus is essential in prompting the brain to register the location of objects in space, thus allowing the brain to remember where in the environment an item was last seen.

"We are starting to understanding how the hippocampus does this, so the next thing to know is how the [neural] connections might alter during learning and development," says Professor Rolls.

Much of his research relies on the work of theoretical physicists, who create computer-generated neural networks that mimic real-life scenarios to test the plausiblity of his models.

Research led by Professor Cowey, another experimental psychologist, will concentrate on perception: how we process colour, movement, depth, the written word, etc. His most precious - and rare - research tool is the occasional patient with a brain lesion that is sufficiently specific to affect only one area of perception.

"Functional brain imaging allows us to study which bits of the brain are active in different tasks. We can even get some indication of the time course of the activity," he says.