Tyrone Cannon Home Page

Opening a Door to the Once-Inaccessible Mysteries of the Brain

March 1, 2006

The new Center for Cognitive Neuroscience will create an interdisciplinary organization that explores some of the greatest challenges of science.

Newly armed with powerful imaging tools, neuroscientists and behavioral psychologists are joining together for the first time at UCLA to explore a frontier that was once inaccessible: the mechanisms inside the brain that underlie functions as complex as reasoning, communication and the ways in which we conceptualize our environment.

Cognitive neuroscience studies what the brain analyzes and what we become aware of—and how those mechanisms get disturbed. Work in cognitive neuroscience could also pave the way to better treatments for Alzheimer's disease. And by opening a window into the way people learn, it might also provide tools to improve the way children are educated.

"The stakes in this new and fast-growing field are huge," said Emil Reisler, dean of life sciences. "By unraveling the genetic factors responsible for variations in the ways people think, researchers will be identifying targets for treating or preventing some of our most debilitating neurological illnesses, including schizophrenia and mood disorders."

With the creation of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience in the UCLA College of Letters and Science, the university will bring together research and teaching philosophies that were once segregated into a combined effort that positions the campus as a leader in this new scientific endeavor.

Researchers in the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience will decipher the molecular basis of complex biological network functions across the evolutionary spectrum. They will study brain processes in healthy populations as well as in populations with specific mental disorders, said Tyrone Cannon, the Staglin Family Professor of psychology, psychiatry and human genetics and the new center's director.

"These two efforts inform each other," Cannon explained. "By understanding how the mind is structured and how the brain supports the mind in someone who is functioning in the normal range, we can better understand how those processes get disturbed in diseases."

Roughly one percent of the population has schizophrenia, and another one percent suffers from bipolar disorder, Cannon notes. Ten percent will experience at least one episode of major depression in their lifetime (for background on depression's impact on teenagers, see page 13). Collectively, these three debilitating mental illnesses account for approximately half of the mental health service use in the United States, and close to half of the overall public assistance provided for all biomedical disabilities.

"The burden to individual sufferers and their families, and to society in terms of their costs, is huge," Cannon said. "From a public health perspective, this is where we need to focus."

UCLA faculty are already recognized as world leaders in studying illnesses that affect cognitive systems, from schizophrenia and Alzheimer's disease to neurofibromatosis—a rare form of cancer, caused by a single gene, that affects learning and memory systems in the brain.

Cannon's own research focus has been in schizophrenia. He led a team of UCLA scientists who in 2002 reported that they used a novel three dimensional mapping technique to identify regions of the brain where people with schizophrenia have significantly less gray matter than their identical twins and the rest of the population. Schizophrenia patients have substantial reductions of gray matter in regions of the brain that integrate, interpret and organize information, Cannon and his colleagues reported.

"We begin life with far more neural connections than we will ever use, but lose huge numbers of the connections among brain cells in late adolescence," he said. "In the regions of the brain that govern the synthesis of information, a critical threshold may be required for integrated cognitive activity. If people fall below this threshold, they may be unable to sustain normal brain activity; the resulting disintegration of cognition may then become apparent as hallucinations, delusions, thought disorder and the other symptoms of schizophrenia."

Future research taking place in the new center may reveal whether schizophrenia patients have many fewer connections to begin with and cross this hypothetical critical threshold during the normal pruning process that occurs during adolescence, or whether they lose connections at a faster rate than normal.

The promise of that discovery and related work is that scientists might eventually pinpoint the molecular mechanisms that cause this loss to occur, and perhaps halt the process and prevent or reduce the loss.

In other research, Cannon has identified the fundamental importance of genetic issues, showing that schizophrenia is more than 80 percent genetic, and that the environmental influences most likely depend on genetic factors as well.

Cannon is one of many experts from disparate fields who will be collaborating at the center.

"We will have people who study molecular genetics and neuroscience at the most basic level, psychologists who study how humans perform cognitive tasks and take in new information, and all points in between—including computer scientists who are modeling cognitive processes in machines," Cannon said.

The center will cast a wide net—for example, bringing in philosophers to explore if scientific attempts to model the mechanical structure of the mind can fully explain the complexity of human mental phenomena.

"Ten years ago, scientists looking at cognitive function from a molecular perspective had little to say to those who were looking at it from a psychological perspective, because the two fields were worlds apart," said Alcino Silva, professor in the departments of psychology and neurobiology.

The major technical innovation that bridged the disciplines to facilitate the growth of cognitive neuroscience is functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), imagery that reveals the functioning areas of the brain. The technology is relatively easy to implement—fMRI scanners are common in medical environments and non-invasive, using levels of radio frequency signals that pose no risk to subjects who are scanned.

"Those features, combined with the fact that fMRI provides high resolution for imaging oxygen levels in the brain, have enabled scientists to develop models of how multiple regions of the brain perform complex, interdependent cognitive processes," Cannon said. "It has allowed us to unify a lot of the content that is being investigated in the field." The explosive growth in cognitive neuroscience is reflected in changes that researchers such as Susan Bookheimer have seen in the types of graduate students applying to her program.

"Cognitive neuroscience is the most rapidly expanding area of brain research," said Bookheimer, a clinical neuropsychologist and professor in the UCLA departments of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences and psychology, "and it's largely propelled by methods for mapping brain function that previously weren't available."

Bookheimer, who specializes in functional brain imaging with positron emission tomography (PET) and fMRI, has studied the organization of language and memory in the brain in healthy adults and children, as well as in neurologic conditions and developmental disorders. Recent work has focused on using fMRI to understand the neural basis of social communication deficits in autism.

With strong cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience programs within the Department of Psychology, an equally outstanding interdepartmental neuroscience program, and a renowned brain imaging program in the David Geffen School of Medicine, the UCLA Center for Cognitive Neuroscience is well positioned to bridge this traditional gap. Moreover, Cannon said, a strong culture of multidisciplinary collaboration is already in place.

"I've been other places where there was potential for this type of center but the culture didn't support it," he said. "UCLA is unique in this regard—the threshold for getting very prominent scientists who look at these phenomena from a molecular biological perspective together with people who study cognition in humans is very low."

Cannon is confident that by bringing together top scientists in these once divergent fields, the center can make great progress in going after the root causes of debilitating mental disorders.

"In most cases, by the time a neuropsychiatric illness is diagnosed, it's relatively intractable," he said. "We have treatments that can partially reduce some of the symptoms, but people have to stay on these medications over their lifetimes and they are always vulnerable to future episodes."

Cannon notes that the already-established trend in treatment for physical illness, in which there is an emphasis on early detection and preventive intervention for diseases such as cancer and diabetes, is just starting to take hold in the field of neuropsychiatric illness.

"We need to identify individuals who are at the highest risk before the illness has set in," said Cannon. "Right now our ability to do that is dependent completely on observable symptoms and behavior. But the efforts of this new center will help us develop other approaches, including measures of brain structure and function, and genetic variation, so that we can intervene earlier and more effectively."