Modifying the brain to change perception: Professor Gregor Thut

Issued: Wed, 26 Jun 2013 15:43:00 BST

Professor Gregor Thut has worked in leading psychology and neuropsychology units around the world – including Harvard and Geneva – honing his skills in electroencephalography, transcranial magnetic stimulation and other techniques for studying brain activity. Using this expertise to explore how and why the brain perceives things and the mechanics of visual perception, he joined Glasgow’s Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging five years ago.

‘I was keen to be involved in shaping something new and the environment was also very attractive,’ he says. ‘The institute is extremely well equipped with the latest technology and can carry out important imaging studies to a very high standard. Neuroimaging has several different components, but my key area of expertise is brain oscillations and brain stimulation techniques.’

There are so many things going on around us at any one time that we can’t possibly perceive them all. Brain resources are limited and what we perceive depends not only on what falls on the retina but also on our expectations and our focus of attention. Professor Thut’s current research examines one important brain oscillation of the attention system called the alpha oscillation, which has a certain frequency and topography.

‘What we’ve found is that we can modulate these oscillations, through brain stimulation, in a desired direction and in a controlled way,’ says Professor Thut. ‘We’ve found that when we generate these oscillations by brain stimulation, this is changing behaviour. For instance, if we generate the oscillations of the attention system, we can improve attention and perception. We’ve just received a big grant, a five-year Wellcome Trust Investigator Award, to take our research one step further.

‘So far we’ve only worked with healthy, adult participants. But what we’ve discovered is very interesting for going into translation studies – it might help us to better understand the role of these oscillations in brain disorders, or perhaps even help us to find some markers for disease or, further than that, to find new therapeutic targets. So there is a possible application at this stage in patients, perhaps first in patients who have attention deficits but likely also in other patients.’

It’s a relatively small but cutting-edge field – there are only around ten groups worldwide working on the topic of generating brain oscillations to change brain functions. Professor Thut says: ‘We have a lot of contact through workshops and symposia, so it’s quite an international effort as well as an interdisciplinary one. We’ll have five new researchers starting with us in 2012 on this topic, and PhD students and postdocs from other groups regularly join us for 6- to 12-month research visits. It’s very important to have that exchange of knowledge to advance the field.’