A hero of science

There is a chap in the US, a psychologist by trade, who volunteered to be examined very thoroughly, over a period of more than a year. He kept a detailed diary, has allowed the computer access to his email, has climbed inside a brain scanner a couple of times a week and has had his blood thoroughly gone over once or twice a week.

One of the ideas being to look at the way that the brain changes over that sort of period. Are the changes bigger than, for example, those you might expect to see between people? Another idea being to see how much more one can find out about the brain by looking at one in great detail - rather than the more usual procedure of looking at lots of them and adding it all up, a procedure which probably smudges out all kinds of fascinating detail.

As it happens, this chap is a fellow sufferer from psoriasis. So maybe something good for me will come out of it. So far what we have is that 'psoriasis severity had a significant negative association with T-cell receptor-related expression, consistent with the central role of T-cells in the disorder', consistent with my prior understanding that it is all mixed up with the immune system misbehaving. Maybe this will turn into something really helpful before too long!

The illustration is of a patch of his corpus callosum, that is to say the very large bunch of neural fibres connecting the two halves of the brain together. Millions if not billions of them. I presume that each of the fibres in the illustration is actually a bunch of fibres, rather than an actual individual fibre, but I did not get that far. But why have these particular fibres got all crossed up? Does it matter? Do you really want to know? Bearing in mind that you can cut right through the corpus callosum, a procedure called a corpus callosotomy, something sometimes done in severe cases of epilepsy, and you still have a more or less working person left.

You can read all about it at reference 1, or by asking google about 'myconnectome' - in which case I suspect that you will find other heroes out there doing the same sort of thing.

PS: has he never heard of data protection?

Reference 1: http://myconnectome.org/wp/.