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Photo: Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle Image 1 of / 7 Caption Close Image 2 of 7 You can turn your head in any direction to see around the model of Hart's brain. You can turn your head in any direction to see around the model of Hart's brain. Photo: Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle Image 3 of 7 On the left is one of the neural caps that patients will wear. The lab lighting and sound is also controlled via iPad. On the left is one of the neural caps that patients will wear. The lab lighting and sound is also controlled via iPad. Photo: Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle Image 4 of 7 The games Gazzaley builds are very interactive. Here, he's playing a surfer-type game that tests your reactions, which are picked up by a Microsoft Kinect. The games Gazzaley builds are very interactive. Here, he's playing a surfer-type game that tests your reactions, which are picked up by a Microsoft Kinect. Photo: Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle Image 5 of 7 Image 6 of 7 At this point I don't want to take off the Oculus Rift because it's just so cool to be touring around a human brain. At this point I don't want to take off the Oculus Rift because it's just so cool to be touring around a human brain. Photo: Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle Image 7 of 7 How to repair someone's brain using gadgets and videogames 1 / 7 Back to Gallery

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I’m traveling through Mickey Hart’s brain. I look to my left and a blue plum of sparks blaze down the Grateful Dead drummer’s corpus callosum. A set of neurons has fired. I travel upward, through a mess of pink synaptic spaghetti, and the two hemispheres of his cerebrum vibrate and banter about some new information. I float back toward his lower brain, where I pass his cerebellum, pulsing softly, and leave through his spinal chord.

Okay, I’m actually in Dr. Adam Gazzaley’s neuroscience lab in UCSF Mission Bay. I’m wearing Oculus Rift virtual reality glasses, holding an Xbox controller and sitting in a comfortable room that could pass for a basement den, if you can afford a new Meyer sound system and two billboard-sized flatscreens.

This is Gazzaley’s idea of modern neurology lab. “It’s not the standard,” he says with a smile.

“What we’re going to use it for is still an open question.” (See video at the bottom for more)

Hart’s brain fires wonderfully, but were there to be problems, Gazzaley’s idea is to harness video game technology to improve or heal the brain, and hopes the “proof of concept” lab — set to open later this year — will be one of the crucibles. The work has also garnered attention from the tech community: he’ll be a keynote speaker at NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference in March — the titan of graphics processing units makes the engines of video game players and its parallel processing framework (called CUDA) chews through the huge amounts of data necessary to monitor a brain in real time.

Patients will wear electroencephalograms (EEG), those caps with the electrodes that monitor electrical impulses firing inside the brain down to the cubic millimeter. As Gazzely and team target areas of the brain that need help — damaged, underused, etc — the idea is that the mechanics of gameplay will adjust on the fly to keep those precise areas engaged and, hopefully, strengthen them back to normal (or beyond). Current games know how to adjust to a player’s skill level, but not with the goal of targeting a very specific portion of the brain.

Gazzaley, who has also founded a company for neuro-beneficial games, published a Nature cover story last fall that showed playing a car racing game improved multi-tasking abilities. Other studies have shown cognitive benefits for videogames, especially in hand-eye coordination — go here for a rather cautious summary of the benefits of video games — but this sort of intimate brain-and-game feedback loop heralds a cutting edge approach.

The lab uses a Microsoft Kinect for motion capture when patients engage in full body games. Yet a Kinect doesn’t necessarily feel cutting edge — there are expensive motion-capture cameras that would do a far better job. Gazzaley is employing gadgets you might find at Best Buy because if the tests prove successful, he wants these diagnostics available in your living room. If his team can develop games that work with existing home entertainment systems, like an Xbox, these videogame treatments don’t require a trip to the hospital.

“The minute we show some in-lab validation, we’ll move it into people’s homes,” he says.

This isn’t lost on Gazzaley’s corporate partners either. “The holy grail is personalized medicine,” says Calisa Cole, of NVIDIA’s developer relations team. “Dr. Gazzaley’s research is an important component of this goal.”

His team of developers have built their own data-crunching backend which runs atop the same NVIDIA chips that powers the Titan super computer . Just down the hall are two MRIs, one for imaging structure, the other for function. Data from the MRI and from the EEG (which can already be hacked together at home ) are combined via clever algorithms to meld the brain’s structure and activity into one beautiful traffic model. Think of the MRI as the road map and the EEG as a radar gun. That combination is eventually rendered in a rich 3d model like Hart’s brain.

The brain’s ability to adapt and strengthen (or weaken) depending on conditions, known as plasticity, is still one of nature’s greatest wonders. The hundred billion neurons and their thousands of contact points, known as dendrites, create a mind-boggling number of possible connections. The combination of these connections and their firing patterns is what generates things like the memory of trip to New York or a fear of snakes. The Human Connectome Project is attempting to map them all, but devising a reliable guide will be a tall order.

Recently Hart worked with Gazzaley to show off his synapses while playing the drums. He has also been using images of his brain for backdrops during recent concerts. The architecture of Hart’s brain remained on file and that’s why I was able to travel through it weeks later.

And just to get meta with the whole thing, here is Gazzaley’s most recent idea: Build a game that lets you travel, Tron-style, around the wiring of your own brain. The areas that need exercises become new levels of the game. After seeing the model of Hart’s brain, it’s not hard to see how those bridges and pathways could turn into a therapeutic Mario Kart.

“If we can determine what’s happening in the moment, we can start feeding that neural data back into the game,” he says.

“We think that someone who’s had a traumatic brain injury, we could really rewire them in a way we’ve never been successful with drugs before.”

[This article has been updated to clarify there is nothing wrong with Hart’s brain. I should have been more clear, as I was trying to demonstrate the overall goal of Gazzaley’s lab. For that I apologize to Mickey Hart.]

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