Brain, body and mind: understanding consciousness

A bedside device that measures 'brain signatures' could help diagnose patients who have consciousness disorders - such as a vegetative state - to work out the best course of treatment and to support family counselling. The patient might be awake, but to what extent are they aware? Can they hear, see, feel? And if they are aware, does their level of awareness equate to their long-term prognosis? - Srivas Chennu In 10 minutes, Srivas Chennu can work out what's going on inside your head. With the help of an electrode-studded hairnet wired up to a box that measures patterns of electrical activity, he can monitor the firing of millions of neurons deep within the brain. A few minutes later, wheeling his trolley-held device away, he has enough information to tell how conscious you really are. What Chennu is looking for with his electroencephalogram (EEG) is the brain's electrical 'signature'. At any one moment in the body's most complex organ, networks of neurons are firing up and creating 'brain waves' of electrical activity that can be detected through the scalp net. This isn't new technology - the first animal EEG was published a century ago - but computational neuroscientist Chennu has come up with a way of combining its output with a branch of maths called graph theory to measure the level of a person's consciousness.