Brain Has @Oops@ and @Yippee@ Zones

A team lead by Dr. Jeffrey D. Schall used macaque monkeys to track a part of the brain that tracks eye movements. In an interview with United Press International, Schall said his team's experiments suggest that the "control center" for the brain is related to the part that controls eye movements.

Writing in the journal Nature, Schall and his colleagues describe how they have been tracking the way the brain is hard-wired for eye movements. They tested monkeys by implanting electrodes in the monkeys' brains and putting them in front of a computer screen on which a spot was projected. The monkeys were rewarded when they correctly tracked the moving spot with their eyes.

Meanwhile, the scientists tracked electrical impulses that were fired from individual messenger cells called neurons. When the neurons fired, Schall could identify the part of the brain that was activated.

Schall said that using these eye tests they discovered that when the monkey failed to follow the spot, "part of the brain would fire and another part would fire when the monkey tracked the spot correctly." He calls the neurons that were activated by error the "oops center" while the part of the brain that recognized a "correct eye movement is the yippee center."

This work meshes very nicely with brain scans done at Princeton, said Dr. Jonathan Cohen, director of the center for study of the brain at Princeton. Cohen said the monkey brains correlate very closely to human brains and the areas identified by Schall in the monkey brain are similar to areas he identified in human brains.

Cohen said he uses electroencephalograms, or EEGs, which measure so-called brain waves, as well as magnetic resonance images of the brain to identify the control areas.

Cohen said this type of brain mapping is important because some psychiatric disorders – such as schizophrenia – occur when "the individual cannot control their brain function."

Although Cohen said he is impressed with the findings by Schall, he suspects that in humans two conflicting areas may be activated simultaneously. He used as an example a person given the command to push a button when he or she is shown a specific colored light. If the light is flashed quickly or if the color is not distinct, the brain might simultaneously signal the need to push the button or not push it. "This is the blip area and is another area that is activated when an error is made," Cohen says.

Cohen said that identifying specific functions within the brain will help him and other psychiatrists develop drugs to control those areas.

Schall said this is his goal as well. He said that he intends to work with a Vanderbilt psychologist, Dr. Sohee Park, to find ways to relate his findings about the brain's "executive control functions" to treatment of schizophrenia. Schall says the goal is to find a cellular center for "self-control so that perhaps we can learn how to control these errant thought processes."

Copyright 2000 by United Press International.