drug abuse and addiction

[music][dr. thomas ross speaking]i'm thomas ross i'm a staff scientistin the neuroimaging research branch at the national institute on drug abuse. so our branch uses brain imaging techniques to investigate issues in drug abuse. principally we usea technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging. we do it in a way that sensitive tochanges in blood flow. so you can imagine that if part of yourbrain is working harder then it will need more oxygen so there willbe a local increase in blood flow. we can setup our mri machine so it issensitive to those local changes in

blood flow. it shows us what parts in the brain areneeded to do certain things maybe if i ask youto make a risky decision i might wanna know whatpart your bring changes during that risky decision maybe that differsbetween a drug user and a non-drug user. and we will create an image where the color of the image is related to how big the blood flow changes. cause we takethese images across time hundreds and hundredsand hundreds of images

and combine them to make a single imagethat represents changes related to whatever we'relooking at. when you see these images of colorful, what we call a cluster or blobs region of activation overlaid ontop of a brain those colors represent how big the signalchange was. we hope to better inform thescientific community what parts of the brain are important in critical in drug abuse,that they can be targets for either behavioral therapy or some sort of pharmical therapy to help end drug abuse.