lies at the nexus of so much of what is important for ourselves as people the brain is the center of our consciousness it is the center of our minds and it's a  tremendous biological cipher as well as a philosophical puzzle or at least it may be the key to this things neuroscience today is say an exciting and fast growing  field there are tens of thousands of neuroscientists in the world all pursuing different aspects of brain science and the both the basic the basic research into how the brain works and also how the brain underlies devastating disorders like mental illnesses are allowed is st and foremost interested in new ways to look at the brain new ways to understand how the brain works and so we spend a lot of time focusing on developing new experimental tools for studying the brain we work particularly with the type of imaging that's familiar to many people called  resonance imaging it is known as m r i and it provides a way to look into the brains of animals or more famously people and see what they're doing so conventional m is performed using a method called functional m r i after morrow you may have heard that term and that's where i detects activity of the brain through changes in blood flow that are indirectly couple to what the brain is doing so we're not actually seeing brain function when we do f m r i we're seeing changes in blood flow and actually a lot of the procedure of what the brain does and how it works is lost in that translation and that severely limits our ability to detect the brain's mechanisms how different parts of the brain different groups of cells in the brain different chemicals that work in the brain how these things kind of come together what their dynamics look like over over the brain and how they relate to stimulate or events that are taking place around the animal or the person that that we're studying so our lab tries to get past this limitation by making chemicals chemicals that translate aspects of neural function into signals that we can map and measure by imag we're interested in looking at aspects of brain function that very few other labs of looked at both because we're trying to target chemicals that can barely be visualized in in living animals currently and because we're trying to get more holistic comprehensive pictures of how the dynamics of the brain work and this is an extraordinary technical challenge for us it's one that i've now been working on for over ten years and  it it requires me and my colleagues to come together with an extraordinary range of different disciplines and different bodies of expertise to kind of attack this problem so my lab  consists of about a dozen students and post office and they come from very different backgrounds so some of them or basic biologists some of them are bioengineers some of them are chemists some of them are n and we also have electrical engineers the people of my love also come from very different national and ethnic backgrounds and that is the reality of science here at mit and much of the world that the team that comes together around any given problem knows no borders we've got side by side and is really in a rainy and the germans do synthesising compounds designing is into sizing compounds that enable august's record different brain activity like thinking  feeling and processing data and everything that our brain daws is mainly controlled by calcium and my task into that is to make sensors that using these chemicals and show night for example each task is processed by different parts of different so that's actually my task what i do i do so called the small molecules and based on manganese complexes so i did transition metal complexes and metal complexes throughout my career and here i work on the specific types of compounds that can show was callous fluctuations changes in the brain and then we translate all these changes using m r i imaging into the brain can convert nerve electrical activity into a magnetic field that we can detect from the outside of the bridge and again what's interesting about these fifty and it's a field that's starting now and hopefully we will be able to have very small devices that have a very small footprint but are able to pulses using these devices that are minimally invasive you can see that these types of devices are  any four material will generate some reaction so our job is to try to make this reaction minimal so we play around with different materials that the body likes access the brain and access the nerve nervous system but we're here looking at an m r i scanner which is one of the key pieces of equipment that my lab uses to study molecular and cellular level processes in the brain and so many of you have probably seen i scanners before you know that they look like go nuts like most medical imaging devices and the donut in the case of an m r i scanner is a big magnet the hole in the middle of the donut is where the person or in our case animal goes  in order to get scanned and if you can see the hole here but it's about twelve centimeters in diameter a little too small for you and me on the other hand it's about right for a route and that's most of what we do our work on  bulk of the scanner here is actually a big magnet it's about twenty times more powerful than the kind of magnet you'd find on your fridge and it allows us to get pretty detailed images of the insides of rats in particular their brains you might be annoyed by this aided by this sort of whistling sound that goes over and over again is us that is the sound of the device that keeps this magnet running it actually doesn't use electricity but it has a so tremendous stored electrical charge in it that circulates in some  s some wires in there that are kept super cold by liquid helium and that noise is a pump that keeps the liquid helium pressurized so that's how this magnet maintains its high magnetic field that we need for our